Shereshevskii could remember how many words

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. He had an active imagination, which helped him generate useful mnemonics. He claimed that his condition often produced unnecessary and distracting images or feelings. 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. It even provides the exact list of things Luria gave him to memorize that day. My search for Solomon Shereshevsky revealed a person who fit uneasily in the story of the Man Who Could Not Forget, as he has so often been portrayed.

He did not, in fact, have perfect recall. His past was not a land he could wander through at will. For him, remembering took conscious effort and a certain creative genius. His extraordinary case also reveals something of how our ordinary minds remember, and how often they do not.

He dates their meeting to April 13, , while Luria has it occurring a few years before, and Shereshevsky gives his age at the time as thirty-seven, while Luria asserts that his subject was still in his twenties. According to Shereshevsky, he returned to the newspaper that day and told his editor that his memory had been tested and was found to exceed the bounds of what was believed to be physically possible. In short order, he hired a circus trainer as his manager and travelling assistant and was coached by a carnival juggler on how to entertain.

Then he set off for the provinces. For Reynberg, S. I tracked him down through a contact in Moscow and went to see him a few years ago on a hot summer afternoon in Brooklyn, where he now lives. His apartment was a rambling series of neatly kept rooms that had an unmistakably Russian feel to them, from the beaded hallway curtain to the feast of delicious zakuski that had been laid out for my arrival. Reynberg is stocky, with a head of neatly combed ivory hair, and we sat for hours in the kitchen, talking about his uncle.

In that town outside Moscow, he said, the farmers who were supposed to meet him and his uncle at the train station never showed up, so they hired horse-drawn sledges to take them through the snow to find the venue on their own.

The actual performance never happened, but they paid him nonetheless—in potatoes, Reynberg recalled, for which his uncle was grateful. Like food, housing was in short supply in those years. In Moscow, Shereshevsky lived with his wife and son in a damp room in the basement of a janitorial outbuilding tucked away in a courtyard.

A graduate of the famous Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, Aida was a talented musician who kept her own piano in their cramped quarters.

During spells of fine weather, husband and wife wheeled the instrument out into the courtyard to let it dry out. There was something striking about this incongruous image: the two of them trundling the heavy piano to a sunny spot in the courtyard, each bump calling forth dim polychromatic echoes from inside its wooden body.

According to Reynberg, Shereshevsky was pressured to put his talents to work for the secret police, but he declined. His problems deepened after the Second World War, Reynberg said, during the so-called anti-cosmopolitanism campaign, a purge directed primarily at Jews.

Shereshevsky found himself increasingly shunned, his shows cancelled. After a disastrous performance that left audience members clamoring for a refund, his career was essentially finished. Shereshevsky had made a living off his memory in a land ruled by amnesia.

Something else I learned that afternoon threatened to change my entire sense of who Shereshevsky was: His uncle, Reynberg said, could be forgetful. Reynberg told me that his uncle trained hours a day for his evening performances. Which is precisely the point — he does not have expertise in memory training, which is he would have needed to make sense of this case study; being an expert in other fields is not relevant.

I think this book has got undeserved attention through having been written by him rather than a less famous author. I think the evidence for the importance of talent rather than practice to explain memory performances is generally very weak, and in the case of S there is no convincing evidence for the importance of talent at all. I suggest that cognitive difficulties of Shereshevsky were not due to his synesthesia or his astounding memory.

I proposed that he was suffering from a mnesic imbalance present in an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Email: tajuddin hotmail. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email. The memory improvement blog. Like this: Like Loading Comments 7 Comments Categories Expert memory.

Thanks for your reply. I am sorry I am unable to locate a photo that I can verify as authentic. Extra - October 19, […] The vast memory of Solomon Shereshevsky […]. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Buy my book! February 2, Diabetes and cognitive decline January 31, Scientific paper has a one word abstract January 29, Podcast on prospective memory January 26, Just how big is that effect size?

January 24, Yes, we have no tofu! Blog at WordPress. Follow Following.