The man who remembered everything

by cheeseman 9 Replies latest jw friends

  • cheeseman
    cheeseman

    If you have an interest in human memory you will find these pages an interesting read. It's the story of Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian born in 1886, and his ability to remember things in frightening detail.

    http://www.dreamhawk.com/memory.htm

    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Thinking.Psychologically96/0060.html

    I wonder what the ramifications would be for mankind if we all had a strange memory such as his.

  • Crumpet
    Crumpet

    true - but I would like to know what life was like before I was 5. I remember nothing before I was at school!

  • Freedom Fighter
    Freedom Fighter

    This guy would be great to have in your pub quiz team!

    FF

  • Pleasuredome
    Pleasuredome

    crumpy, maybe you could try hypnosis. everything we experience is held in the brain, and hypnosis can tap into info. just beware of the demunz tho!

  • Mary
    Mary

    I have the opposite problem. I can remember really far back in life. I remember when my mom was trying to get me off "the bottle"----no not booze, but milk. She was getting me ready for bed and she said "..you don't want your bottle tonight do you?" I knew she was trying to wean me off so I said no, and she put me to bed. Two minutes later, I remember standing up in my crib calling for her and crying that I wanted my bottle....I asked her a couple of years ago how old I would have been and she said we were all off the bottle by the age of 2. I also have a good memory of a trip we took to Algonquin Park and I can remember the room. We were a large family and so my 3 siblings were in one bed in the room, my parents in the other bed and my mom had pushed two chairs together to make a bed for me. I was also about 1 1/2 years old.

    On the other hand, I can't remember what the heck I did yesterday.............Strange how the mind works!

  • swiftbreeze
    swiftbreeze

    Mary:

    The same here. I can remember so much about my childhood. I remember being in my crib crying and there was two people trying to console me but i wanted my mother, i had to be no more than 1 at the time. but like you said i can't remember yesterday but i can remember things that happened 30 years ago in great detail.

  • New Worldly Translation
    New Worldly Translation

    It seems as if his brilliant memory was tied in to his synesthesia as mental pictures are by far the best memory aid. I once saw an excellent documentary on synesthesia and people's ability to taste sounds, see number lines or convert sound to colours. Apparently for years no-one believed it was true until fairly recently. The test was incredible simple too for people who had colour synesthesia and they were shown something like this picture -

    What the people with colour synesthesia saw was this and were able to see the triangle shape immediately -

  • Leolaia
    Leolaia

    I have synesthesia, and it is exactly like that for me...I see that black and white image in color, except for me "5" is blue and "2" is green.

    Alas, I have a sucky memory tho...

  • Leolaia
    Leolaia

    Mary, swiftbreeze....I can remember my early childhood too. It is a little annoying when my bf refuses to think I can remember Christmas when I was three years old....that is an incredibly vivid memory, and it definitely not just remembering something my parents told me because my own recollection differs so radically from my parents', and that my memory is mostly about what emotion I felt at the moment.

    Still, I do have a bunch of false memories of my early childhood too, and then some that are mixed. For instance, I remember an earthquake that happened when I was seven months old. However, I don't remember the event itself....only recurring nightmares that were based on what I experienced in the earthquake. So I have about three or four different versions of this memory (from different dreams of the same type), each with imagined elements and with genuine elements from the event itself (e.g. especially being in my crib, looking through the bars and seeing the floor boards rattling, and the crib rolling around on the floor).

  • tijkmo
    tijkmo

    i remember being tested for this as a child...dont know why....turns out i was just your average genius

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