A. R. Luria: "The Mind of a Mnemonist"

A. R. Luria

I'm now catching up on my garage sale book-buy reading of last summer -- namely, the classic study of a memory "super-savant." The descriptions of the way "S." combines his synesthesia sensations to build a "memory palace" for his images is fascinating. (A. R. Luria studied Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist with a seemingly unlimited memory, sometimes referred to in contemporary literature as "flashbulb" memory, in part due to his five-fold synesthesia.)

"A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science, ' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behavior and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science.

Luria's essay is a model of lucid presentation and is an altogether convincing description of a man whose whole personality and fate was conditioned by an intellectual idiosyncrasy.

A distinguished Soviet psychologist's study...[of a] young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him. It is all fascinating and delightful."

Solomon Shereshevskii: Legendary Synaesthetic Mnemonist

From yee Wiki:

Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevskii (1886–1958) (Russian: Соломон Вениаминович Шерешевский), also known simply as 'Ш' ('Sh') or 'S.', was a Russian journalist and mnemonist active in the 1920s.

Studies

Shereshevskii participated in many behavioral studies, most of them carried by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria over a thirty year time span. He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was told off for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own also, due to his belief that everybody had such an ability to recall), he could recall the speech word by word.

Along the years Shereshevskii was asked to memorize complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices and even poems in foreign languages and did so in a matter of minutes. Despite his astounding memory performance, Shereshevskii scored no better than average in intelligence tests.

On the basis of his studies, Luria diagnosed in Shereshevskii an extremely strong version of synaesthesia, fivefold synaesthesia, in which the stimulation of one of his senses produced a reaction in every other. For example, if Shereshevskii heard a musical tone played he would immediately see a color, touch would trigger a taste sensation, and so on for each of the senses. The images that his synaesthesia produced usually aided him in memorizing. For example, when thinking about numbers he reported:

Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person; 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a moustache; 8 a very stout woman—a sack within a sack. As for the number 87, what I see is a fat woman and a man twirling his moustache.

Problems

Shereshevskii had an active imagination, which helped him generate useful mnemonics. His condition often produced unnecessary and distracting images or feelings. He had trouble memorizing information whose intended meaning differed from its literal one, as well as trouble recognizing faces, which he saw as "very changeable". He also occasionally had problems reading, because the written words evoked distracting sensations. Things were far worse when he, for example, ate while reading. An example of the difficulties he faced in daily life:

One time I went to buy some ice cream ... I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. 'Fruit ice cream,' she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way ...

His mnemonic associations were so strong that he could recall them after many years. After he discovered his own abilities, he performed as a mnemonist; but this created confusion in his mind. He went as far as writing things down on paper and burning it, so that he could see the words in cinders, in a desperate attempt to forget them. Reportedly, in his late years, he realized that he could forget facts with just a conscious desire to remove them from his memory, although Luria did not test this directly.