A Tale of Two Mnemonists

Borges’ “Funes” and Luria’s “S.” make for a fascinating pair of contrasting mnemonists. Comparing their respective mnemonic abilities from an external, practical perspective, Funes seems like a super-powered fantasy conception of Luria’s real-life patient, whose name a quick internet search discovers is Solomon Shereshevskii. While Shereshevskii can retain and subsequently reproduce a practically infinite series of random information under proper conditions, Funes retains everything; every piece of sensory information he experiences is preserved perfectly in his memory.

Funes’ internal memory – that is, his recall of his mental experiences apart from external sensorial information – also makes that of Shereshevskii pale in comparison. Shereshevskii has a lasting and detailed internal reality, a kind of mental world as palpable is the material one, which allows him, through its manipulation, to form mnemonic devices that have permanence thanks to their imagined physical nature. It is as though he has a computer game world existing inside his head which he can explore and manipulate at will. But Funes does him one better. He holds the entirety of reality in his memory, or at least as much of it as he can experience or imagine. While these worlds do not operate on the same level of complexity – the former is like a dream landscape littered with strategically placed symbolic images and storylines, the latter recalls the nesting warehouse theaters of the film Synecdoche, New York, limited in detail only by the attention of its owner – they both possess an inherent materiality that can both inhibit and aid the man whose mind inhabits them. When trying to recall a word from a series, Shereshevski might miss the word if its image were placed within his mental world in a place where it was camouflaged such that he might not “see” it clearly. He explains that this “happened with the word egg. I had put it up against a white wall and it blended in with the background. How could I possibly spot a white egg up against a white wall?” (Luria 36). Knowing the egg was against the wall was not enough. He had to be able to perceive the egg within the physical laws of his internal world. The world’s physics were in a sense thought-proof. But the physical nature of the internal world could be turned to his advantage. He could make the egg larger, in other words more immediately visible, to facilitate an easier recall of the image. Funes uses a similar device as a tool to manipulate his thoughts. To quiet his overcrowded mind for sleep, he would turn toward the new houses in his town that he had never laid eyes on and could only imagine as “black, compact, made of homogeneous shadow” (Lethem 126). Since he had never experienced them, Funes’ otherwise infinitely detailed conception of reality resorted to a blank, placeholder substance to fill the gaps he knew existed but could never perceive. His thoughts could not infer imagined houses; his memory of everything was so precise and specific that he could not generalize in his imagination to create anything less complex than the rest of his remembered reality. The placeholder shadow houses were so sturdy in their nonexistence that they became a refuge from thought and perception.

Shereshevskii would have been served well by such a refuge. Though their informational experiences differ as significantly as the natures of their internal memories – Funes endures an unending stream of information of overwhelming complexity, while Shereshevskii is muddled by blurring and interweaving sensorial experiences – both men are comparably overmatched by neural stimulation. Neurologically, I can guess that Shereshevskii’s sensory irregularity comes much earlier in the course of processing incoming information. He is sometimes unable to process a simple narrative, because each particle of information triggers a series of sensory experiences that distract from the communicative power of the original information. Funes had no such difficulty with taking in the full meaning of abstract information. His blessing and curse is that he takes in all information at all levels. If there is anything that can be gleaned from any sensory or mental experience at any moment, he retains it with perfect clarity. This wealth of information is too much to process if he is to achieve some semblance of clarity. Similarly, Shereshevski’s mnemonic abilities are hampered by the white noise of extra sensory input. The both want for a method to block out surplus information. It seems strange to me as one of the vast majority of human beings who forgets exponentially more than he remembers, but it is clear that for someone with infinite memory, the most desirable skill is the ability to forget.

thoughts on the mind of a mnemonist

The Mind of a Mnemonist provides another fascinating study of an unusual set of neurological circumstances, refracted through the lived experience of an individual. I’ve enjoyed it, although I find Luria much more restrained than Sacks. Luria’s style reflects a certain discipline and distance, whereas Sacks tries audaciously to stretch neuropsychology to its imaginative and intuitive limits. Luria is a scientist with a humanistic turn of mind; Sacks is a storyteller and philosopher who retains some roots in the sciences. It may be that Luria simply reflects the conventions of his time; and, drawing on Luria’s influence, Sacks has been able to build on a pre-existing foundation, toward greater heights. I’m more inclined to think that this is a difference of personality between Luria and Sacks, however, and the question of personality is quite pertinent here.

All of the cases we’ve considered examine the most extreme neurological circumstances--which is important, because somehow the extreme cases bring to light less marked but noteworthy tendencies in more average minds. That is to say, by looking to the mnemonist, we can gain insight into ourselves. The distinctions between these cases and neurotypical minds is really a matter of degree, it appears increasingly, but not one of kind. In other words, it is a quantitative, not a qualitative, distinction. I remember, as a very young child, experiencing some synaesthesia. For instance, the name of my third grade teacher (Ms. Edward) always seemed decidedly green to me. I remember discussing this with a friend one day, who countered that Ms. Edward's name was not in fact green, but another color. We were both experiencing synaesthesia in some mild form. With age, this slight synaesthesia has become slighter for me, but there are still the faintest traces. What, finally, do we learn from this, this similarity to the subjects? What specifically? The information is fascinating, but I’m unsure of what exactly to take away from it.

The particular case of the mnemonist may be instructive as we try to grasp the psychology of personality. Jung was the first to propose an extensive system of psychological types. There were three primary dimensions of personality in his view, three main areas in which our personalities differ most dramatically (yet in consistent ways) from one another: introversion-extroversion, intuition-sensation, and feeling-thinking. I won’t bore you with too many details, but someone who has sensing as dominant function resembles the mnemonist in a way. Sensing individuals take in information via their senses in a literal, concrete manner. Intuitive individuals immediately abstract from sensory data. These are just prevailing tendencies, at ends of a continuum.The mnemonist, thinking in almost entirely sensory terms, represents a grossly exaggerated expression of a tendency that is present to one degree or another in each of us. Notions of normality and health--as we’ve been discussing a fair amount--are somewhat destabilized by much of our reading.

What I’d like to suggest at this point--based on our discussions of Sacks and Luria--is that we not view the case subjects as fundamentally different from us. They show us the brain’s most extreme potentialities, but these potentialities are latent within ourselves. Seen this way, the model of the doctor-patient relationship that Sacks proposed looks sensible rather than idealistic. They must be equals, two humans, each striving to understand more fully the humanity of the other.

Intellect and Memory

Throughout our course material thus far, I've been struck by the regularity with which Sacks (and Luria, in Man with a Shattered World) describes almost every patient as having had a high intellect before whatever condition afflicted them occurred. It's unclear to me whether this is true, and perhaps the most precocious of brains are the most susceptible to damage or change, or if this is a fabrication, a stretching of the truth on Sacks' part in order to make a more compelling story. Perhaps it is simply that once a mind is gripped by Parkinsonism or sensory deficit or any of the myriad conditions we have discussed, the clarity of functioning beforehand seems all the more extraordinary and precious in contrast.

In The Mind of a Mnemonist, however, we have the story of a man whose memory functions much higher than any normal human being, but who also "[strikes] one as a disorganized and rather dull-witted person" (Luria 65). Despite-in fact, because of-the rich fabric of S.'s inner life and imagery, he has difficulty understanding a simple story. What, then, can be said of the relationship between intellect and memory? S.'s condition is both demonstrable to others and unknowable by them, as is the inner state of the Parkinsonian patient. How are we meant to measure the capacities and faculties of others, and what is the standard against which they should be set?

Analagous Balancing Acts

Ledoux’s presentation of the Instruction versus Selection debate (regarding how, why, and when synaptic connections are formed in the human brain—as well as the extent to which they are influenced by inherent or exterior conditions) dovetailed wonderfully with Luria’s account of the synesthete/mnemonist, S. Not only does the former provide a conceptual basis for (at best) attempting to understand S.’s mind; but the latter—the case detailed by Luria—is an informative illustration of what happens when one of the two complementary mechanisms outlined by Ledoux (synaptic regression) seems to be missing from the picture. Thus Ledoux’s concept that a union between the two often opposed schools of thought (“selectionist nativism vs. instructional constructionism”) underlies ‘normal’ primate brain functioning is given weight—inasmuch as the consequences of a brain leaning more to one side of the debate (so to speak) are readily observed.

It would seem that, both metaphorically and physically, S.’s brain was incapable of undergoing a necessary pruning of connections—whether these were physical (neuronal) or conceptual (associative) by nature. Indeed, that S. was indeed synesthetic implies that the connections between his cortical sensory-association-areas had not undergone the usual parsing and dissociation found in a conventional adult brain (as per the Synasthesia Quick Guide). This structural abnormality (or gift, depending on your perspective) gave rise not only to the functional crossing over of his senses (inasmuch as he could taste and feel color, while perceiving words as colors and syllables as shapes), but also to a psychological and cognitive inability to parse and dissociate nonrelevant or unnecessary information. As Luria describes, “…whenever [S.] would have to deal with a sotry that had been read to him…S.’s faces would register confusion and finally utter bewilderment…‘This is too much. Each word calls up images; they collide with one another, and the result is chaos’…a far more difficult and exhausting job…than others do for whom the written word does not summon up such graphic images; who operate more simply and directly by signaling out key points in a passage—those that offer a maximum of information” (Luria 65). In a way, S.’s compensatory process of cutting down the details of incoming information, via his methods of “shorthand” (described by Luria under the chapter, The Art of Forgetting), can be likened to a self-imposed pruning: a top-down, conscious executive enactment of what usually occurs on a nonconscious, automatic level.

Though S. did find a coping mechanism for his inordinate retention of memory, he still experienced difficulties filtering out the extraneous voices, sounds, and bits of irrelevant sensory stimulation—such as when he began to confuse number sets on blackboards shown to him during his career as a professional mnemonist (Luria 69). Even his process of writing down that which he intended to forget—an apparent reversal of conventional behavior regarding memory—proved unfruitful, as images/words/concepts he wanted to erase repeatedly popped into his mind. This, of course, directly reminded me of particular disorders involving anxiety and obsessive thought patterns. Though S. should by no means be classified as obsessive compulsive or diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, the symptoms (or, reflections) of his anomaly are analogous to those symptoms (or behavioral manifestations) of such disorders. Simply put, the inability for S. to let go of a certain set of numbers or a string of phonemes—and the necessary compensatory behavior to rid himself of this persistence) seems similar to the inability of those afflicted with obsessive compulsive and anxiety disorders to release themselves from their compulsive thoughts, behaviors, obsessions. All such situations, in a broad and perhaps overly generalized manner, involve an inability to let go of superfluous stimuli, a difficulty putting to rest or quieting the mind.

All such examples, however, are in turn mere exaggerations of normal human functioning. Every individual experiences the desire to forget something that will not leave his or her head—for instance, an annoying melody, or a traumatic memory. In turn, most have experienced an inability to cease fixating on (or thinking of), say, an event in the future—such as an impending test or deadline; a nervousness about hearing back from an employer or college after applying. Additionally, as Luria is quick to point out, most humans have “…remnants of synesthesia…which are of a very rudimentary sort (experiencing lower and higher tones as ‘warm,’ others as ‘cole’; ‘seeing’ Friday or Monday as having different colors)…” (Luria 27). Thus synesthesia, also, is an exaggeration of the norm (as regards general/conventional human functioning). [Attentional disorders are also called to mind here, as they may be conceived of as an inability to filter that which otherwise normal individuals hear/see but are not distracted by].

In sum, every instance of exaggeration which may be termed anomalous curves back to the original dichotomy between Instruction versus Selection—and what happens when one side of the debate is more emphasized than the other. Perhaps, then, the ‘norm’ of functioning should indeed be perceived in Ledoux’s complementary sense, with innate characteristics (genes) giving rise to a plethora of structures, which environmental influences cut and parse according to both chance and conditioning. It is only when one such mechanism (either the preprogramming or, in this case, the ‘post-programming’) steps out of sync with the other that an anomaly arises—though this anomaly may be the very thing that individuates one from another.

Short snippet on amblyopia (goes well with To See and Not See)

*sidenote: I listened to this interview a while back on a disorder called amblyopia, aka lazy eye...aka loss of 3D sight/stereo vision. If anyone is interested, it's very pertinent to Virgil's experience in To See and Not See.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99083752
Enjoy!

Demythologizing the Brain: Laypeople's Myths and the Ethics of the Artistic Neuropsychological Experience.

At first glance, this week’s section of reading from Joseph LeDoux’s The Synaptic Self provides something undeniably necessary for any study of neuropsychology: an overview of “the most unaccountable of machinery,” the human brain and its various functions, focusing primarily on the eponymous synapses. Such an overview would be beneficial for any students of the brain, whether they were approaching it from our class’s perspective, from the perspective of the straight neurologist or psychologist, or from the perspective of an interested layman; however, LeDoux seems to say, from the chapter’s onset, that exposure to such knowledge would benefit more people than simply those interested in the brain. In his opening set of paragraphs, he discusses certain “beliefs” that people “tend to carry around with them,” such as the folk notion what “we only use 10 percent of our brains” and “part truths” that, when removed from their respective contexts, “are patently false.” “Most of us,” he writes, “are mystified by our brains” – and he spends the chapter addressing this “ignorance” from an evolutionary, chemical, and scientific standpoint.

Given his background in neural science and what he has proposed to endeavor with The Synaptic Self, LeDoux’s choice to write scientifically makes perfect sense and he does so quite efficiently. But, to play Devil’s Advocate for the moment, how much use is there, for the “average” person, in “demythologizing” the brain, which is to say explaining the chemical reactions, the functions of synapses and what stimuli in which regions or areas lead to which sets of openings, closings, and relays? The overall use of studying the brain is obvious: advances in neuroscience have found applications in medicine as well as psychiatry and, ideally, can be applied to help the greater wellness of the “average” people, but it’s all too easy for someone of higher learning to give an abridged version of what a diagnosis means to a patient. Even if the “myths” about the brain that certain people “carry around with them” are not entirely true, if said “myths” have some basis in fact, is it not better than people having nothing at all? In theory, it wouldn’t be difficult for the layperson to simply read The Synaptic Self and debunk all of the neurological fairy stories that s/he had previously held to, but if it’s easier for people to live their lives with a slightly limited or vaguely skewed understanding of everything going on in their minds, are they in the wrong for not wanting to have their notions discredited?

In addition to the logic of these questions, it is necessary to consider the emotional impact of “demythologizing” the brain on people suffering from neurological ailments, which was discussed quite well in this week’s reading from Oliver Sacks, most notably in his section, “The Landscape of His Dreams.” In the footnotes to the main narrative, Sacks mentions two different cases in which artists living with neurological ailments were reluctant to have diagnostic labels pinned to their minds’ lapels: in the first, Sacks describes how painter Girogio De Chirico “was subject to classical migraines and migraine auras of great severity” but, rather than “acknowledge a purely medical or physical cause for his visions” – which he apparently used to drive his painting and integrated into his work – he focused on the strong “spiritual quality” of them, only finally compromising with the term “spiritual fevers.” In the second, Sacks notes how, despite suffering from lifelong debilitating epilepsy, author Fyodor Dostoevsky uses his character, Prince Mishkin, to ask, “What if it is disease? What does it matter that it is an abnormal intensity, if the result… turns out to be the acme of harmony and beauty … of completeness, of proportion?”

The main narrative corresponds well with these notions: although the patient, Franco, a painter of exceptional skill but limited subject matter, finds confusion originating from the “doubling of consciousness” that accompanies the seizures preceding his artistic fits, and although his family members note what seem to be significant disturbances to his general functioning – according to his brother-in-law, “Back in ’61, Franco would talk about anything. …He wasn’t obsessed – he was normal.” and, moreover, the trouble Franco gets from his malady is enough to merit hospitalization, at one point – Franco still rejects the “‘medical’ possibilities” that could explain his obsession and his art, thinking, instead, that “A gift, a destiny, had been vouchsafed to him.”

Sacks, judging from his narrative and footnotes, has a clear understanding of the fact that, for some, “demythologizing” the brain is an ineffective method of assisting them. In one footnote, he even warns against “[going] overboard in medicalizing our predecessors (and contemporaries), reducing their complexity to expressions of neurological or psychiatric disorders, while neglecting all the other factors that determine a life, not least the irreducible uniqueness of the individual.” However, the artistic rejection of “‘medical’ possibilities” seems quite similar to the “myths” that LeDoux’s average people cling to regarding how the brain functions. Is a neurologically afflicted artist’s choice not to be diagnosed, thus, a method of ego-preservation – in that, by rejecting a clinical explanation, the artist keeps alive whatever notions of inspiration s/he holds – or is it, as LeDoux seems to argue regarding laypeople’s “myths,” a willful ignorance that impedes widespread understanding? Do artists have the right to hold their notions and to ignore the scientific aspects of their suffering, or is it necessary to take a reductionist approach, in favor of helping future generations?

Distinctly Human

In my sociology class last semester, we were asked to write down what we feel separates us (human beings) from animals. Most people wrote that we can differentiate between right and wrong, we have the ability to choose which path we will take in the future, and we have will power (e.g. the will power when to eat or when not to eat). Not one person, including myself, however mentioned that we as humans are able to express ourselves and communicate verbally and we are also able to read and understand other human beings’ verbal and written expressions. We use language in our everyday lives with no regard as to how and why exactly it is possible. Something that struck me in A.R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World was the question of what makes us distinctly human. As Luria takes the reader on Zasetsky’s insufferable and seemingly endless journey, it becomes clear that language, something that we take for granted every day, is actually made possible through a very intricate and delicate brain process that can be shut down in an instant. The idea of losing the ability to think and communicate at the most basic level is impossible to even begin to fathom. One cannot know what that is like unless one were to lose the ability to use words.

There is a definite, deliberate method to the organization of The Man with a Shattered World. I think that, much like Oliver Sacks, Luria wrote this book in the same order in which he learned about and familiarized himself with this particular case. It begins with Zasetsky’s past and then there is a description of the brain and what damage was made by the bullet. After this description there are many of Zasetsky’s journal entries which include his own journey and struggle with aphasia. Luria then makes sure the reader understands the actual severity of this case in the chapter titled “Grammatical Constructions: The Third Digression.” I found this chapter to be a sort of realization; a breaking down of Zasetsky’s living hell. The reader is put through these journal entries which can begin to take a toll on him/her. There is a lot of repetition and at times it seems that Zasetsky will regain language, but never does. Luria puts the reader through the same frustration that Zasetsky went through and yet the reader is only able to be objective until “Grammatical Constructions” where he/she can become empathetic. Luria states that “intricate turns of speech that are so routine to us that we fail to notice their complexity are, in fact, codes that have taken centuries to develop. We readily employ them, because we have mastered linguistic patterns—our most basic means of communication” (126-127). The fact is that Zasetsky lost his ability to communicate, something that seems innate to humans. Luria makes a point to give the reader Zasetsky’s background in order to make it clear that Zasetsky was an intelligent, curious man before the accident and as Katie states in her comment, so much of his identity was lost when he lost his mode of communication. It is as though with this loss of identity, Zasetsky also lost touch with humanity.

What interests me is that Zasetsky knows words and can sense a certain familiarity in words, but “no longer had the capacity for such an instantaneous grasp of intricate patterns (whether spatial of linguistic relationships)” (128). He could not understand the concept of phrases, but at some points he could pick words out in a fragmented sort of way. Another question that is raised in this book is: why write? Why try everyday to remember and to learn if you have had an irreversible brain injury? I believe that although Zasetsky lost his ability to understand language and communicate with other, he still had something that is undeniably human. This something was his will to reconnect with humanity through language.