Moonwalking With Einstein (4 page)

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.

So if photographic memory is just a myth, what about the Russian journalist S? If he wasn’t taking snapshots in his mind, what exactly was he doing?

Sʹs exceptional memory wasn’t
the only strange feature of his brain. He also suffered from a rare perceptual disorder known as synesthesia, which caused his senses to be bizarrely intertwined. Every sound S heard had its own color, texture, and sometimes even taste, and evoked “a whole complex of feelings.” Some words were “smooth and white,” others “as orange and sharp as arrows.” The voice of Luria’s colleague, the famous psychologist Lev Vygotsky, was “crumbly yellow.” The cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein’s voice resembled a “flame with fibres protruding from it.”

Words set S’s mind ablaze with mental imagery. When you or I hear someone mention the word “elephant” or read the word on this page, we understand immediately that the referent is a large, gray pachyderm with thick legs and an oversize proboscis. But under most circumstances we don’t actually conjure up an image of an elephant in our mind’s eye. We might, if we choose to, but it takes a little extra effort, and in the course of normal conversation or reading, there’s usually no point to it. But that’s exactly what S did, automatically and instantaneously, with every word he heard. He couldn’t help it. “When I hear the word green, a green flowerpot appears; with the word red I see a man in a red shirt coming toward me; as for blue, this means an image of someone waving a small blue flag from a window,” he told Luria. Because every word summoned up an accompanying synesthetic image—sometimes also a taste or smell—S lived in a kind of waking dream, once removed from reality. While one universe unfolded around him, another universe of images blossomed in his mind’s eye.

These images that populated S’s head were so powerful that they felt at times indistinguishable from reality. “Indeed, one would be hard put to say which was more real for him: the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest,” Luria wrote. All S had to do was imagine himself running after a train to make his pulse race, or envision sticking his hand in a hot oven to make his temperature rise. He claimed even to be able to abolish pain with his images: “Let’s say I’m going to the dentist ... I sit there and when the pain starts I feel it ... it’s a tiny, orange-red thread. I’m upset because I know that if this keeps up the thread will widen until it turns into a dense mass ... So I cut the thread, make it smaller and smaller, until it’s just a tiny point. And the pain disappears.”

Even numbers had their own personalities for S: “Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person (why, I don’t know); 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a mustache; 8 a very stout woman—a sack within a sack. As for the number 87, what I see is a fat woman and a man twirling his mustache.” But while numbers were brought to life by S’s synesthesia, he had trouble understanding abstract concepts and metaphors. “I can only understand what I can visualize,” he explained. Words like “infinity” and “nothing” were beyond his grasp. “Take the word
something
for example. For me this is a dense cloud of steam that has the color of smoke. When I hear the word
nothing
, I also see a cloud, but that one is thinner, completely transparent. And when I try to seize a particle of this
nothing
, I get the most minute particles of
nothing
.” S was simply unable to think figuratively. An expression like “weigh one’s words” evoked images of scales, not prudence. Poetry was virtually impossible to read, unless it was completely literal. Even simple stories proved difficult to understand because his irrepressible image-making would bog him down as he tried to visualize every word, or else send his brain hurtling off to some other associated image, and some other memory.

All of our memories are, like S’s, bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of the brain’s physical structure. The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed.

If thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think about the color black and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, that’s a function of a cascade of electrical impulses rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain, which links a set of neurons that encode the concept of coffee with others containing the concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness. That much scientists know. But how exactly a collection of cells could “contain” a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience.

For all the advances that have been made in recent decades, it’s still the case that no one has ever actually seen a memory in the human brain. Though advances in imaging technology have allowed neuroscientists to grasp much of the basic topography of the brain, and studies of neurons have given us a clear picture of what happens inside and between individual brain cells, science is still relatively clueless about what transpires in the circuitry of the cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that allows us to plan into the future, do long division, and write poetry, and which holds most of our memories. In our knowledge of the brain, we’re like someone looking down on a city from a high-flying airplane. We can tell where the industrial and residential neighborhoods are, where the airport is, the locations of the main traffic arteries, where the suburbs begin. We also know, in great detail, what the individual units of the city (citizens, and in this metaphor, neurons) look like. But, for the most part, we can’t say where people go when they get hungry, how people make a living, or what any given person’s commute looks like. The brain makes sense up close and from far away. It’s the in-between—the stuff of thought and memory, the language of the brain—that remains a profound mystery.

One thing is clear, however: The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception—some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web. So when a memory goes missing or a name gets caught on the tip of the tongue, hunting it down can be frustrating and often futile. We have to stumble in the dark with a flashlight for cues that might lead us back to the piece of information we’re looking for—
Her name begins with an L ... She’s a painter ... I met her at that party a couple years ago—
until one of those other memories calls to mind the one we’re looking for.
Ah yes, her name was Lisa!
Because our memories don’t follow any kind of linear logic, we can neither sequentially search them nor browse them.

But S could. S’s memories were as regimentally ordered as a card catalog. Each piece of information he memorized was assigned its own address inside his brain.

Let’s say I asked you to memorize the following list of words: “bear,” “truck,” “college,” “shoe,” “drama,” “garbage,” and “watermelon.” You might very well be able to remember all seven of those words, but it’s less likely you’d be able to remember them in order. Not so with S. For S, the first piece of information in a list was always, and without fail, inextricably linked to the second piece of information, which could only be followed by the third. It didn’t matter whether he was memorizing Dante’s
Divine Comedy
or mathematical equations; his memories were always stored in linear chains. Which is why he could recite poems just as easily backward as forward.