The Case of Solomon Shereshevsky: How Memory and Imagination Intertwine

It must be a completely surreal experience to be able to remember everything that you have seen, heard, felt, or experienced in any way, down to the minute detail. Solomon Shereshevsky was one such individual. He could remember everything that his editor had instructed them, verbatim, at the morning meeting without having to take any notes.

It was fascinating, and it became the subject of Alexander Luria's study on human memory. As a mnemonist, Shereshevsky was able to experience everything in a visceral way, and in multiple senses which enabled him to form memories resistant to interference.

To put it simply, the way Shereshevsky recalled things was to create stories in his imagination piecing those memories and bits of information together, in order to make elaborate multisensory mental representations.

To use a more familiar analogy, it's similar to how Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock has a mind palace from which he can pull bits and pieces of information that he witnessed or experienced. But instead of a palace that resembles a vast library of information, Shereshevsky has a whole world of images and stories.

This brings us to Sir Frederic Bartlett's study on how humans remember. And in his famous experiment, he told the Native American story of the "War of the Ghosts" to British students. When asked to retell the story, the students were able to get the gist, but missed certain details.

The important insight he got from this experiment was that it wasn't simply a matter of misremembering the details, but that the students adapted those details and made the story their own infusing their own cultural expectations and norms into them. So, Bartlett finds that the act of remembering is not simply recalling minute, seemingly fragmented details but an exercise of imaginative reconstruction. - via The Daily Grail

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