Moonwalking With Einstein (5 page)

S kept his memories rigidly organized by mapping them onto structures and places he already knew well. “When S read through a long series of words, each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was fairly long, he had to find some way of distributing these images of his in a mental row or sequence,” wrote Luria. “Most often ... he would ‘distribute’ them along some roadway or street he visualized in his mind.”

When he wanted to commit something to memory, S would simply take a mental stroll down Gorky Street in Moscow, or his home in Torzhok, or some other place he’d once visited, and install each of his images at a different point along the walk. One image might be placed at the doorway of a house, another near a streetlamp, another on top of a picket fence, another in a garden, another on the ledge of a store window. All this happened in his mind’s eye as effortlessly as if he were placing real objects along a real street. If asked to memorize those same seven words—“bear,” “truck,” “college,” “shoe,” “drama,” “garbage,” and “watermelon”—he would conjure up an image associated with each of them, and scatter them along one of his many mental paths.

When S wanted to recall the information a day, month, year, or decade later, all he would have to do was rewalk the path where that particular set of memories was stored, and he would see each image in the precise spot where he originally left it. When S did, on rare occasions, forget something, “these omissions ... were not
defects of memory
but were, in fact,
defects of perception
,” wrote Luria. In one instance, S forgot the word “pencil” amid a long list of words that he was supposed to have memorized. Here’s his own description of how he forgot it: “I put the image of the pencil near a fence ... the one down the street, you know. But what happened was that the image fused with that of the fence and I walked right on past without noticing it.” On another occasion, he forgot the word “egg.” “I had put it up against a white wall and it blended in with the background,” he explained.

S’s memory was a beast that indiscriminately gobbled up everything it was fed, and had trouble disgorging those pieces of information that were too trivial to be worth keeping. The greatest challenge S faced was learning what Luria called “the art of forgetting.” The rich images that every sensation created proved frustratingly indelible. He experimented with different techniques to wipe them from his mind. He tried writing things down, with the hope that he would then no longer feel a need to remember them. When that didn’t work, he tried burning the pieces of paper, but he could still see numbers hovering among the embers. Eventually he had an epiphany. One evening, while feeling particularly pestered by a chart of numbers he had earlier memorized, he figured out the secret of forgetting. All he had to do was convince himself that the information he wanted to forget was meaningless. “If I don’t want the chart to show up it won’t,” he exclaimed. “And all it took was for me to realize this!”

One might assume that S’s vacuum-cleaner memory would have made him a formidable journalist. I imagined if I could only take notes without taking notes and have at my fingertips every fact I’d ever digested, I’d be immensely better at my job. I’d be better at everything.

But professionally S was a failure. His newspaper gig didn’t last long, and he was never able to hold down a steady job. He was, in Luria’s estimation, “a somewhat anchorless person, living with the expectation that at any moment something particularly fine was to come his way.” Ultimately, his condition made him unemployable as anything but a stage performer, a theatrical curio like the mnemonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The 39 Steps
. The man with the best memory in the world simply remembered too much.

In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a fictional version of S, a man with an infallible memory who is crippled by an inability to forget. He can’t distinguish between the trivial and the important. Borges’s character Funes can’t prioritize, can’t generalize. He is “virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas.” Like S, his memory was too good. Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”

While S’s capacious memory
for facts seems almost unbelievable, he was in fact taking advantage of the well-developed spatial memory we all possess. If you visit London, you’ll occasionally cross paths with young men (and less often women) on motor scooters, blithely darting in and out of traffic while studying maps affixed to their handlebars. These studious cyclists are training to become London cabdrivers. Before they can receive accreditation from London’s Public Carriage Office, cabbies-in-training must spend two to four years memorizing the locations and traffic patterns of all 25,000 streets in the vast and vastly confusing city, as well as the locations of 1,400 landmarks. Their training culminates in an infamously daunting exam called “the Knowledge,” in which they not only have to plot the shortest route between any two points in the metropolitan area, but also name important places of interest along the way. Only about three out of ten people who train for the Knowledge obtain certification.

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on the cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect.

The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true.

After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph
Superior Memory
, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess.

The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. When Ed and Lukas told me they were average guys with average memories, they weren’t just being modest.

But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs, regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be working in overdrive for the mental athletes.

Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes?

Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes recounted a strategy that sounded almost exactly like what S claimed had been happening in his brain. Even though they were not innate synesthetes like S, the mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys. Unlike S, they weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice. The mental athletes had taught themselves to remember like S.

I found myself fascinated
by Ed and his quiet friend Lukas, and this formidable-sounding project of theirs to push their memories as hard and as far as they possibly could. And they likewise seemed fascinated with me, a journalist of roughly the same age, who might share their story in some magazine they’d never heard of, and perhaps jump-start their careers as mnemonic celebrities. After Ed’s lecture at the high school, he invited me to follow him and Lukas to a nearby bar, where we met up with an aspiring filmmaker and old boarding school chum of Ed’s who had been trailing them around New York with an 8-mm video camera, documenting their every antic adventure, including Lukas’s attempt to memorize a deck of playing cards on the fiftythree-second elevator ride to the Empire State Building’s observation deck. (“We wanted to see if the fastest lift in the world was faster than the Austrian speed cards champion,” Ed deadpanned. “It wasn’t.”)

After a few drinks, Ed was keen to carry me deeper into the obscure underworld of mental athletic secrets. He offered to introduce me to the rituals of the KL7, a “secret society of memorizers” that he and Lukas cofounded at the Kuala Lumpur championships in 2003, and which, evidently, was not so secret.

“KL, as in Kuala Lumpur?” I asked.

“No, KL as in Knights of Learning, and the seven is because it started with seven of us,” Lukas explained, while sipping one of the three free beers he had just won by memorizing a deck of cards for the waitress. “It’s an international society for the development of education.”

“Membership in our society is an extraordinarily high honor,” Ed added.

Though the club’s endowment of more than a thousand dollars languishes in Lukas’s bank account, Ed conceded that the KL7 has never actually done much of anything, except get drunk together the evening after memory contests (occasionally aided by a sophisticated pressurized keg attachment designed by Lukas that folds up into a suitcase). When I pressed Ed for more information, he offered to demonstrate the society’s single cherished ceremony.

“Just call it a satanic ritual,” he said, and then asked Jonny, his documentarian, to set a timer on his wristwatch. “We each have exactly five minutes to drink two beers, kiss three women, and memorize forty-nine random digits. Why forty-nine digits? It’s seven squared.”

“I was surprised to discover that this is actually quite difficult,” said Lukas. He was wearing a shiny charcoal suit and a shinier tie, and had no trouble convincing the waitress, whom he’d already won over, to give him three pecks on the cheek.

“Technically that’s unsatisfactory, but we’ll count it,” Ed proclaimed, a rivulet of beer running down his chin. From his pocket he pulled out a page of printed numbers and tore it into sections. His finger raced across the scrap until it got to the forty-ninth digit, at which point he stood up and sputtered, “Almost done!” and then limped over to a nearby booth, where he tried to explain his predicament to three silver-haired women who seemed far too old to be enjoying this loud bar. With time running out, and before they could respond to his plea, he had leaned across the table and planted his lips on each of their sunken, flustered cheeks.

Ed returned triumphantly, pumping his fist and soliciting high fives from all of us. He ordered another round for the table.

I didn’t know quite what to make of Ed. He was, I was gradually discovering, an aesthete, in the true Oscar Wilde sense. More than anyone I’d ever met, he seemed to participate in life as if it were art, and to practice a studied, careful carefreeness. His sense of what is worthy seemed to overlap very little with any conventional sense of what is useful, and if there were one precept that could be said to govern his life, it is that one’s highest calling is to engage in enriching escapades at every turn. He was a genuine bon vivant, and yet he approached the subject of his PhD research, the relationship between memory and perception, with a rigor and seriousness that suggested he intended to accomplish big things. He was in no conventional sense handsome, and yet later that night, I watched him approach a woman in the street, ask for a cigarette, and a few minutes later walk away reciting her phone number. His “normal bar trick,” he told me, involves shimmying up to a young lady and inviting her to create an “arbitrarily long number,” and then promising to buy her a bottle of champagne should he successfully remember it.