Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A. R. Luria - The Mind of A Mnemonist
A. R. Luria - The Mind of A Mnemonist
THE MIND OF
A MNEMONIST
A. R. Luria
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN
by Lynn Solotaroff
vii
FOREWORD
viii
Cambridge, Mass.
October 21,1967
PREFACE
A. R. L.
Summer 1965
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 3
2 The Beginning of the Research 7
3 His Memory 15
THE INITIAL FACTS 16
SYNESTHESIA 21
-WORDS AND IMAGES 29
DIFFICULTIES 38
EIDOTECHNIQUE 41
THE ART OF FORGETTING 66
4 His World 75
PEOPLE AND THINGS 75
WORDS 83
5 His Mind 95
HIS STRONG POINTS 96
HIS WEAK POINTS 111
15
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
16
SYNESTHESIA
DIFFICULTIES
i
His Memory
39
ELDOTECHNIQUE (TECHNIQUE
OF EIDETIC IMAGES)
[First line]
(Nel)—I was paying my membership dues when
there, in the corridor, I caught sight of the ballerina
Nel'skaya.
(mezzo)—I myself am a violinist; what I do is to set
up an image of a man, together with [Russian:
vmeste] Nel'skaya, who is playing the violin.
THE M I N D OF A M N E M O N I S T
46
[Second line]
(Mi)—Here I set up an image of a Jew who comes
out with the remark: "We had nothing to do with
it."*
(ritrovai): (ri)—This is some reply to him on the
phone.
(tru-)—But since the receiver [Russian: trubka] is
transparent, it disappears.
(vai)—What I see then is an old Jewish woman run-
ning off screaming "Vai!"
(per)—I see her father [per] driving along in a cab
near the corner of Lubyanka.
(una)—But there on the corner of Sukharevka I see
a policeman on duty, his bearing so stiff he looks
like the figure 1.
(selva)—I set up a platform next to him on which
Silva is dancing. But just to make sure I won't make
a mistake and think this is Silva, I have the stage
• He evokes an image of a Jew whose Yiddish accent alters
the pronunciation of the Russian mwi ("we"), rendering it "mi."
[Tr.]
His Memory
47
[Third line]
(Che)—This might be a Chinaman: cha, chen*
(la)—Next to him I set up an image of his wife,
a Parisian.
(diritta)—This turns out to be my assistant Margarita.
(via)—It is she who says "via" [Russian: vasha, "your"]
and holds out her hand to me.
(era)—Really, the things that can happen to a man
in this life; he lives a whole "era."
(smarrita): (sma)—I see a streetcar, a bottle of cham-
pagne next to the driver. Behind him sits a Jew
wearing a tallith and reciting the Shmah Israel; that's
where the sma comes in. But there's also his daughter
(Rita).
[Fourth line]
(Ah)—Ahi in Yiddish means "aha!" So I place a man
in the square outside the streetcar who begins to
sneeze—apchkhi! With this the Yiddish letters a and
h suddenly appear.
(quanto)—Here I use a piano with white keys instead
of a quint.
(a dir)—Here I'm carried back to Torzhok, to my room
with the piano, where I see my father-in-law. He
says: Dir! [Yiddish: "you"]. As for the a, I simply
* The Italian word che had been read incorrectly as having
a soft sound. [Tr.]
T H E M I N D OF A M N E M O N I S T
48
As he later remarked:
If I had been given the letters of the alphabet arranged
in a similar order, I wouldn't have noticed their ar-
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
60
75
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
76
And further:
WORDS
95
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
96
(a) (b)
The pencil is 30 kopecks cheaper than the notebook
. . . Since three of the pencils are superfluous, they're
pushed aside to the right, making room for the note-
book, their equivalent value in money. Immediately
after these images I see the numbers 10 and 40—the
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
106
He She
fit the context, but all the same my images led me there
automatically. This means I have to spend far more
time with a passage if I'm to get some control of things,
to reconstruct the images I see. This makes for a
tremendous amount of conflict and it becomes difficult
for me to read. I'm slowed down, my attention is dis-
tracted, and I can't get the important ideas in a pas-
sage. Even when I read about circumstances that are
entirely new to me, if there happens to be a description,
say, of a staircase, it turns out to be one in a house
I once lived in. I start to follow it and lose the gist of
what I'm reading. What happens is that I just can't
read, can't study, for it takes up such an enormous
amount of my time . . .
(Record of December 1935.)
137
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
138
149
THE MIND OF A MNEMONIST
150