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Title: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory by Aleksandr R. Luria, Lynn Solotaroff, Jerome Bruner ISBN: 0-674-57622-5 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A readable book on a fascinating subject
Comment: I first encountered the name of A.R. Luria in the works of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, and am glad that several of Luria's works have been translated from Russian into English. The Mind of a Mnemonist is an insightful inquisition by Luria into a man he knew for several decades who had a literally limitless memory. The man - called 'S.' in the book - had an especially vivid synesthesia, whereby he converted what he saw or heard into vivid visual imagery, with powerful gustatory and auditory overtones as well. To forget things required an act of the will, and in some respects his prodigious memory was actually a hindrance for him. This short book is quite easy to read and fascinating enough to hold one's interest all the way through.
This book, Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (especially his chapter on "The Twins") or An Anthropologist on Mars (cf. the chapter "Prodigies"), and Donald Treffert's Extraordinary People: Understanding "Idiot Savants", all explore people whose memory is astonishingly accurate and sometimes limitless. These are fascinating and highly stimulating accounts that arouse our sense of wonder.
Rating: 5
Summary: An Endless Abyss of Fascination
Comment: This is a highly unique and true story about a remarkable man. S. (we never discover his true name) is a mnemonist, an individual with an apparently limitless memory capacity. The book chronicles the study of S. by Dr. Luria in Russia. Having found his subject's memory endless, He then studied the bizarre nature of S.'s memory, and the nature of S's thoughts and how all this affected S.'s life and personality. What we read about is an alien mind, filled with pictures, colors, clouds and tastes but often crowding out any kind of sense or meaning.
This is a very fascinating and original book, from beginning to end.
Rating: 5
Summary: Just one story
Comment: One of the positive side-effects of Oliver Sacks is that he has called attention in America to the works of the great Soviet psychiatrist Aleksandr R. Luria, many of which have been translated from Russian into English.
"The Mind of a Mnemonist" is a slim book that tells the story of a man identified only as "S," whom Luria knew and worked with for decades, a man who literally could not forget. Like other such bottomless memories, "S" was a side-show curiosity whose ability was a burden as much as a gift. Luria details the difficulties "S" had in grappling with daily life, where thinking clearly depends so much upon forgetting the useless.
I have no idea whether Borges had ever seen this book when he wrote "Funes the Memorious," which is a wonderful fictional account of just such a mind.
The book also takes a fascinating detour into the condition that somehow gave "S" his powers, synesthesia. People with synesthesia can "hear" colors and "see" sounds. Smells have textures. Shapes have sounds. This seems to be a natural condition in infancy, but most people lose it, except for remnants of this when people talk about "warm" colors or "cold" sounds.
The composer Alexander Scriabin was among those who retained a complex synesthetic sensitivity into adulthood. S. was another. "What a crumbly, yellow voice you have," he told one psychologist. For him, numbers had personality: "5 is absolutely complete and takes the form of a cone or a tower -- something substantial. ... 8 somehow has a naive quality, it's milky blue like lime ...." And Luria gives this account of an experiment: "Presented with a tone pitched at 2,000 cycles per second and having an amplitude of 113 decibels, S. said: 'It looks something like fireworks tinged with a pink-red hue. The strip of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste -- rather like that of a briny pickle ... You could hurt your hand on this.' "
Experiments were repeated over several days at the Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow, with dozens of tones, and the results were invariably the same. This synesthesia of sound is the essence of poetry, too. Dante divided words into "pexa et hirsuta," combed and unkempt (or "buttered and shaggy" in Ezra Pound's translation). S. used exactly the same words -- "prickly," or "smooth" -- for sounds, voices, words.
If you don't need one author to do all your thinking for you, if you can take what you read in one place and apply it to what you know from others, this book will expand your awareness of the human experience in an unforgettable way.
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Title: The Man With a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound by Aleksandr R. Luria, Jerome S. Bruner ISBN: 0674546253 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1987 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks ISBN: 0684853949 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 02 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: An Anthropologist On Mars : Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks ISBN: 0679756973 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 February, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology by Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, Alexander R. Luria, Alexdandr R. Luria ISBN: 046509208X Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: June, 1973 List Price(USD): $28.50 |
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Title: The Mind within the Net: Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting by Manfred Spitzer ISBN: 0262692368 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 28 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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