Is it possible to have photographic memory?

Yeah, there's even a man with such abilities

Meet Kim Peek

Kim Peek was a remarkable savant. A savant is an individual who — with little or no apparent effort — completes intellectual tasks that would be impossible for ordinary people to master.

Kim Peek couldn't operate a light switch or button his shirt. But his memory was so vast and deep and exact, he was compared to a computer. In fact, some called him "Kim-puter."

"He had a bottomless memory," recalls Daniel Christensen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah's Neuropsychiatric Institute. During the past 20 years, Christensen examined, tested and traveled with Peek.

Peek had the ability to recall facts and patterns about history, mathematics, music and geography but, adds Christensen, "the ability to take those things ... and use them, to reason with them, make sense of them, to know the implications, to make judgments based on them, that's a very different thing. And that's sort of where his mental abilities ended."

Christensen discovered a rare birth defect, known as agenesis of the corpus callosum, during a brain scan in the 1980s. Peek was missing the thick bundle of millions of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. But a precise explanation for Peek's mix of abilities and disabilities remained elusive.

In 1984, Peek met screenwriter Barry Morrow, who was so inspired by the savant he wrote Rain Man, a film about a man with similar characteristics. The film won four Academy Awards, including a Best Actor Oscar for Dustin Hoffman, who played the character based on Peek. Peek later traveled with an Oscar statuette.