Luria

One thing that struck me was how S. didn't realize that he had an extraordinary memory until they first began to test him. It doesn't seem possible to me that he could not have figured out how diffferent his brain was from everyone else's. I wonder if his brain matured and his thinking changed as he began to critically analyze himself. I wonder if being forced to articulate how he thought and how his memory worked made his thinking patterns change. I know that when I try and think about how my mind does something, I never feel like I can truely grasp how it works because my concious mind always changes it in some way. Trying to dissect the thought into its component parts ruins some of the integrity of it. The subject would never be able to explain themselves fully because they would always be either succumbing to the expectations placed on them or conciously resisting them.
The other part that really fascinated me was his descriptions of his synesthesia. I wonder if this type of memory can be found to a lesser degree in other people or if it is one of those things that is either present or not. For instance, maybe some people have incredibly vivid visual memories and have different sensory perceptions, but just not quite to the extent that S. had.

October 10 post

Pillemer brought up some things that I have thought about before, particularly in terms of traumatic memories. I think someone said before that the most significant memories from their childhood were the good, happy ones. In my case though, it’s been the painful traumatizing events that have stuck out the most, when I was in a bad car accident and sprained my shoulder, or when I fractured my knee playing basketball. Both of those being sudden and extremely painful are probably reasons they are still so vivid in my mind. That being said, I don’t think of them as particularly haunting either. The older I get, the more I find myself disconnecting with those memories. It’s not as if they’ve faded dramatically, but more along the lines of they have stopped affecting me emotionally. This could be because they weren’t extreme life threatening events, and somewhere along the line I probably decided that I didn’t need to attach myself to those events. It’s funny that the memories that tend to bring up emotion or more visceral reactions are the more emotional memories, memories of a deceased friend or moving to a new home. Remembering emotion brings up emotion…it’s weird.

I also thought it was funny that S. (in the Luria book) had to will himself to forget. It’s been my experience that the more I try to forget, the more I remember. Maybe it’s a subconscious willing that I’m not aware of. It really struck me how tuned in to his memory S. was. Obviously he got better and better at explaining his images and his process of remembering. But even so, to remember how you remember is complicated, and then to be able to put that process into words, an almost story, is pretty amazing.

S and Forgetting

I was very intrigued by Luria's description of S.'s attempts to forget things. Though the methods S. tried to use to forget information he no longer wanted to be able to remember seemed odd and rather tedious at times, such as having to take time to visualize burning the information, it does seem to fit quite logically with S.'s general patterns of memory. When he would hear something, such as a sequence of numbers or words, he visualize the information in a chart and, when later asked to recall, would retrieve this information from his visual images of these very same charts. When he would try to forget this information then, he would visualize a chalkboard with these charts and attempt to mentally erase the information---another visualization technique. It was surprising to me, then, that such a method did not work. The fact that he found success in a method as simple as not recalling things he did not wish to recall seems unusual, and left me with an unanswered question. Though in one instant, such during a performance, S. might not wish to remember certain data and is able to "forget" it, does that mean he will has forgotten the data forever or just in that instant when he wanted to forget it? If he later wanted to remember data he had previously "forgotten," would he be able to? I am hesitant to believe that a man with such a complex and detailed memory system to rid himself of memories in such a simple and passive way.

Luria and Pillemer

I found Luria’s account of the mnemonist extremely fascinating. I was most interested in the ways that his memory affected his ability to think and reason on a higher level. Despite his prodigious memory, S had a great deal of trouble understanding abstract thoughts and ideas, due to his mind’s need to visualize and hear everything that it encountered. For example, if he heard the words intelligence or boundless, he might be able to associate some sound with them, but they are both rather difficult words to attach visual imagery to (I realize that these may not be the best examples; “nothing” and “infinity”, as discussed in the book work better). It would have been interesting to know how S dealt with less visual but still abstract words such as love, sadness, or joy. It’s easier to attach visual imagery to these words but they are still abstract concepts.

I was also interested by his inability to forget things, needing to visually erase them or throw them away in order to not have them interfere with whatever he was trying to do. I was amused (although it must have been quite frustrating for him) by his account of trying to forget things by writing them on scraps of paper, and then burning the papers, but still being able to make out fragments of the words on the charred paper. It seems that S has to work harder to forget things than most of us have to do to remember things.

I wish that Luria had investigated his memory’s affects on his personality more deeply. S’s descriptions of visualizing “him” doing things, but separately from the “I” was fascinating. His differentiation between reality and imagination seems very thin at times and it would be interesting to know how aware he is of what his mind is doing. Luria never really address how much control S had over this splitting, or if he was able to exert more or less control over it at certain times.

Pillemer devotes chapter two to commenting on what makes a memory memorable. He first discusses traumatic memories in relation to PTSD. These memories are imprinted in the brain during a high stress situation, are most clearly recalled when the person feels helpless to control the situation, and are easily recalled at a later time. There are generally numerous, sometimes seemingly insignificant, triggers for these memories. He next discusses critical incidences and insight, situations where a situation is clearly recalled but is not traumatic. These usually include major life events or decisions. This chapter is quite thorough but I was surprised that Pillemer didn’t incorporate a discussion of repressed memories. I realize that this is a controversial and complex idea, perhaps too complicated to discuss in-depth in this text, but it seems like he should have at least raised the idea. He does broach the issue, to some extent, in the section on accuracy, but he never mentions not repressing the incident altogether.

comments on Pillemer

Pillemer brought up several things which i found very interesting and that have come up in my own thoughts. One of these is the idea of traumatic experiences causes startling memories to spring up on even seemingly minor cue's. What interests me in this case specifically is the ability to suffer through life threatening scenario's and then have very significant cues not summon up painful memories [but still be able to remember the events]. In the reading, it mentions that the more traumatized someone is, the more significant this is, and it states that trauma is often a factor of suddenness or speed of the event. There is however a reference to trauma being active in situations that are not only dangerous and fast, but in which the person feels profoundly helpless to alter the events in the moment. In this case, having someones memory be significantly amplified or not based on their perceived helplessness is extremely interesting to me. It would imply that life threatening situations in which one has perceived agency are not as significant in terms of inducing trauma, and not as significant with coding precise memories. In later stages of the reading it is stated that imprecise memories are more adaptive to dangerous situations [like the cave man example], and therefore rote memory is less adaptive. Yet, we see this example of more rote memory in a situation in which not having a recurrence of the event is obviously more important [helpless to danger]. The reading also gives the example that the more rote someones memory is, the more they tend to have 'flashbacks' of the events when prompted in similar and inappropriate situations alike [giving credit to their theory of it being maladaptive].
This issue made me wonder on people's ability to not be traumatized. That is, how is a persons memory and how they remember the event affecting how noticeably traumatized they are, and in fact, how generally traumatized they are. Because a person may not be 'traumatized' by the one event, but having to continually relive the event at even the most moderate cues, and then to remember it so vividly could cause them to be traumatized where they would not have otherwise [especially in the long term, ie. 15-20 years later].
As one might imagine, i thought of some of my own brushes with danger, and my ability to remember them in depth vs. how often they are cued and how much do i perceive them haunting me. My personal findings did not concur with the theory here, but thats just me, and i would like to talk in class or read peoples blog about their personal feelings on memory and its connection to trauma or distress or pain.
On a smaller note, i was wondering how people who are blind remember momentous events, which are apparently heavily visual memories.

Luria, S., and Pillemer

S. “wasn't aware of any peculiarities in himself and couldn't conceive of the idea that his memory differed in some way from other people's.” He believed everyone's mind functioned the same way, and that we all had to deal equally as often with the difficulties of his synesthesia and eidetic memory. This led me to think about how common—if not universal, to some extent—this experience must be. I would imagine that only those young adults with a very special empathy would assume a priori that all people experience life in vastly different ways. (I recognize that this comment as well as many—or all—of my others are colored by my subjective experience of life, and that all my statements about the minds of others are just my mind's best attempt at the most accurate of conjecture.) I would also imagine that no two people perceive, retain, and remember events, systems, and actions in the same way. This is not to say that the difference between my experience and my roommate's experience is anywhere near the size of the difference between mine and S.'s experience; his experiences are so markedly different that one must use several hard to pronounce conditions to approximate S's world. But this does start my thought process moving down the slippery slope toward suggesting that there may not be enough shared experience in terms of perception and memory to formulate any sort of more realistic picture of human memory. Are there enough commonalities to get past the most vague conception of schemata? Does my memory work similarly enough to yours to allow us to gain anything by studying different interpretations of the “human memory?” Is there anything resembling a normal human memory? Can (and I guess I'm with my buddy Neisser on this one) we really learn anything truly meaningful about memory without obtaining an in-depth study—the detail of which approaching Luria's study of S.—of every living human being? Can we generalize anything beyond asserting, “This method worked for this subject on this occasion but on that occasion it was different”?
Okay. Enough of my subjective epistemological break down.

All that said, I really appreciated Luria's account, mixing a great deal of phenomenological data with ample experimental/lab data. I cannot help but lean in the direction of saying this may be the best way to figure out what commonalities we do share.

I was also extremely fascinated by S.'s control over his body—his body temperature, heartbeat, etc. If he could learn and perfect certain techniques of his visual memory, can we “normal people” learn to do the same? And if so, can we learn to use these images to the extent that S. could, and so learn to control our body temperatures? What were the limits of his bodily control? What are the limits of ours? Levitating monks, anyone?

In the section titled Momentous Events, does Pillemer really say anything beyond, “We often remember the things that seem the most important to us”? Of course someone is more likely to remember a moment when their life is “abruptly and violently altered,” if they actually experienced an earth quake or perceive themselves as directly related to the news they hear, if the moment initiates a “major life transition,” or comes at a time of life-altering personal insight. I know that Neisser would scoff at this section of the chapter. The funny thing is how often Neisser is cited—and how banal the summaries of the conclusions of his studies are.

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.)