Luria and mind of a mnemonist and "s" and russian and synaesthesia and synesthesia

I am finally getting to this book--38 years after it was first published in English. It is not a remarkable book, though the subject of the book, identified as "S," was a remarkable man. In a word, "S" had a limitless memory and an almost unerring ability to "recall" several years after the event whatever was previously placed in the memory. What Luria does is to introduce us to the way "S's" mind worked and describe the effect of "S's" synaesthetic capacity on his ability to learn and communicate. Though Luria ends his book with a chapter which tries to integrate his earlier discussion with "S's" personality, the chapter is spotty and not thorougly presented. Nevertheless, there is enough in this little book for those of us who have been blessed and cursed with extraordinary memories not only to understand "S" but also to see ourselves mirrored here, even if the mirror sometimes slightly or even crazily distorts.

"S's" Capacity

Luria, a renowned Russian psychologist, came upon "S" in the 1920s, when the latter was a reporter for a newspaper. S came to Luria's attention when the editor realized that S didn't need to take down detailed instructions on how to do things--he simply remembered whatever had been said to him. At first S thought that everyone could remember as he did; only later did he realize the uniqueness of his talent. The "essence" of the talent, as Luria presents it, resided in S's synaesthetic capability. The concept of synaesthesia has been made popular in America by anthropoligist Oliver Sacks, and refers to a person who experiences "mixed sensations," i.e., s/he tastes shapes or hears colors. Luria may not have been aware of how common this trait was when he did his study on S; in any case, S practiced synaesthesia in spades.

A few illustrations will focus the issue. S wrote:

"For me, 2, 4, 6, 5 are not just numbers. They have forms. 1 is a pointed number--which has nothing to do with the way it's written. It's because it's somehow firm and complete. 2 is flatter, rectangular, whitish in color, sometimes almost a gray. 3 is a pointed segment which rotates. 4 is also square and dull; it looks like 2 but has more substance to it, it's thicker. 5 is absolutely complete and takes the form of a cone or a tower--something substantial. 6, the first number after 5, has a whitish hue; 8 somehow has a naive quality, it's milky blue like lime..." (p. 26).

But it was not simply that S had the ability to (or, rather, he had to) associate images with numbers, he did this with other words and sounds. He insisted that a series of numbers or a text be read very slowly to him so that he could "convert" the words to images. As Luria says: "If the words were read too quickly, without sufficient pause between them, his images would tend to coalesce into a kind of chaos.." (p. 33).

This, then, explains S's "capacity," which Luria describes as limitless. S would make up pictures and stories about the words he heard, and then would file away the picture in his mind, as one would put a movie on a shelf, recalling it at a later time when asked to do so. Sometimes it would take him a little while to get his bearings on something he was asked to recall; but then he would unerringly recite was was memorized. At times, when he did "slip up" or simply seemingly "forgot" some words or syllables, it is because (as Luria discovered), S had created a scene in his mind where the object was "hard to see," such as creating a white egg in his mind and placing it in front of a white wall. Thus, when he "re-read" the image at a later time, he might simply skip over the egg.

Memorizing Dante's Inferno

S had not previously been introduced to Dante, nor did he know Italian, when he was given the first four lines of the Inferno to memorize in Italian. Here is how he memorized the first line: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita..."

Nel--"I was paying my membership dues when there, in the corridor, I caught sight of the ballerina Nel'skaya.

mezzo--"I myself am a violinist; what I do is to set up an image of a man together with [Russian: vmeste] Nel'skaya, who is playing the violin."

del--"There's a pack of Deli Cigarettes near them.

cammin--"I set up an image of a fireplace [Russian: kamin] close by.

di--"Then I see a hand pointing toward a door [Russian: dver].

nostra--"I see a nose [Russian: nos]; a man has tripped and, in falling, gotten his nose pinched in the doorway (tra).

vita--"He lifts his leg over the threshold, for a child is lying there, that is, a sign of life--vitalism" (pp. 45-46).

Conclusion

You can begin to detect a number of things about S already. First, you see how learning would be very slow because of the profusion of images filling the mind upon hearing words or numbers. Second, S's "picture-taking" capacity would enable him to fix the text so clearly in his mind that as long as he could recall the story that he had created, the text would also be unerringly present. And, third, we can begin to see how S would have to begun to spend most of his time in "another" world---the world of images he created for himself so that he would never forget what he had heard. What Luria doesn't tell us is whether this was a capacity that S felt he had to exercise or whether it was just the way things were, or that it was only conjured up with some difficulty. One gets the impression that, to use words from St. Paul, "necessity was laid upon him." The next essay probes some of what psychologists call the "shadow side" of this great capacity.

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