It's Hard to be a Rain Man

I was watching the rerun of Rain Man on the Science Channel. Not the movie, but the real inspiration for it. The movie Rain Man starred Tom Cruise and opposite him in the title role was Dustin Hoffman as the Rain Man.

It was Kim Peek, the most famous of all savants, the real person behind Dustin Hoffman’s role. He has a developmental disability. I couldn’t quite call it a disability, for his memory is like a huge database of world knowledge. His brain is like a compressed edition of all the world’s libraries combined.

Drop him a date and he would instantly give you not just what day it falls into but also a world event that happened on that particular date. Scientists and scholars alike have pounded him with questions on world history and he could easily put it out of his brain like a magician pulling out a card inside a hat.

His memory is gi-normous and stupendous. He is a walking encyclopedia, Guinness book of world records, a living wikipedia, and a living human USB drive that can store possibly an infinite amount of space.

His fascination with Beethoven’s 5th symphony was so magnificent that I didn’t place the connection at first. When asked what he thought about the said symphony, he said Morse code, V sign, victory, and Churchill.

When asked to elaborate the connections, he said that the intro of the 5th symphony that sounded like “dat-dat-dat-daaaahhhh… dat-dat-dat-dahhhh..” corresponds to the Morse code characters “…____”.

The characters “…_____” Morse code corresponds to the letter V, which in turn V corresponds to the letter V hand sign which means victory, which in turn reminded him of Churchill proclaiming victory over the Nazis at the onslaught of World War II.

It sounded like a bit of a stretch but if you think about it, it isn’t. It was just his memory bank trying to tell him lots of bits of information at a particular time.

He was so special that much of the world wanted to know how his brain works. I wish I could have even the tiniest amount of his knowledge. But behind his natural talent to remember details of everyday occurrence and all the information in the world, there was a slight downside.

His brain could only remember each and every detail of what he sees and hears, and reads. He cannot comprehend, analyze, and conceptualize such enormous information. His brain lacks the gray matter called corpus callosum, a tissue that connects the left and the right brain. Something that is present in common brains that we have.

That means he could only grasp every bit of information his brain could get hold on to, but he doesn’t have the ability to connect this information for complex decision making. His father had to help him to do simple physical tasks such as brushing his teeth.

But while some people who watched him might have the clinical approach on the fantastic abilities of his brain, I was touched in a way. I was amazed, intrigued by the endless probabilities of the human mind. But I also felt both joy and sadness at the same time.

Again I was reminded that in life, we can never have it all. We all are walking in a thin line between something of the other. Like balancing the good and the bad. Like matter and anti-matter, hues of black and white, a yin-yan.

We can never be too good, and we can never be too bad. If we choose one over the other, either by choice or by means other than our own, something will always give in. It is hard to maintain the perfect equilibrium. It is equally hard to be a Rain Man.

But like his message at the end of the clip, like a footnote at the end of a great book, "You don't have to be handicapped to be different. We all are different." Tell that to the doctors who said he couldn't grasp metaphors.