Wonderful monograph about Luria's most famous case: S., the man with nearly perfect recall. Or, more accurately, with an astonishingly strong eidetic memory.
S.'s synesthesia contributed to, if not right out was the basis of, his phenomenal memory. Every sound he experienced was immediately associated with vivid imagery: a syllable could evoke bright lines dancing on a dark background, for example. To S., each word had a colour and mood that accompanied it, as well as a flavour and smell: earthy, metallic, bitter, hot, etc. It was disorienting when a word for something cold or harsh had a warm and pleasant feeling.
S. could recall lists of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years and even decades after he had seen or heard them. He taught himself several techniques to use his memory more effectively. For example, he would place objects (or visual representations of words) that were read to him along the path of a walk he knew well. When asked to recall the objects, he would take the walk and simply mention the items he saw. When he missed one in such a trial, it would often turn out he had placed the object in a place that was hard to see: in a dark alcove, or against a wall of the same colour: his memory had not failed him, but his power of perception.
There are some wonderful passages that reminded me what it was like to be a child. The wonder, the magic, the mystery of the world was apparent then, as it always remained for S.
We are aware of course that "magical" thinking is natural to young children, that is a simple matter for them to perform some trick of the imagination, say, whereby they keep their teacher from calling on them. [...] But whereas such thinking is generally a passing phase and remains merely as a memory of childhood, as an experience somewhere between childish play and a pleasant naive sort of "magic", with S. the tendency persisted. And he himself couldn't really say whether he believed in it or not.
(Whether such thinking is really a passing phase is debatable: superstition is just this. But it loses some of its magic happiness, its wonder in most adults.)
S.'s earliest memories, as early as his first year of life, are fascinating:
This is the sense I had of my mother: up to the time I began to recognize her, it was simply a feeling—"This is good." No form, no face, just something bending over me, from which good would come [...] My mother picks me up. I don't see her hands. All I have is a sense that after the blur appears, something is going to happen to me. They are picking me up. Now I see their hands. I feel something both pleasant and unpleasant... It must have been that when they wiped me, they did it kind of roughly, and it didn't feel good...or when they took me out of my crib, particularly in the evening. [...] I'm scared, I cry, and the sound of my own crying only makes me cry harder... Even then I understood that after "this" feeling there would be noise, then stillness. Right after that I could feel a pendulum, a rocking back and forth...
[...]
This wasn't the impression I had of wetting the bed... I didn't know whether it was good or bad... I remember how the bed started to get wet. First a pleasant feeling, a feeling of warmth, then of cold, then something that doesn't feel very good, it burns. I start to cry...
Fantastic book.
