I’ve just cracked open The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a book I’ve always wanted to read and just never got around to. Another book that falls into that category of neglected reading matter: Neuropsychologist A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria was the forerunner to Oliver Sacks and other scientist’s sharing unusual case studies of the mind. The book, as you might gather from the title, is a portrait of a man with an incredibly elastic memory. In an excellent Five Books interview at the Browser, Joshua Foer discusses this work. An excerpt:

“Question:

Finally, let’s turn to The Mind of a Mnemonist, a monograph by a renowned Russian neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria. He subtitles it ‘a little book about a vast memory.’ Tell us about Luria’s subject.

Joshua Foer:

This book created the entire genre of humanistic clinical histories. Without Luria, there could be no Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist who wrote Awakenings. For 30 years, Luria studied a journalist called Solomon Shereshevsky or simply ‘S’. Supposedly, S had a vacuum cleaner memory. He could remember anything.

Luria is a terrific writer, but he didn’t document S’s skills with the kind of detail that is required to compare S with people who live today. Luria is so concerned with telling a good story that he doesn’t rigorously describe S’s abilities. We don’t have any other records of S, this seemingly singular character in the history of psychology. As a result it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from this book.

Question:

What does Luria’s study of S teach us about the human condition?

Joshua Foer:

S seemed to remember too well. He was ineffectual as a journalist and ultimately couldn’t make a living as anything other than a stage performer — a memory freak. I think that points to something profound. Forgetting is an important part of learning, it teaches us to abstract. Because S remembered too much, he couldn’t process what he witnessed, and as a result he couldn’t make his way in the world.”