Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104057 in Books
• Published on: 1987-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
A distinguished Soviet psychologist's study...[of a] young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him. It is all fascinating and delightful. (New Yorker )

Luria's essay is a model of lucid presentation and is an altogether convincing description of a man whose whole personality and fate was conditioned by an intellectual idiosyncrasy. (Times Literary Supplement )

[A] compassionate and vivid portrait. (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science,' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science. (Psychological Medicine )

About the Author
The late A. R.Luria was professor of Psychology, University of Moscow.

Jerome Bruner is University Professor at New York University and the author of many books, including Acts of Meaning; On Knowing; The Process of Education; and Toward a Theory of Instruction (all published by Harvard).

Customer Reviews

Just one story
One of the positive side-effects of Oliver Sacks is that he has called attention in America to the works of the great Soviet psychiatrist Aleksandr R. Luria, many of which have been translated from Russian into English.

"The Mind of a Mnemonist" is a slim book that tells the story of a man identified only as "S," whom Luria knew and worked with for decades, a man who literally could not forget. Like other such bottomless memories, "S" was a side-show curiosity whose ability was a burden as much as a gift. Luria details the difficulties "S" had in grappling with daily life, where thinking clearly depends so much upon forgetting the useless.

I have no idea whether Borges had ever seen this book when he wrote "Funes the Memorious," which is a wonderful fictional account of just such a mind.

The book also takes a fascinating detour into the condition that somehow gave "S" his powers, synesthesia. People with synesthesia can "hear" colors and "see" sounds. Smells have textures. Shapes have sounds. This seems to be a natural condition in infancy, but most people lose it, except for remnants of this when people talk about "warm" colors or "cold" sounds.

The composer Alexander Scriabin was among those who retained a complex synesthetic sensitivity into adulthood. S. was another. "What a crumbly, yellow voice you have," he told one psychologist. For him, numbers had personality: "5 is absolutely complete and takes the form of a cone or a tower -- something substantial. ... 8 somehow has a naive quality, it's milky blue like lime ...." And Luria gives this account of an experiment: "Presented with a tone pitched at 2,000 cycles per second and having an amplitude of 113 decibels, S. said: 'It looks something like fireworks tinged with a pink-red hue. The strip of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste -- rather like that of a briny pickle ... You could hurt your hand on this.' "

Experiments were repeated over several days at the Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow, with dozens of tones, and the results were invariably the same. This synesthesia of sound is the essence of poetry, too. Dante divided words into "pexa et hirsuta," combed and unkempt (or "buttered and shaggy" in Ezra Pound's translation). S. used exactly the same words -- "prickly," or "smooth" -- for sounds, voices, words.

If you don't need one author to do all your thinking for you, if you can take what you read in one place and apply it to what you know from others, this book will expand your awareness of the human experience in an unforgettable way.

Effect of prodigious memory on personality
Some of the other reviewers have faulted Luria for not noticing the resemblance bewteen his subject's memory techniques and those used in the Middle Ages. With all due respect to those reviewers, the point of this book (clearly stated by Luria in the introduction) is to examine the effect of such a remarkable capacity for memory on the development of the subject's PERSONALITY. The key is in the approach: to examine how personality structure may hinge on a feature of psychic activity. This book does NOT concern itself specifically with the mechanisms of memory, although, of course, these are discussed as a preliminary to the discussion of memory's effect on personality development.

Great idea; imperfect execution
Fascinating concept and much-heralded innovation in psychological analysis could have been woven into a classic but the result falls short. As a prior review points out quite helfpfully, S. (the subject of Luria's analysis) uses ancient mnemonic tecniques of which the author seems ignorant, although the most cursory research in the field of memory would have revealed them to him. Readers should not repeat Luria's error; read Frances Yates' "The Art of Memory" after finishing this book.

In addition, Luria relies far too often on the subject's self-description and analysis even in matters that could have been tested or at least observed. As a result, the impact of the subject's psychological condition on his day-to-day life is addressed but only descriptively; the subject is not brought to life or "humanized" as commentators claim. The subject could have written this book better himself.