From Another Man Autumn Winter 2007 issue.
We all wish we could remember: that person’s name; some elusive incident buried deep in our childhood; what exactly it was we went into the room intending to do. Memory, for most of us, is, in the words of Pliny, the Roman author of the Naturalis Historia, “fickle and slippery”, an ungraspable, ever-mutating chaos of images and ideas. It tricks us, deceives us, lets us down when we most need it, and is generally an unreliable narrator of the story of our life.
Yet for a very small elite of people – between 50 and 100 individuals at any given time in history, scientists believe – memory is not like this at all. For these people, almost invariably men and labelled either as autistic savants or mnemonists, memory is as clear and absolute as the magazine you are holding in your hands. They can “read” the past as easily and accurately as you are reading these words. How would it feel to relive entirely the images, sounds, smells and emotions of your fifth birthday party, say, or to read a novel once and then recite it, all 100,000 words of it, without making a single mistake? Aren’t you envious? Well, you shouldn’t be.
Perhaps the most famous of all literary mnemonists is the young Uruguayan man described in Borges’s story, “Funes the Memorious”. Funes, we are told, is able to tell the exact time without even glancing at the sky. Unlikely, you may think, but that is nothing compared to his abilities after he is thrown from a horse and knocked unconscious. When he comes to, Funes finds he has lost the use of his legs, but that, in recompense, he is able to remember everything: “The present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memories.”
This tale, of course, is fiction. It has the feel of a fable, an exaggerated fantasy. And yet, whether he knew it or not, Borges was describing an actual condition. The ability to always know precisely what time it is, is a common gift among autistic savants. Take the case of Orlando Serrell, a perfectly ordinary American boy until the day in August 1979, when, aged 10, he was hit by a baseball on the left side of his head. He can recall the weather, where he was and what he was doing, for every single day since that accident.
Take Daniel Tammet, author of bestselling memoir Born on a Blue Day, who, like the fictional Funes, is able to learn a new language (and to speak it fluently) in just a few days. Take Derek Paravicini, the blind, autistic piano prodigy who, having heard a song once, is able not only to memorise it but to reproduce it exactly on the keyboard.
Above all, take Solomon V Shereshevskii, the subject of Russian psychologist AR Luria’s classic case study, The Mind of a Mnemonist. Subtitled “A Little Book About a Vast Memory”, this slim volume tells the story of “S”, who was working as a journalist when his editor sent him to the scientist to be studied. His editor was fascinated (and somewhat disturbed) by his employee’s ability to memorise, without notes, everything said in the morning editorial meeting. S, was baffled that anyone should find this extraordinary. Over the course of nearly 30 years, Luria ran tests on S, only to admit that he could find “no distinct limits” to his patient’s memory. Not only could he memorise a table of 50 random numbers, but he could recall them with equal accuracy 10 or 15 years later. How was this possible?
S, it was discovered, had synesthesia (as does Tammet), meaning that if he heard somebody’s voice, he would also simultaneously taste it on his tongue, feel it on his skin, and see it as a very specific pattern of coloured lights. This made it easier for him to remember all that had happened to him, but also made life extremely complicated. For example, S complained that he had a poor memory for faces because they “are constantly changing”. He could not eat and read at the same time because “the taste of the food drowns out the sense (of the words)”.
Worst of all, he could not forget. In later years, he worked as a professional mnemonist, and had to remember vast series of random numbers or meaningless words every night. The problem was that he could not get them out of his head afterwards. Even writing them down and burning the pieces of paper made no difference. It took years for S to come up with a solution to this problem, though in the end it was ludicrously simple: when he consciously wished that he would forget something, he could. “At that moment, I felt I was free,” he recalled. “I felt simply wonderful.”
The moral, surely, is clear. Forget trying to remember everything, and be grateful that, by this time next week, you will have only the dimmest recollection of this article.
No comments:
Post a Comment