A famous case study helped spark a myth about a man who could not forget. But the truth is more complicated.
On an April afternoon in 1929, a timid-looking man with a broad face appeared at Moscow’s Academy of Communist Education and asked to see a memory specialist. The man, who would become known in the psychological literature as S., had been sent by his boss, a section editor at a Moscow newspaper where S. was a reporter. That morning, the editor had noticed that S. did not take any notes when the daily assignments were made. When he confronted S. about this, S.
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. Eventually, I tracked down a relative. Then, more recently, I got hold of a small, blue school notebook, preserved by Luria’s grandniece in the psychologist’s archives.
Like food, housing was in short supply in those years. In Moscow, Shereshevsky lived with his wife and son in a damp room in the basement of a janitorial outbuilding tucked away in a courtyard. It was a trying situation for them all, but perhaps especially for Shereshevsky’s wife, Aida. A graduate of the famous Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, Aida was a talented musician who kept her own piano in their cramped quarters.
Luria also notes that Shereshevsky had an extraordinarily strong case of synesthesia, the heritable condition in which the senses become intermingled in the mind, and the psychologist recognized that this had something to do with Shereshevsky’s powers of recall. When Luria rang a small bell, for instance, the sound would evoke in his subject’s mind “a small round object . . . something rough like а rope . . . the taste of salt water . . . and something white.
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