What is a rain man? The answer to this question is known to those who watched the 1988 Barry Levinson painting. The man of the rain and the expression "suffering from savantism" are almost synonyms. But what is this ailment? What are its symptoms?
Key features
What is a rain man ? This is one that suffers from an extremely rare mental disorder. The phenomenon of savantism is still not fully understood. Savant in French means "scientist."
It is difficult for a patient with such a diagnosis to adapt to the surrounding reality, while he has amazing abilities in any area. To the question "Who is the rain man?" many will answer: "Autist." And they will be partly right. Savantism is a secondary phenomenon that accompanies diseases such as autism, Asperger syndrome.
A patient who exhibits rare abilities in music, fine arts, arithmetic calculations, cartography, the construction of complex three-dimensional models, or who has other abilities that amaze others, is the man of the rain. The definition of “savantism” is absent in medical classifiers. In the textbooks on psychiatry, of course, the term "rain man" is not found. It came into use with the light hand of filmmakers.
At the end of the 19th century, they still did not know who the rain man was. The term appeared much later. In 1887, a scientist who devoted many years to the study of one of the forms of genomic pathology described in his monograph ten cases from the life of savant patients. Patients with a rare ailment were previously called "learned idiots." However, the English doctor John Down rejected the term, noting that savantism and oligophrenia have nothing in common.
Forrest Gump
The history of medicine knows several cases of savantism. Patients with a rare diagnosis are found among the characters of famous films and books. For example, the famous Forrest Gump. The hero of the legendary film has low intelligence, but a golden heart. And most importantly, Forrest has rare abilities, which makes him rich and famous.
Rain Man
What does this expression mean? This is a synonym for the word “savant” that arose after the release of the film of the same name. Dustin Hoffman played an autist named Raymond, who has a phenomenal memory and the ability to reproduce complex arithmetic calculations. Critics felt that the film was about the syndrome of savantism, although none of the heroes mentioned the diagnosis. The name Raymond is consonant with Rain Man, which is translated into Russian and means "rain man."
The expression has taken root in society. It is worth talking about several real people who are usually referred to as savants. Let's start with the prototype of the Hoffman hero.
Kim Peak
In 1959, a child with a disproportionately large head was born in a hospital in Salt Lake City. A baseball ball-sized hernia was found in a baby and a congenital malformation characterized by the absence of a corpus callosum. According to scientists, brain neurons have created new compounds. This led to giftedness.
The peak had a phenomenal memory. I memorized almost 98% of the text I read. At the age of three, he already read newspapers, used explanatory dictionaries. By the age of seven, he had memorized the New Testament. In those years, there were no schools for children with similar disabilities in the United States. Teaching Kim took his father.
At the age of 18, Peak read all of Shakespeare. And of course, he learned the works of the great classic by heart. First of all, Kim was interested in world history, geography, sports, cinema, space, the history of Christianity. Classical literature was also of great interest to him. Kim demonstrated unique abilities in cartography.
This amazing person has developed his own reading technique. It took no more than ten seconds to read two pages. In his memory, Peak kept about twelve thousand read works. Moreover, he was absolutely not capable of abstract thinking: he could not explain the meaning of a simple proverb.
At the beginning of the two thousandths, age 50, Kim Peak learned to play the piano. Dustin Hoffman talked a lot with Peak during the filming of Rain Man. It is worth saying that this outstanding personality had many friends, he was quite sociable and even witty, which is rare in people with a similar diagnosis. Kim Peak passed away about 2009 as a result of a heart attack.
Other famous savants
Daniel Tammet at the age of four suffered a severe seizure of epilepsy, as a result, as his doctors believe, there were changes in his brain that affected his mental activity. He acquired the ability to reproduce complex calculations, consisting of more than one hundred characters.
Richard Vouro is a Scottish landscape painter. He did not speak until 11 years old. At the same time, already in early childhood, he demonstrated amazing drawing abilities. The first exhibition of Richard Vouro took place in 1969. Then he was only 17 years old. To date, about a thousand paintings by the artist have been sold. Richard Vouro died of cancer in 2006.
Stephen Wiltshire was diagnosed with savantism at the age of three. This person has an amazing ability to reproduce the landscape, seeing him only once. Stephen did not speak until the age of five. It is noteworthy that the first word he uttered was the token “paper”.