Or that he was an example of any kind of autism at all, because autistic people can turn off their autism and become neurotypical just like “that”. He conveniently kept the savant bit though.
I’ve never seen Rain Man, so I don’t know how accurate a depiction it is. But just the fact that he was able to talk means that he can’t have been at the extreme end.
And savantism is something different from intelligence, too. When I say that autistic people can be intelligent, I’m not referring to autistic savants.
Raymond Babbit, the character in Rain Man, was based heavily on Kim Peek. Screenwriter Barry Morrow met Kim Peek and was inspired to write the screenplay as a result of that meeting. Dustin Hoffman also met Kim Peek as he was developing his portrayal of Raymond Babbit, and based a lot of his mannerisms for the character on Kim Peek’s mannerisms.
Kim Peek could carry on a conversation, and if you met him and had a brief conversation with him, you might not notice that too much was wrong with him. However, if you spoke with him for a while, you’d start to notice that quite a few things just weren’t right with him. For one thing, Kim took everything literally. He simply could not understand things like irony and sarcasm, and could not grasp the point of things like proverbs.
While Kim would seem fairly normal in a brief conversation, this wasn’t because he was good at normal conversation. It was because he had learned some basic tricks over the years that helped him get through normal conversations, so he knew that in X situation you say Y, and that sort of thing. He was often imitating normal conversation, not actually conversing normally.
If you watch the movie, you’ll notice that Dustin Hoffman doesn’t look people in the eye. This was because Kim didn’t like to look directly at faces, not even his own face. Kim shaved in front of a mirror, because he knew that normal people shaved in front of a mirror. However, he hated looking at his own face, so he closed his eyes while he shaved. This was typical behavior for him. In a lot of things, he was trying to act normal, but he wasn’t actually behaving normally.
Kim had some rather severe abnormalities in his brain, including a completely missing corpus callossum. For those who are not familiar with the corpus callossum, this is the big bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two halves of the brain. People who have their corpus callossum damaged or intentionally severed later in life (usually as a treatment for severe seizures) end up with some weird symptoms, like if they hold a ball in one hand they can tell you its color but they can’t tell you that it’s a ball, but if they hold it in the other hand they can tell you it’s a ball but can’t tell you its color. Since Kim was missing this part of his brain since birth, his brain somehow developed other ways to interconnect the two halves, and he showed none of the usual symptoms of a missing corpus callossum. And that wasn’t the only thing wrong with his brain.
A lot of Kim’s remarkable abilities actually seemed to result from the damaged or missing parts of his brain, combined with some unique “rewiring” that his brain did to cope with the missing bits as he developed. When a normal person sees or hears something, they break it down into smaller bits and process the bits. Kim wasn’t able to do this. This is why he took everything literally. He couldn’t break things down into abstract concepts. He read books by literally reading both pages at the same time, with his right eye reading the right page and his left eye reading the left page. He could read a 300 page book and recall exactly what he had read. But he didn’t necessarily understand what he had read. Instead of a normally functioning brain, his was more of a tape recorder. His brain could play back what he had experienced, but it couldn’t break it down into what those experiences actually meant. If you told him your birth date, he could say exactly what day of the week you were born and what was on the front page of major newspapers on that day. But if you asked him why a particular joke was funny, he would be completely lost. All he could do is recite the joke. He couldn’t understand it.
Kim was very antisocial, because he couldn’t really understand social interactions. The movie helped push him out into social situations and he learned to cope a lot, though he never truly learned how to be properly social. If not for the movie, he would have been much more withdrawn and much worse at interpersonal communication.
Kim was diagnosed with autism, but it is now believed that he had FG Syndrome (wikipedia link: FG syndrome - Wikipedia ). A lot of his symptoms are similar to autistic symptoms, even if he didn’t actually have autism.
Kim could carry on a conversation, but a lot of his symptoms really were fairly severe.
Over a third of people diagnosed with autism have an IQ of less than 70. It used to be thought that all people with autism had an intellectual disability too since people who got diagnosed back in the day tended to be pretty severely affected, but that was before what we call Asperger’s was considered part of the autism spectrum too, and not just people who are kind of odd.
I work with a bunch of psychiatrists who specialize in treating patients with developmental disabilities, and they pretty often have patients that have lived in long-term residential programs who are in their 50s-70s that are finally diagnosed with autism in the past few years after decades of people not realizing what was up with their “weird” behaviors because they didn’t fit the severe end of the spectrum.