The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory [Paperback]

Aleksandr R. Luria (Author), Lynn Solotaroff (Author), Jerome Bruner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674576225 | ISBN-13: 978-0674576223 | Publication Date: April 30, 1987

"The Mind of a Mnemonist is a rare phenomenon - a scientific study that transcends its data and, in the manner of the best fictional literature, fashions a portrait of an unforgettable human being.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A distinguished Soviet psychologist's study...[of a] young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him. It is all fascinating and delightful. (New Yorker )

Luria's essay is a model of lucid presentation and is an altogether convincing description of a man whose whole personality and fate was conditioned by an intellectual idiosyncrasy. (Times Literary Supplement )

[A] compassionate and vivid portrait. (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science,' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science. (Psychological Medicine )

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 30, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674576225
• ISBN-13: 978-0674576223
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #351,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A readable book on a fascinating subject, September 7, 1998

By 

David Graham (Shell, Ecuador) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (Paperback)

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.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Luria at his best, April 24, 2000

By 

Al Kihano (Iskandria) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (Paperback)

You will never think about your mind the same way. A. R. Luria's most famous subject was a young Russian man whose talent in life was to be able to recall anything -- literally *anything* -- that he set his mind to remembering. His talent was prodigious, and we are fortunate that a researcher as talented and humane as Luria found and studied him. This resulting volume is a beautiful account of how his memory worked, of a doctor-patient relationship that spanned decades, and of how what appeared to be a gift turned out to be a curse.

A beautiful book.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just one story, August 7, 2003

By 

Douglas Harper (Lancaster, Pa., U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (Paperback)

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.