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A Man with an Impossible Memory
A famous case study helped spark a myth about a man who could not forget. But the truth is more complicated.
For years now, since first reading Luria’s book as an undergraduate studying Russian, then after encountering it again as a research assistant in a memory lab, I’ve searched, on odd weekends and nights, for what information I could find about S., whose real name was Solomon Shereshevsky. As described by Luria, some of Shereshevsky’s mental operations bear a strong resemblance to the sort of garden-variety mnemonic tricks that have been known for many centuries—for example, the “memory palace,” or “method of loci,” in which an imagined physical space is used to organize information in its proper sequence. Luria’s famous case study of extraordinary memory turns out to be less about perfect recall and more about something at once more fundamental and more strange: our ability to conjure such sensory details even without the direct input of our senses, to swim against the usual currents of perceiving minds.
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