The Curse of Memory
KAPLAN, DONALD M.
The Curse of Memory THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST By A. R. Luria Translated by Lynn Solotarofi Basic Books. 160 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by DONALD M. KAPLAN Clinical psychologist; associate editor, ...
...Like Luria, who went on to observe S. periodically for almost 30 years, I am sure I would not let such a subject get away...
...For example, S. would study a series of 70 random numbers for a minute or so, close his eyes, then recite the series faultlessly, forward and backward...
...How did he derive pleasure, regulate his desires, resolve his conflicts...
...We are given cogent samples of the various mnemonic tasks S. was put through...
...S. was troubled too, by the return of previously visualized material...
...Though there have been many signs in recent years of Russian psychology's acquiring this perspective (another instance of the cross-fertilization of East and West), Luria's book doesn't really have it...
...A rather fair performance is seven forward and five or six backward...
...there is no mention of Pavlov, and no attempt to view the data through conditioning theory or neurophysiology...
...We speak, for example, of "warm" tones and "cold" tones...
...Certainly, he would want to know more than Luria reports about S.'s adaptation to his environment...
...With S., synesthesia often took the form of intense visual imagery...
...Not the least reason for their offensiveness is their anti-salvation-ist intellectual position, with its indifference to the social engineering of an elite psychological attainment...
...This had distressing effects...
...Nor can I think of any psychologist worth his degree failing to rise to such an occurrence, with the intention of eventually sharing his findings with his colleagues through publication...
...In recent decades, however, through the slow, osmotic influence of William James and Sigmund Freud, Western psychology has enlarged its interest to include such hitherto anathematic matters as motives, moods, affects, fantasies, dreams, psychosexuality, the epi-genesis of mind—matters that provide a distinguishably human perspective for behavior...
...Now the measurement of faculties, like memory, and the phenomenology of such things as synesthesia have been concerns of psychology since the turn of the present century —though awkwardly at first, for psychology had only recently been emancipated from philosophy and was wary of losing its independence as an academic discipline by slipping back into the study of a subjective, mentalistic subject matter...
...Still, this book is another indication of the interest that Russian psychology is taking in exclusively mental events...
...S.'s synesthesias would change radically in connection with only "slight" modulations in another's voice quality or facial expression...
...Further investigation revealed that S. was not altogether in control of his synesthetic inclinations...
...Didn't everyone retain similar amounts of details...
...Russian psychology, on the other hand, has been deprived of this relatively recent perspective, because thinkers like James and Freud are offensive to Marxist-Leninist ideology...
...associate editor, "American Imago" I would not have been surprised had I come upon this book among the sooty items outside one of those used-book stores still surviving along New York's Fourth Avenue...
...Very rarely does a subject hit the roof of this subtest by going nine forward, eight backward...
...I put the image of the pencil near a fence," S. explained a miss, "the fence down the street, you know...
...The routine attack on Freud is completely absent...
...In addition, the kind of psychology he deals with tells us something about developments in contemporary Russian intellectual life...
...What does all this suggest about contemporary Russian society...
...Traces of synesthesia are found in everyone's mental functioning...
...What was his general intelligence...
...Despite the ecstatic endorsement by Jerome S. Bruner —a sheer personal favor for one of Russia's most eminent psychologists—Professor Luria's study of a pathetic man, handicapped by a freakish memory, is confined in an old-fashioned behaviorism and exemplifies what a deadly enterprise Russian academic psychology continues to be...
...His cognitive style...
...Hallucinogenic drugs, like LSD, can induce a variety of synesthesias...
...Thus I can imagine my stupefaction were I to happen upon a subject whose digit span was comparable to Luria's subject...
...Theory in the hands of a psychologist is not unlike a telescope in the hands of an astronomer...
...For this little treatise could well have appeared in, say, 1924 between the plain covers of some now-defunct publishing house...
...That is, a subject starts the subtest by repeating, first, three digits read aloud by the examiner, then four digits and so on up to nine digits...
...4 is square and dull...
...We learn that an essential basis of S.'s mnemonic performance was an extensive synesthesia, sometimes called "secondary sensation...
...Undoubtedly there are more...
...This aspect of the study is also well drawn and quite fascinating...
...To be sure, behavior is still the fundamental datum of psychology, but behaviorism has lost its sovereignty...
...8 somehow has a naive quality, it's milky blue like lime...
...Yet, because of the rarity of Luria's subject, the book cannot be without interest...
...Such a concept of mind is consistent with the kind of individuality the Russians have deplored as politically decadent...
...In the years that I have been administering the Wechsler as part of a clinical test battery, I don't think that I have found more than a dozen subjects who went all the way on the Digit Span, and those who did managed by the skin of their teeth...
...Here the question, of course, is which findings is he going to pursue...
...When S. would hear or see a long list of words, he would place them, in his mind's eye, as objects along a familiar street...
...What is more," Luria tells us, "the phenomenon of reminiscence, a tendency for seemingly extinguished [memory] traces to come to light after a . . . period of quiescence, also seemed to be lacking in S.'s case...
...Examples of synesthesia would be the experience of taste aroused by the perception of color, or color aroused by sound, or taste aroused by sight...
...Luria very soon discovered that there was virtually no limit to the length of a series of items S. could recall...
...Moreover, Luria was to learn that upon being reminded years later of a particular experimental occasion, S. could recall and repeat the series of that occasion with as much aplomb as originally...
...The answer depends upon the psychologist's theoretical persuasions, which dictate the kind of data that will be observed and the methods of observation...
...He ended up directly exploiting his peculiar mental characteristic by becoming a performing mnemonist,) Through one incidental phrase toward the end of the book, we discover that somewhere along the line S. had found a wife...
...While fantasies are reported, no nocturnal dreams are included...
...Piecing together the barest data, I had the impression that S. was, in life, a borderline schizophrenic, which is neither a reliable conclusion nor a very informative one...
...He could do the same with lists of random words, nonsense syllables, indeed just about anything...
...Thus S. would retain a number series as a series of various qualities, which he would then scan and retranslate when called upon to recite it back to the examiner...
...Aside from a sketchy, incompetent commentary on S.'s "personality," this is about as much as Luria's study covers...
...His recall involved his imagining himself walking along that street identifying the word-objects where he had left them...
...As might be expected, S. had considerable trouble with the meaning of poetry, fiction, painting and conversation, where hierarchies of expressive intent function significantly...
...Luria's findings are interesting insofar as they describe S.'s odd mnemonic capacity...
...The point is (and I shall come back to it before long) that an American psychologist of comparable eminence, because he is equipped in my opinion with finer theory at this moment, would have produced not only a different book than Luria's but a better one...
...And there is only a modicum of curiosity about his personal history...
...6 has a whitish hue...
...But what more would an American psychologist want from a book such as Luria's...
...In S., Luria had acquired a most extraordinary specimen...
...he would try to erase his unbidden recollections by writing them down and tearing the paper into shreds...
...Strict measurement of quantifiable behavioral events was for a long time the ideal program of psychology...
...On the Wechsler Scale—one of our best instruments for describing and evaluating intellectual performance—the Digit Span subtest, which measures the sort of recall that S. excelled in, has a roof of nine digits forward and eight backward...
...Greater degrees of it are routinely evident in very young children and sometimes evident in psychotic functioning...
...They have forms . . . 3 is a pointed segment which rotates...
...This is especially true for Freud, whom no Russian psychologist misses an opportunity to attack...
...Then, having described what S. could accomplish mnemonically, Luria shifts to how S. accomplished it...
...What was S.'s other mental functioning like, in addition to his memory...
...This man, whom Luria calls S., was sent to his psychology laboratory in the 1920s by a newspaper editor who was dumbfounded at S.'s ability to retain the myriad details of a re-portorial assignment without taking notes...
...I had put it up against a white wall and it blended in with the background...
...5 is absolutely complete and takes the form of a cone or a tower...
...himself, then in his 20s, was surprised at the editor's reaction...
...Nor was any projective study made, like the Rorschach...
...This refers to the arousal of additional modalities of perception...
...A cough from someone in the room might show up in the visualized series as a puff of steam obscuring one of the items...
...Indeed, the major portion of Luria's book is devoted to what went on inside S.'s head as he exercised his awesome recall...
...With numbers, his synesthesias varied...
...He complained of the difficulty he had committing a series to memory when there was adventitious noise...
...An occasional miss might be the result of his having placed one of the objects against a fence or building of like color, or in a dim light, so that the word-object would not stand out...
...The subject of Luria's book is a Russian Jew, as much possessed by as in possession of a prodigious memory...
...Lima's book is a study of mind in a leisure mode, mind in a state of thoughtfulness, preliminary to specified action, divorced from the service of specified behavioral goals...
...But what happened was that the image fused with that of the fence and I walked right on past without noticing it...
...Whether this is progress or corruption is as debatable among the Russians as the Welfare State with its social engineering is among us...
...There was also the problem of his not always recognizing voices and faces of people he had met on previous occasions (I was going to say familiar voices and faces, but ordinary usage soon becomes misleading...
...It is only in the most passing manner that we are told of S.'s various vocational disasters...
...The subject is then asked to recite backwards the digits the examiner again reads aloud...
...For me 2, 4, 6, 5 are not just numbers...
...Recently I have been personally informed of three psychoanalyses taking place in the USSR, free-association, couch and all...
...This theoretical impoverishment accounts for the book's dated quality...
...The same thing happened with the word egg...
...Even of the subject of memory itself, which is central to his study, Luria's command is shaky...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 16
