Fran and Kim Peek don't understand everything the researchers hope to learn, only that it's "kind of like artificial intelligence," Fran said. "The goal is to measure what happens in Kim's brain when he expresses things and when he thinks about them."

This journey started when Peek spoke to a Rotary Club in Monterey Bay last weekend, Fran Peek said. A doctor from the Salinas Valley Medical Center suggested the NASA program do the scans.

One interest the researchers have is to look at a series of MRI images taken back in 1988 by Dr. Dan Christensen, Peek's neuropsychiatrist at the University of Utah, to see what has changed within his brain.

Fran Peek is convinced that a lot has changed for her son, both inside and out. He was a shy young man with few social skills when the movie propelled him to public notice. He's calmer and more at ease in crowds now. His sense of humor peeps out in startling ways. Not long ago, at a gathering in Washington, D.C., where Peek was to deliver the annual "disability training lecture" to government officials, he quipped to the well-dressed and often high-powered audience members that "Dad and I haven't seen so many ushers without flashlights in our whole life."

He no longer reads only nonfiction, Fran Peek said, but has dabbled with some fiction, such as books by Stephen King. Because Peek is so literal-minded, his father feared he wouldn't be able to separate fact and fiction. But he has managed to keep them separate, Fran Peek said. He wanted to read the popular fiction because that's what so many people are talking about. Reading about prehistoric times or the Crimean War, which no one's talking about, he does for the joy it gives him.

Peek is a popular speaker in detention centers and in assisted living centers. In one nursing home recently, he was invited by family members to visit a woman who, because of Alzheimer's disease, no longer talks. The woman's son told Peek where she was from and he started listing the roads and the boat harbor, the lake, the picnic spot, the businesses that line the street, memorized from old phone books of her era. She brightened up and even told a simple story herself.

When he's home in Utah, Peek spends afternoons at the Salt Lake City Public Library poring over and memorizing phone books and the Cole's address directory. Ask him any historical event, what day of the week Feb. 12, 1322, fell on or when March 17, 2242, will be, or the call letters of the TV station in Roanoke, and he can answer in a flash.

The study of his brain is likely to take quite a bit longer.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com