by Joshua Foer
TWO
THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH
In May 1928, the young journalist S walked into the office of the Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria and politely asked to have his memory tested. He had been sent by his boss, the editor of the newspaper where he worked. Each morning, at the daily editorial meeting, his boss would dole out the day’s assignments to the roomful of reporters in a rapid stream of facts, contacts, and addresses that they would need to file their stories. All the reporters took copious notes, except one. S simply watched and listened.
One morning, fed up at the reporter’s apparent inattentiveness, the editor took S aside to lecture him about the need to take his job seriously. Did he think all that information was being read off each morning just because the editor liked to hear his own voice? Did he think he could report his stories without contacts? That he could simply reach out to people telepathically, without knowing their addresses? If he hoped to have any future in the world of newspaper journalism, he’d have to begin paying attention and jotting notes, the editor told him.
S stared at the editor blankly through his scolding and waited for him to finish. Then he calmly repeated back every detail of the morning meeting, word for word. The editor was floored. He didn’t know what to say. But S would later claim that he, S, felt the bigger shock. Until that moment, he said, he’d always assumed that it was perfectly normal for a person to remember everything.
Upon arriving at Luria’s office, S remained skeptical about his own uniqueness. “He wasn’t aware of any peculiarities in himself and couldn’t conceive of the idea that his memory differed from other people’s,” recalled the psychologist, who gave him a series of tests to evaluate his powers of recall. Luria started by asking S to memorize a list of numbers, and listened in amazement as his shy subject recited back seventy digits, first forward and then backward. “It was of no consequence to him whether the series I gave him contained meaningful words or nonsense syllables, numbers or sounds; whether they were presented orally or in writing,” said Luria. “All he required was that there be a three-to-four-second pause between each element in the series, and he had no difficulty reproducing whatever I gave him.” Luria gave S test after test, and kept getting the same result: The man was unstumpable. “As the experimenter, I soon found myself in a state verging on utter confusion,” Luria recalled. “I simply had to admit that ... I had been unable to perform what one would think was the simplest task a psychologist can do: measure the capacity of an individual’s memory.”
Luria would go on to study S for the next thirty years, and would eventually write a book about him, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory, that has become one of the most enduring classics in the literature of abnormal psychology. S could memorize complex mathematical formulas without knowing any math, Italian poetry without speaking Italian, and even phrases of gobbledygook. But even more remarkable than the breadth of material he could commit to memory was the fact that his memories seemed never to degrade.
For normal humans, memories gradually decay with time along what’s known as the “curve of forgetting.” From the moment you grasp a new piece of information, your memory’s hold on it begins to slowly loosen, until finally it lets go altogether. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus set out to quantify this inexorable process of forgetting. In order to understand how our memories fade over time, he spent years memorizing 2,300 three-letter nonsense syllables like GUF, LER, and NOK. At set periods, he would test himself to see how many of the syllables he’d forgotten and how many he’d managed to retain. When he graphed the results, he got a curve that looked like this:
No matter how many times he performed the experiment on himself, the results were always roughly the same: In the first hour after learning a set of nonsense syllables, more than half of them would be forgotten. After the first day, another 10 percent would disappear. After a month, another 14 percent. After that, the memories that were left had more or less stabilized—they had become consolidated in long-term memory—and the pace of forgetting slowed to a gentle creep.
S’s memories seemed not to follow the curve of forgetting. No matter how much he’d been asked to remember, or how long ago it had been—as many as sixteen years in some cases—he was always able to recite back the material with the same exactitude as if he’d just learned it. “He would sit with his eyes closed, pause, then comment: ‘Yes, yes ... this was the series you gave me once when we were in your apartment ... you were sitting at the table ... you were wearing a grey suit ...’ And with that he would reel off the series precisely as I had given it to him at the earlier session,” wrote Luria.
In Luria’s lyrical account, S seems at times like a visitor from another planet, and in the annals of abnormal psychology, his case has often been treated as entirely sui generis. But as I was about to learn, there is another far more exciting interpretation of S’s story: that as rare and singular a case as S might have been, there’s much that the rest of our normal, enfeebled, forgetful brains could learn from his. Indeed, his extraordinary skills may lie dormant in all of us.
After I had wrapped up my reporting on the competition that had brought me to New York, standard journalistic protocol would have been to head back home, write up a short article, and move on to some other story. But that’s not what happened. Instead of boarding a train to Washington, I found myself standing in the back of yet another auditorium—this time, at a public high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Ed Cooke was supposed to be teaching a roomful of sixteen-year-olds how to use memory techniques to ace their exams. I had canceled my plans for the day and tagged along because he’d promised me that if I hung around with him long enough he would explain to me, in detail, how he and Lukas had taught themselves to remember like S. But before delving into any such esoteric secrets, there was some basic groundwork to be laid. Ed wanted to show me and the students that our memories were already extraordinary—at least when it came to learning certain kinds of information. To do that, he had brought along a version of a memory test known as the two-alternative picture recognition exam.
After introducing himself to the students with some self-deprecating humor—“I’m from England, where we prefer to spend our time memorizing, rather than developing full social lives”—he demonstrated his mnemonic bona fides by learning a seventy-digit number in just over a minute (three times faster than it took S to perform the same feat), and then proceeded straight into a test of the students’ memories, and mine.
“I’m going to show you guys a bunch of pictures, and I’m going to show them to you really, really fast,” he announced, trying to lift his voice above the clamoring teenagers. “I want you to try to remember as many of them as you can.” He pressed a button on a remote control, and the overhead lights dimmed. A series of slides began to blink across a projection screen at the front of the room, each lingering for less than half a second. There was a slide of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over Sonny Liston. Then a slide of barbells. Then Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon. Then the cover of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. And a red rose.
There were thirty such pictures, each appearing and disappearing so quickly that it was hard to imagine we’d ever be able to recall any of them, much less all of them. But I tried my hardest to capture some detail from each, and to make a quick mental note of what I was looking at. After the last slide, a picture of a goat, the wall went blank and the lights came back on.
“Now, do you think you’ll be able to remember all those pictures?” Ed asked us.
A girl sitting just in front of me sarcastically shouted, “Not a chance!” provoking giggles from several of her colleagues.
“That’s the spirit!” Ed yelled back, and then looked down at his watch to note the time. Of course, the point of the exercise—why else would he have given it?—was that we would be able to remember all those pictures. Like the gir
l in front of me, I found it hard to believe.
After giving us thirty minutes for the curve of forgetting to work its inevitable erasures on the images we’d glanced at so quickly, Ed put up a new set of slides. This time, there were two pictures on the screen. One of them we’d seen before, and one of them we hadn’t: Muhammad Ali on the left and a fizzling Alka-Seltzer tablet on the right.
He asked us all to point to the picture we recognized. Easy enough. We all knew we’d seen Muhammad Ali, but not the Alka-Seltzer tablet. “Isn’t it striking how easily you remember that?” said Ed, before clicking through to another slide: a deer on the left and the Nietzsche book on the right.
We all knew that one, too. In fact, he went through thirty slides, and everyone in the room recognized every single one of the photos we’d seen before. “Now here’s the fascinating thing,” said Ed, pacing professorially at the front of the linoleum-tiled auditorium. “We could have done this with ten thousand slides, and you would have performed almost equally well. Your memory for images is that good.” He was referring to a frequently cited set of experiments carried out in the 1970s using the exact same picture recognition test that we’d just taken, only instead of thirty images, the researchers asked their subjects to remember ten thousand. (It took a full week to perform the test.) That’s a lot of pictures for a mind to keep track of, especially since the subjects were only able to look at each image once. Even so, the scientists found that people were able to remember more than 80 percent of what they’d seen. In a more recent study, the same test was performed with 2,500 images, but instead of asking people to choose between an image of Muhammad Ali and an Alka-Seltzer tablet (an easy choice, no matter how effervescent Cassius Clay might have been), they had to choose between alternative images that were almost identical: a stack of five dollar bills versus a stack of one dollar bills, a green train car versus a red train car, a bell with a narrow handle versus a bell with a wide handle. Even when the images differed only in a tiny detail, people still remembered 90 percent of them correctly.
I found those numbers astonishing, but I realized they were merely quantifying something that I instinctively knew: that our memories do a pretty darn good job. For all of our griping over the everyday failings of our memories—the misplaced keys, the forgotten name, the factoid stuck on the tip of the tongue—their biggest failing may be that we forget how rarely we forget.
“Here’s the most incredible thing about the test I just gave you,” Ed declared. “We could play this game several years from now and ask you which of these photos you’ve seen before, and you’d actually be able to point to the right one more often than not. Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”
That sounded like a bold and possibly dubious claim, one that I was curious to look into. Exactly how good are our memories? I wondered. Is it possible we have the capacity to remember everything?
This notion that our brains don’t ever really forget is certainly embedded in the way we talk about our memories. The metaphors we most often use to describe memory—the photograph, the tape recorder, the mirror, the computer—all suggest mechanical accuracy, as if the mind were some sort of meticulous transcriber of our experiences. Indeed, I learned that until fairly recently, most psychologists suspected that our brains really do function as perfect recorders—that a lifetime of memories are socked away somewhere in the cerebral attic, and if they can’t be found it isn’t because they’ve vanished, but only because we’ve misplaced them. In an oft-cited paper published in 1980, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus polled her colleagues and found that fully 84 percent of them agreed with this statement: “Everything we learn is permanently stored in the mind, although sometimes particular details are not accessible. With hypnosis, or other special techniques, these inaccessible details could eventually be recovered.”
Loftus goes on to say that this conviction has its modern origins in a set of experiments carried out from 1934 to 1954 by a Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield. Penfield used electrical probes to stimulate the brains of epileptic patients while they were lying conscious on the operating table with their skulls exposed. He was trying to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy, and hopefully cure it, but he found that when his probe touched certain parts of his patients’ temporal lobes, something very unexpected happened. The patients started describing vivid, long-forgotten memories. When he touched the same spot again, he often elicited the same memory. Based on those experiments, Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.
The Dutch psychologist Willem Wagenaar came to believe the same thing. For six years, between 1978 and 1984, he kept a diary of the one or two most notable events that happened to him each day. For each event, he wrote down what occurred, who was involved, where it occurred, and when—each on a separate card. In 1984, he began testing himself to see just how much of those six years he’d be able to recall. He would pull out a random card and see if he had any memories of the events described that day. He found that he could recall almost everything that happened—especially the more recent events—with just a few retrieval clues. But nearly 20 percent of the oldest memories seemed to have totally disappeared. These events, described in his own diary, felt totally foreign, as if they had happened to a stranger.
But were those memories really gone? Wagenaar wasn’t convinced they were. He decided to take another look at ten events that he believed he’d completely forgotten, in which his diary suggested that another person had been present. He went back to those people and asked them for details that might help him recall his lost memories. In every single case, with enough prodding, someone was able to supply a detail that led Wagenaar to retrieve other parts of the memory. Not one of his memories had actually disappeared. He concluded that “in light of this one cannot say that any event was completely forgotten.”
Even so, over the last three decades, most psychologists have grown less optimistic that we in fact possess perfect memories of the past, just waiting to be uncovered. As neuroscientists have begun to unravel some of the mysteries of what exactly a memory is, it’s become clear that the fading, mutating, and eventual disappearance of memories over time is a real physical phenomenon that happens in the brain at the cellular level. And most now agree that Penfield’s experiments elicited hallucinations—something more like déjà vu or a dream than real memories.
Nevertheless, the sudden reappearance of long-lost episodes from one’s past is a familiar enough experience, and the notion that with just the right cue, we might somehow be able to pull out every single bit of information that once went into our brains persists. In fact, probably the single most common misperception about human memory—the one that Ed had so casually laughed off—is that some people have photographic memories. When I followed up with him about that, he confided that he used to wake up in cold sweats worrying that someday someone with a photographic memory would read about the World Memory Championship in the newspaper, show up, and blow him and his colleagues out of the water. He was reassured to learn that most scientists now agree that this is unlikely to happen. Even though many people claim to have a photographic memory, there’s no evidence that anyone can actually store mental snapshots and recall them with perfect fidelity. Indeed, only one case of photographic memory has ever been described in the scientific literature.
In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a paper in Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, about a young woman named Elizabeth, a Harvard student, who could perform an astonishing feat. Stromeyer showed Elizabeth’s right eye a pattern of ten thousand random dots, and a day later he showed her left eye another dot pattern. Astoundingly, Elizabeth was able to mentally fuse the two images, as if they were one of those “Magic Eye” random dot stereograms that were a fad in the 1990s. When she did, she claimed to see a single, new image where the
two dot patterns overlapped. Elizabeth seemed to offer the first conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. But then, in a soap opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was never the subject of further testing.
In 1979, another researcher named John Merritt decided to investigate Stromeyer’s claims. He placed a photographic memory test in magazines and newspapers around the country. It consisted of two random dot drawings. Merritt hoped someone might come forward with abilities similar to Elizabeth’s and prove that her case was not unique. He figures that roughly one million people tried their hand at the test. Of that number, thirty wrote in with the right answer, and fifteen agreed to be studied by Merritt. But with scientists looking over their shoulders, none of them could pull off Elizabeth’s nifty trick.
There are so many unlikely circumstances surrounding the Elizabeth case—the marriage between subject and scientist, the lack of further testing, the inability to find anyone else with her abilities—that some psychologists have concluded that there’s something fishy about Stromeyer’s findings. He denies it. “We don’t have any doubt about our data,” he told me over the phone. Still, his one-woman study, he admits, “is not strong evidence for other people having photographic memory.”
Growing up, I’d been enchanted by stories about ultra-Orthodox Jews who had memorized all 5,422 pages of the Babylonian Talmud so thoroughly that when a pin was stuck through any of the Talmud’s sixty-three tractates, or books, they could tell you which words it passed through on every page. I’d always assumed those stories had to be apocryphal, a bit of Hebrew school lore like the levitating rabbi or the wallet-cum-suitcase made out of foreskins. But as it turns out, the pinprick Talmudists are as legit members of the Jewish pantheon as the Mighty Atom. In 1917, a psychologist named George Stratton wrote up a study in the journal Psychological Review about a group of Polish Talmudic scholars known as the Shass Pollak (literally, the “Talmud Pole”) who lived up to their reputation of pinpoint precision. But as he noted in his commentary, despite the impressive memories of the Shass Pollak, “none of them ever attained any prominence in the scholarly world.” The Shass Pollak didn’t possess photographic memories so much as single-minded perseverance in their studies. If the average person decided he was going to dedicate his entire life to memorizing 5,422 pages of text, he’d also eventually get to be pretty good at it.
