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Unlike any other savant known to the world scientific community, Kim can read a page with each eye simultaneously, even if the book is upside down or sideways.

Kim’s mother, Jeanne, divorced Fran after 32 years in 1981, but she still lives in Salt Lake City and the family is in close contact. Kim also has a brother, Brian, and a sister, Alison, who will have legal powers of guardianship for Kim, assuming that Fran, who is 79 and has diabetes, dies ahead of the son he has dedicated his life to bringing up.

The latest breakthrough in Kim’s life came last October. He spoke at a Rotary Club lunch in Monterey, California, where a prominent member, Sam Downing, is also chief executive of the Salinas Valley Hospital, which specialises in scanning. The hospital works with a nearby arm of Nasa that investigates the effects of zero-gravity space travel on astronauts.

Downing persuaded Kim to be scanned and has teamed up with Nasa to make what they hope will be a detailed brain map that could help to unlock motion sickness, vertigo, memory and brain-cell renewal. Salinas Valley doctors gave Kim MRI and CT scans and the Nasa team is about to take the raw data and fuse them into a high-resolution, three-dimensional computer model. Nasa experts hope to track the electrical impulses of Kim’s brain, giving them in sight into how the synapses adjust to forces such as acceleration and gravity.

Nasa wants new ways to keep astronauts healthy. It also aims to create compact scanner machines that can be carried by the Space Shuttle to diagnose illness in sick astronauts thousands of miles from Earth.

Kim was born with an unusually large head and a water blister inside his skull that damaged the left hemisphere, which controls language and motor skills. And in 1988, when he was given his first scan, his neuroscientist was shocked to discover that Kim has no corpus callosum, the membrane that separates the two hemispheres of the brain. Scientists want to find out whether Kim’s brain is fused into one huge databank or whether he has the equivalent of two brains separately processing phenomenal quantities of information — but with little reasoning.

When Kim was born in 1951, doctors told his parents that he would never walk or learn and that they should put him in an institution . “We just decided to love him instead,” says Fran. Kim could not walk until he was 4, but could read at 16 months. He was more or less ignored by the education authorities, but after Fran fought for home tutoring, Kim completed the secondary school (or high school) curriculum by the time he was 14. The authorities did not deign to give him his high-school certificate until after Rain Man made him famous.

Fran notes bitterly that it is a good thing he and his dad did not respond to the invitation extended by the renowned brain surgeon Peter Lindstrom after he visited Salt Lake City when Kim was 6 and offered him (and other disabled children) a lobotomy to make him easier to institutionalise. “Bastard!” explodes Kim at the mention of Lindstrom. He has never fallen in love romantically, but is very loving towards family and friends.

Munching dinner at the Little America restaurant in Salt Lake City, he suddenly breaks off and starts singing loudly to the background music. “It’s from Rain Man. The scene where he teaches him to dance,” says Kim, chortling at the coincidence.