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03 Dec 2008 12:36 pm
The Nightmare Of Total Recall, Ctd.
Jonah Lehrer recalls:
This isn't the first case report of a person with perfect memory. In the masterful The Mind of A Mnemonist, the Soviet neurologist A.R. Luria documented the story of a Russian newspaper reporter, D.C. Shereshevskii, who was incapable of forgetting.
For example, D.C. would be bound by his brain to memorize the entire
Divine Comedy of Dante after a single reading. Audiences would scream
out random numbers 100 digits long and he would effortlessly recount
them. The only requirement of this man's insatiable memory was that he
be given 3 or 4 seconds to visualize each item during the learning
process. These images came to D.C. automatically.
Eventually, D.C.'s memory overwhelmed him. He. struggled with mental
tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly
memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and
poetry - though they clung to his brain like Velcro - were
incomprehensible. He couldn't even use the phone because he found it
hard to recognize a person's voice "when it changes its
intonation...and it does that 20 or 30 times a day."
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