The study of Solomon Sheresshevskii, a Russian journalist with an apparently limitless memory, is one of the most famous case histories in psychology. Sheresshevskii’s extraordinary abilities were recorded over several decades by Aleksandr Luria, a professor at the University Of Moscow.
In 1965, psychologist Aleksandr Luria published The Mind of a Mnemonist, an astonishing account of his 30 years of memory experiments with a man he referred to simply as ‘S.’ The man’s real name was Solomon Shereshevskii, and he was a young newspaper reporter who had been noticed for his uncanny ability to recall highly detailed daily briefings without taking any notes.
Multi-Sensory Remembering
Luria began memory tests with S and found that he had a faultless recall of long and complex series of words or numbers after only a few minutes of study. As the sessions continued, S revealed to Luria that he depended mainly on visual images to remember the material. He also appeared to experience a phenomenon called synaesthesia, in which a single stimulus triggers combinations of different senses. When S heard words, he saw colored splashes, smudges, and lines and experienced taste and touch sensations. On hearing a bell ringing, S said: ‘A small round object rolled right before my eyes….my fingers sensed something rough like a rope…Then I experienced the taste of saltwater…and something white. ‘S told Lev Vygotsky, a famous psychologist who worked with Luria, that he had a ‘ crumbly yellow voice.’
Investigating an infallible memory
Luria realized that it was pointless to attempt to measure S’s memory capacity as it effectively had no limits. Instead, he tried to discover how S could retain so much information. Although S believed he had a form of photographic memory, Luria’s accounts of some experiments suggest S may have been using more active memory techniques without being taught. In one test, Luria gave S a table of 50 numbers, which he studied for three minutes. Surprisingly, S took 40 seconds to recall the whole table but twice as long to recall one column: this suggests he may have been coding each row of numbers to memorize them and then ‘ unpacking ‘ the codes in turn to recall the table. Using this system, he would have to unpack the whole table to recall just one column.
When he was trying to remember lists of objects, S placed images in sequence in locations familiar to him – Gorky Street in Moscow, for example, or his childhood hometown of Rezhitsa. To retrieve the list, S mentally ‘walked’ along the street. Although this is similar to the method of loci-a recognized memory technique – in S’s case, the process was more intuitive.
S’s incredible memory led to his becoming a stage performer, but it was not without disadvantages. He could never overcome the synaesthetic reactions that confused even the simplest situation. The array of images and feelings conjured up by simple words and phrases made it difficult for him to decipher the meaning or disregard unimportant details. As a result, he often appeared slow and awkward in his responses to other people, and the memory methods he used were designed as much to control his over-rich mental imagery as to retain things in his mind.
Aleksandr Luria
Aleksandr Luria was born in Russia in 1902 and studied both medicine and psychology. In 1924, he began working with the psychologist Lev Vygotsky in Moscow, and from 1937, he focused on the effects of brain injury on mental functioning. He developed great skills in investigating individual cases of brain injury and methods of rehabilitation and wrote many books on these studies. One of his best-known accounts is The Man with the Shattered World, a description of a soldier who suffered a head injury that destroyed the stability of his perceptual world, producing a constantly changing kaleidoscope of experience. Luria used the soldier’s account of his experience to paint a portrait of the whole person and to reflect on the implications for our understanding of human life. He approached the study of the memory prodigy Solomon Shereshevskii in much the same spirit.
The Need to Forget
Much forgetting is beneficial because experience is repetitive, and all we need to extract from our experiences is a general ‘script’ to guide us in the future. Only specific events depart from the general pattern and are retained in detail. Shereshevskii apparently could not do this – he recalled everything in detail. This caused problems when lists he had memorized in earlier stage performances interfered with later ones. To make himself forget old lists, he visualized writing them down and burning them, but he could still ‘see traces of writing. One day, however, he realized that if he didn’t want to see an old list, he could simply will himself to put it out of his mind.
