Word Perfect

What are the real limits of the potential of our memories?

In the Book of Genius, Tony Buzan relates the remarkable story of a man called Shereshevsky, which was touched upon in Use Your Head magazine Vol. 1, No 4. This account emanates from Professor Lucia, the most eminent Russian psychologist of the second half of the twentieth century.

Luria explains: 'The actual beginning dates back to the 1920s, when I had only recently begun to do work in psychology. It was then that a man came to my laboratory and asked me to test his memory.

'At the time the man, Shereshevsky, was a newspaper reporter and he had come to my laboratory at the suggestion of the paper's editor. Each morning the editor would meet with his staff and hand out assignments for the day - lists of places he wanted covered, information to be obtained in each and so on. The list of addresses and instructions was usually fairly long, and the editor noted with some surprise that S (Shereshevsky) never took any notes.

He was about to reproach the reporter for being inattentive when, at his urging, S repeated the entire assignment word-for-word. Curious to learn more about how the man operated, the editor began questioning S about his memory. But S merely countered with amazement: Wasn't that the way other people operated? The idea that he possessed certain particular qualities of memory which distinguished him from others struck him as incomprehensible...

'When I began my study of S it was with much the same degree of curiosity psychologists generally have at the outset of research, hardly with the hope that the experiments would offer anything of particular note. However, the results of the first test were enough to change my attitude and to leave me, the experimenter, rather than my subject, both embarrassed and perplexed.

'...as the experimenter, I soon found myself in a state verging on utter confusion. An increase in the length of a series of numbers or words to be memorised led to no appreciable increase in difficulty for S, and I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no limits...

Experiments indicated that he had no difficulty reproducing any lengthy series of words whatever, even though these had originally been presented to him a week, a month, a year or even many years earlier.

In fact, some of these experiments designed to test his retention were performed (without his being given any warning) 15 or 16 years after the session in which he had originally recalled the words.'

Luria concluded that to all intents and purposes, Shereshevsky's memory was not only phenomenal, it was perfect.

Such a story might seem impossible, were it not for the mounting evidence about the physical and behavioural aspects of the brain which seem to indicate that, in a natural state, memories can indeed approach the levels attained by Shereshevsky.

Further evidence for the brain's capacity and memory is offered by the record-breaking accomplishments of Dominic O'Brien and Jonathan Hancock.

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