Thoughts (conflicting ones) on the mnemonist.

Almost naturally, it seems to me, the portion of this week's reading about which I can say the most is from Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist. As in any field that is such an enigma and is still in a state of being constantly researched and newly understood as memory, the best way to attempt to understand certain radical concepts, such as "S."'s case, is by means of comparison. One of the aspects of Luria's findings on S. that struck me the most was his investigations into the "omissions" of certain parts of his memory. There were concrete, immediate, simple, and almost, dare I say, superficial explanations for why he would omit certain words (or numbers, or nonsense syllables, or characters in a series, etc.), such as the word "egg" and its corresponding synesthetic image being set against a white background in the "field" that S. used to set up the items he needed to recall. But could there be a deeper reason, so to speak, for setting it against that part of the background? This is where the important aspect of comparison comes in. In normally-structured human memory, there is always some sort of reason, whether or not it in itself is explicable, why we remember the things that we do; the reason could be based on associations, poignancy, novel characteristics of the remembered thing, etc. And in laboratory experiments with normal memory, it is one of the centers of focus to, as Luria puts it, test the "limits" of the memory, and observe what remembered versus what was forgotten; and in normal memory, more (overall) will be forgotten than remembered. This is the inverse of what had to be done to experiment with forgetting in "S."; understanding why he "forgot" (or rather, omitted) certain things was much harder to understand than why he remembered them. He would omit the word "egg", for example, in a certain test series because he set it in a certain place on his psychic field for remembering, but why? Is it not shown by Luria that his process of remembering so diligent that it carefully constructs a background with the aim of remembering everything perfectly? Could words like "egg" and other ones that were omitted somehow, in a way that was not consciously recognizable, conjure up some sort of feeling or association that S. would inadvertently, but certainly, avoid and that would ultimately lead him to subconsciously set the word in a part of his psychic field that would be inevitably overlooked? Perhaps his mother was cooking him eggs for breakfast one morning when he was a boy, and for whatever reason, while she was cooking or while he was eating, sher became angry with him and the boy was very hurt by this. Is it then possible that he could associate the word "egg" with that fight, without realizing it, and, not wanting to relive the memory of this fight, unconsciously place the word "egg" in a place where it would not be remembered? In the case of normal memory, an association like this would be a cause for specifically REMEMBERING something - just the opposite of the case I pose for S. But in the case of S., where everything is so diligently and specifically encoded, the concept of forgetting, or omitting, and not remembering, brings up the most questions.

And with that, I am now compelled to do something strange and argue against my own case. For S., it seems that his subconsious mind, or the details of his "schema" (to use the term loosely and with caution) is much, much more accesible in daily, waking life (Luria compares his mental, visual field of memory to a dream during sleep) than other persons' subconscious minds. Normal humans make memories, in part, by making associations, but often the associations are not vividly brought to mind - people just remember certain things more so than, or rather than, others, but often can't really explain why, or can do so only vaguely. But S. makes vivid, detailed, extravagant associations in remembering, such as associating the Italian word "nostra" by breaking the syllables down into words (or words similar to those) in Russian and making an image of them - for "nostra, a man tripping and falling and a doorway pinching his nose. The associations that would normally be subconscious or unconscious in normal memory structures are effortlessly in the forefront of S.'s mind. So here we run into the contradiction to my earlier case - does S. even HAVE a subconscious, so to speak? For not only does he readily associate the given words that he must recall with vivid, completely conscious images, but these images are usually all hypothetical - as in, they don't correspond to a specific memory, such as (as a theory) a boy getting into and argument with his mothger while eating eggs. Is perhaps another itegral aspect in the workings of S.'s mind an abnormally large capacity for creativity? More support for S. not having a subconscious mind in the conventional sense comes from the fact that, as is made clear throughout Luria's book, S. cannot condense details into a general memory with a deeper meaning behind it, because those details are virtually unforgettable and he is constantly bogged down by them. So would he even have memories with enough (or any) emotion and poignancy attached to them to be able to make subconscious associations that ultimately lead to omission at all?

(I was on the debate team throughout high school and always had to write both affirmative and negative cases on the topic that we were given. I guess - forgive the cliché - old habits die hard. At least it seems that it will spark some good discussion... I hope.)