Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

  I met Kim on a leg of what has become his endless speaking tour—on which his father and caregiver, Fran, accompanies him, and for which he never requests payment. He was addressing a group of about three dozen elderly women in the activities room at an old-age home in his hometown of Salt Lake City. Members of the audience had been invited to try to stump him with obscure trivia (anything but “logic or reasoning questions,” Fran cautioned). A woman breathing from an oxygen tank asked him about the highest peak in South America. He answered correctly—Mt. Aconcagua, a fact any mildly competent trivia buff would know—and gave its height: 22,320 feet (which, I later discovered, was off by about five hundred feet). An amputee in a wheelchair inquired how many times Easter fell in March in the 1930s. Without a pause, he responded. “March 27, 1932. March 28, 1937.” His answers ended with a quickening of his voice that sounded like it was about to explode in raucous laughter. The program director of the home asked him which books were summarized in volume 4 of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books from 1964. He named all five. The name of Harry Truman’s daughter? Margaret. The number of times the Steelers have won the Super Bowl? Four. The last line of Coriolanus? “Which to this hour bewail the injury, / Yet he shall have a noble memory. Assist.”

  “He’s never forgotten anything,” Fran told me, including, supposedly, every fact in the more than nine thousand books he has read at about ten seconds a page. (Each eye scans its own page independently.) He’s memorized Shakespeare’s entire corpus and the scores to every major piece of classical music. At a recent staging of Twelfth Night, an actor transposed two lines, sending Kim into a fit of such magnitude that the house lights had to be turned on and the play suspended. He’s no longer allowed to attend live plays.

  Unlike Daniel, there’s no way to look at Kim and not immediately sense that he is entirely unique. He has gray hair and a bearlike build, and squints through thick, brown plastic frames. His head is almost always tilted forty-five degrees to the side. He keeps one hand docked inside the other, and thrusts it in and out when he gets excited. Possibly the most allusive conversationalist on the planet, his mind so overflows with facts and figures that they often come out as a waterfall of apparent non sequiturs. When an Argentine woman at the old-age home told Kim that she was born in Córdoba, Kim immediately told her the major roads into and out of her hometown and then belted out the chorus of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” provoking a squirm of discomfort from me. And then out of nowhere he screamed, “You’re fired!” Fran helped him explain the connection: The basketball star Dennis Rodman, who used to date Madonna, who played Argentinean first lady Eva Perón in the movie version of Evita, was fired by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1999.

  Kim seems to have discovered a Pavlovian association between his astounding literalness and audience laughter. At a recent talk, he responded to a question about the content of the Gettysburg Address with, “227 Northwest Front Street. But Lincoln stayed there only one night. He gave the speech the next day.” He now repeats that joke often.

  Kim likes to be called the “Kimputer,” but his full name is Laurence Kim Peek. “We named him after Laurence Olivier and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,” says Fran. When Kim was born, after a difficult pregnancy, it was immediately clear that something was deeply off. His head was a third larger than normal and sprouted a fist-size blister on its backside that the doctors were afraid to remove. For the first three years of his life, Kim dragged his head on the ground as if it were loaded with a heavy weight. He didn’t walk until he was four. His parents were urged to consider a lobotomy. Instead Kim was put on heavy sedatives until he was fourteen. Fran recalls that it was only when Kim was taken off the sedatives that he first started to show an interest in books. He’s been memorizing them ever since.

  But even though Kim has access to a larger store of knowledge than perhaps anyone else on the planet, he doesn’t seem able to put it toward any end other than itself. He has an IQ of just 87. And no matter how many books of etiquette he may have memorized, his sense of what’s socially appropriate is, to put it generously, esoteric. Standing in a crowd of people in the lobby of the Salt Lake City public library, Kim wrapped his thick arms around my shoulders and gripped me against his paunch and then forcibly gyrated against me. “Joshua Foer, you are a great, great man,” he told me loudly enough to startle a passerby. “You are a handsome man. You are a man of your generation.” And then he let out a deep roar.

  How Kim can do what he does is a mystery to science. Unlike Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, Kim is not, apparently, autistic. He’s far too sociable for that diagnosis. He’s something else entirely. In January 1989, the same week that Rain Man was released, a CT scan of Kim’s brain revealed that his cerebellum, an organ crucial to sensory perception and motor function, was severely distended. An earlier scan had discovered that Kim also lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and allows them to communicate. It’s an incredibly rare condition, but how it might contribute to his savantism isn’t at all clear.

  Kim and I spent the better part of our afternoon together sitting at a table in the back corner of the Salt Lake City public library’s fourth floor, where he has spent almost every weekday of the last ten years reading and memorizing phone books. He took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “I’m just going to do a little scanning,” he announced. I looked over his shoulder as he leafed through a phone book from Bellingham, Washington. I was trying to keep pace with his memory. I did what Ed would have coached me to do had he been there: I set up a memory palace and converted each person’s phone number into an image, did the same thing with the first and last name, and then quickly tried to tie all those images together in a memorable way. It was hard work, and when I tried to explain it to Kim, he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. Every time I’d get to the fourth or fifth name in the first column, he was ready to move on to the next page. I asked him how he was able to do it so quickly. He looked up from the book and peered over his glasses, agitated by my interruption. “I just remember!” he screamed. And then he reburied his head in a column of phone numbers, and ignored me for the next half hour.

  One of the challenges of developing a theory to explain savant syndrome is that it expresses itself so differently in different individuals. However, there is one neuroanatomical anomaly that turns up again and again in savants, including Kim: damage in the brain’s left hemisphere. Interestingly, the exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual and spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain’s domain, such as language. Speech defects are extremely common among savants, which is part of the reason that loquacious, well-spoken Daniel seems so extraordinary.

  Some researchers have theorized that shutting off certain left-brain activities somehow liberates right-brain skills that had been latent all along. Indeed, people have been known to suddenly acquire savantlike abilities later in life, after a traumatic injury to the left side of the brain. In 1979, a ten-year-old boy named Orlando Serrell took a baseball pitch to the left side of his head and came to with a remarkable capacity to calculate calendar dates and remember the weather on every day of his life. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He’s found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants.

  The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us. There may be, as Treffert likes to put it, “a little Rain Man” hiding inside every brain. He’s just
kept under lock and key by the inhibitory “tyranny of the dominant left hemisphere.”

  Treffert further speculates that savants with exceptional memories may somehow hand over the duties of maintaining declarative memories, like facts and figures, to the more primitive nondeclarative memory systems, like those that help us recall how to ride a bike or catch a fly ball without consciously thinking about it (the same systems that allow the amnesic HM to draw in the mirror and EP to navigate his neighborhood without knowing his address). Consider how much mental processing must take place just to position one’s hand to catch a fly ball—the instantaneous calculations of distance, trajectory, and velocity—or to recognize the difference between a cat and a dog. Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.

  But with enough effort those lower levels of cognition can sometimes be accessed. For example, when students are taught to draw, often the first two exercises they’re made to master are tracing negative space and contour lines. The aim of these exercises is to shut down the top-level conscious processing that can’t see a chair as anything but a chair, and activate the latent, lower-level perceptual processing that sees it only as a collection of abstract shapes and lines. It takes a great deal of training for an artist to learn to deactivate that top-level processing; Treffert believes savants may do it naturally.

  If the rest of us could turn off that top-level processing, would we become savants? There actually is a technology that can selectively, and temporarily, turn off parts of the brain. It’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, and it works by using focused magnetic fields to wreak havoc on the electrical firing of targeted neurons. The deadening effect can last for upwards of an hour. Although TMS is relatively new, it has been used successfully as a noninvasive means of treating problems as diverse as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and migraines. But in many ways, TMS’s experimental potential is even more exciting than its therapeutic uses. There are obviously some intractable ethical problems with experimenting on the human brain. Since you can’t go in and mess around with a living brain (HM taught us that), much of what neuroscientists have been able to learn about the brain has been the result of a few “natural experiments” caused by extremely unlikely forms of brain damage (like EP’s). Because TMS allows neuroscientists to turn regions of the brain on and off at will, they can use it to perform repeatable experiments without waiting for someone to walk into their office with a rare lesion that just happens to affect the specific part of the brain they want to study. Allan Snyder, an Australian neuroscientist who popularized TMS as an experimental tool, uses the technique to temporarily induce savantlike artistic skills in otherwise normal people by targeting the left frontotemporal lobe (the same region that is often damaged in savants). After having the left temporal lobe zapped, subjects can draw more accurate pictures from memory, and can more quickly estimate the number of dots flashed on a screen. Snyder calls his device a “creativity-amplifying machine.” He might as well call it the savant cap.

  In the Brainman documentary, I had watched Daniel divide 13 by 97 and give the result to so many decimal places that the answer ran off the edge of a scientific calculator. A computer had to be brought in for verification. He multiplied three-digit numbers in his head in a few seconds, and quickly figured out that 37 to the fourth power was 1,874,161. To me, Daniel’s mental math seemed much more impressive than his memory.

  As I began looking into the complicated subject of mental math, I learned that just like mnemonics, the field has its own vast literature, and even its own world championship. Indeed, with a bit of Googling and a whole lot of practice, anyone can teach themselves how to multiply three-digit numbers in their head. It is by no means easy—believe me, I tried—but it’s a skill that can be learned.

  Though I asked him repeatedly on several occasions, Daniel refused to perform even a single mental calculation for me. “One of my parents’ big fears was that I would become a freak show,” he said when I pressed him. “I had to promise them that I wouldn’t do calculations for people who ask me. I only do them for scientists.” But he did perform some mental math for the cameras in Brainman.

  As he was performing those calculations, I was struck by something odd that Daniel seemed to be doing with his fingers. While he’s supposedly watching the answer crystallize in his mind’s eye, the camera captures his index finger sliding around on the surface of the desk in front of him. Given his descriptions of shapes melting and fusing in his mind, that little bit of finger work just struck me as strange.

  Talking to a few experts, I learned that anyone who has done mental multiplication might have suspicions about those sliding fingers. One of the most common techniques for calculating the product of two large numbers is known as cross multiplication. It involves doing a sequence of individual multiplications of single-digit numbers and then combining them together in the end. To my eye, this appeared to be what Daniel may have been doing on the table. Daniel denies this. He says it’s just a fidget that helps him concentrate.

  “There are a lot of people in the world who can do those kinds of things, but they’re still pretty impressive,” Ben Pridmore told me. In addition to competing on the memory circuit, Ben also competes in the Mental Calculation World Cup, a biennial contest in which participants carry out mental calculations far more extreme than Daniel’s, including multiplying eight-digit numbers without pencil or paper. None of these top calculators make any claims about seeing numerical shapes that fuse and divide in their minds’ eyes. They all readily admit to using techniques detailed in countless books and Web sites. I asked Ronald Doerfler, author of one of those books, Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments, to watch Brainman and tell me what he thought. “I’m not fantastically impressed with any of that,” he said of Daniel’s mathematical talents, and added, “The lore of mental calculators is rife with misdirection.”

  What about the fact that Daniel knows all the prime numbers less than 10,000? Even this doesn’t impress Ben Pridmore. “Just basic memorization,” he says. There are only 1,229 primes less than 10,000. That’s a lot of numbers to commit to memory, but not compared to learning 22,000 digits of pi.

  Calendar calculating, the only savant skill Daniel was willing to perform in front of me, turns out to be so simple that it really shouldn’t impress anyone. Savants like Kim, who can tell you the date of every Easter in the last thousand years, seem to have internalized the rhythms and rules of the calendar without explicitly understanding them. But anyone can learn them. There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely on the Internet. It only takes about an hour of practice to become fluent with them.

  The more Daniel and I talked, the more his own statements began to cast doubt on his story. When I asked him on different occasions two weeks apart to describe what the number 9,412 looked like, he gave me two completely different answers. The first time he said, “There’s blue in there because it starts with a nine, and a drifting motion as well, and kind of like a sloping as well.” Two weeks later, he said after a long pause, “It’s a spotty number. There’s spots and curves as well. It’s actually a very complex number.” Then he added, “The larger the numbers are, the harder they are to put into words. That’s why in interviews, I usually concentrate on the smaller numbers.” Indeed, synesthetes are never entirely consistent, and to his credit, Daniel described several smaller numbers consistently over the course of our meetings.

  But what about those “Mindpower and Advanced Memory skills” courses that Daniel used to advertise on the WWBC? Back at his home in Kent, I handed him a printout of his ad from 2001 and asked him what I was supposed to make of it. If his extraordinary memory came to him entirely without effort and he didn’t need to use mnemonic techniques, why was he selling a course on exactly that subject? He uncurled his feet from under him an
d put them back on the floor. “Look, I was twenty-two at the time,” he said. “I had no money. The one thing I had experience in was competing in the World Memory Championship. So I wrote a course on improving your memory. When I went to the world championship, I found out that the people taught themselves to remember. None of them had good memories. I thought at the time that they were lying, but it did give me the idea that this was something you could teach. I was in a position where I had to sell myself. The only thing I thought was sellable was my brain. So I used Tony Buzan kind of stuff. I said, ‘Expand your brain,’ and that sort of thing, but I didn’t like doing it.”

  “You don’t use memory techniques?” I asked him.

  “No,” he assured me.

  If Daniel had concocted his story of being a natural savant, it would have required a degree of mendacity that I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe he possessed. If he was merely a trained mnemonist trying to cloak himself in the garb of a savant, why would he so willingly subject himself to scientific testing?

  How could one ever know whether Daniel is what he claims to be? For a long time, scientists were skeptical that synesthesia even existed. They dismissed the phenomenon as fakery, or nothing more than lasting associations made between numbers and colors in childhood. Despite all the case reports in the literature, there was no way of proving that something so seemingly far-fetched was actually taking place in someone’s brain. In 1987, Baron-Cohen developed the Test of Genuineness for Synesthesia, the first rigorous assessment of the condition. The test measures the consistency with which a purported synesthete reports color-word associations over time. When Baron-Cohen administered a version of this test to Daniel, he passed it with ease. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if any trained mnemonist would have been able to do as well. Other results from Daniel’s scientific testing struck me as odd. When Baron-Cohen tested Daniel’s memory for faces, he performed abysmally, leading Baron-Cohen to conclude that “his face memory appears impaired.” That sounds like just the sort of thing a savant might be bad at. And yet when Daniel Corney competed in the World Memory Championship, he won the gold medal in the names-and-faces event. It just didn’t make sense.