ABSTRACT
Kim Peek suffered a major heart attack and was pronounced dead at a hospital in his home town of Salt Lake City, Utah on 19 December 2009. Kim continued to be a voracious consumer of factual knowledge – usually hidden away in his room, hour after hour, adding to his phenomenal memory, never forgetting any detail that he learned. Kim loved learning for its own sake and enjoyed storing information in his computer-like memory. Kim was also classified as a prodigious savant, that is, someone whose ability level in one domain qualified him as a prodigy or exceptional talent. The most common ability of savants is that of a prodigious memory but there are other abilities, such as artistic ability, embodied in British-born artist Stephen Wiltshire and musical ability, seen in the phenomenon of American musician Tony de Blois.
