Audios para aprender: Recent Episodes
Fábio Queiroz
THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH
In May 1928, the young journalist S walked into the office of the Russian
neuropsychologist A. R. Luria and politely asked to have his memory
tested. He had been sent by his boss, the editor of the newspaper where
he worked. Each morning, at the daily editorial meeting, his boss would
dole out the day’s assignments to the roomful of reporters in a rapid
stream of facts, contacts, and addresses that they would need to file their
stories. All the reporters took copious notes, except one. S simply watched
and listened.
One morning, fed up at the reporter’s apparent inattentiveness, the
editor took S aside to lecture him about the need to take his job seriously.
Did he think all that information was being read off each morning just
because the editor liked to hear his own voice? Did he think he could
report his stories without contacts? That he could simply reach out to
people telepathically, without knowing their addresses? If he hoped to have
any future in the world of newspaper journalism, he’d have to begin paying
attention and jotting notes, the editor told him.
S stared at the editor blankly through his scolding and waited for him to
finish. Then he calmly repeated back every detail of the morning meeting,
word for word. The editor was floored. He didn’t know what to say. But S
would later claim that he, S, felt the bigger shock. Until that moment, he
said, he’d always assumed that it was perfectly normal for a person to
remember everything.
Upon arriving at Luria’s office, S remained skeptical about his own
uniqueness. “He wasn’t aware of any peculiarities in himself and couldn’t
conceive of the idea that his memory differed from other people’s,”
recalled the psychologist, who gave him a series of tests to evaluate his
powers of recall. Luria started by asking S to memorize a list of numbers,
and listened in amazement as his shy subject recited back seventy digits,
first forward and then backward. “It was of no consequence to him whether