Remembering absolutely everything would be great, right? Funes, the memory man, may not have the same opinion. At the age of 19 he hit his head hard while riding a horse and, when he came to, he realized that he had acquired the incredible talent (or perhaps curse) of remembering everything he perceived.
“Those memories were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular, thermal sensations, and so on. She could reconstruct all the dreams, all the half-dreams. Two or three times she had reconstructed a whole day; he had never doubted, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. However, Funes was not very capable of thinking. Thinking is forget differences, is generalize, to abstract. In the crowded world of Funes there were only details, almost immediate”.
In reality, Funes never existed. At least, outside of the prodigious mind of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and the short story Funes el memorioso, published in 1942.
But, as extraordinary as it may seem, there has been someone real very similar. We are referring to Solomon Shereshevski, a Russian professional mnemonist who lived in Moscow in the first half of the 20th century and who was studied by the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria. His book The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968) exhaustively describes this case and is a gem of scientific literature.
Shereshevski could accurately recall long strings of letters, numbers, and words that were shown to him only once, even decades later, and without error! Solomon's memory could be described as "photographic" since everything he saw, read or heard became a memory that he perceived clearly with his mind's "eye" as if he were seeing it. really.
In addition, it made copies of the information in different sensory formats than the original, a phenomenon known as synesthesia. Solomon himself described how he remembered lists of words: “Usually I feel the taste and weight of the word… and I don't have anything to do anymore, it remembers itself. I feel something buttery slipping down my hand, made of numerous very very light dots, which tingles my left hand slightly and I don't need any more”.
However, Solomon had a pronounced inability to extract the meaning of long texts, to understand the double meanings of poetry, jokes or proverbs, and even to make logical and mathematical reasoning. Even more extraordinary, Shereshevski had trouble remembering other people's faces and voices.
We can draw a conclusion from this case: a superlative memory does not seem to imply greater intelligence or a better capacity for logical or abstract reasoning. William James, one of the fathers of contemporary psychology, had already pointed it out at the end of the 19th century: "If we remembered everything, we would be as disabled most of the time as if we did not remember anything... The paradoxical result is that a condition for remembering it is that we must forget”.
Another well-known case seems to support the idea that greater memory capacity does not necessarily lead to better memory.
Born in 1965, Jill Price is an American who can remember, in great detail and with the same emotional intensity as the first time, everything that has happened in her life. This condition is known as hyperthymesia and involves an exacerbated autobiographical memory, which becomes dysfunctional and pathological.
The main problem is that Jill doesn't control access to those memories, instead they overwhelm her when she comes across a date or other linked memories. “Most people consider it a blessing, but I call it a burden,” she explains. "Every day I go over my entire life in my head and it's driving me crazy."
She is even able to recall each of the times her mother told her that she was getting fat during adolescence, with the same emotional weight she felt then. Her memory has become an encyclopedia of remorse that haunts her relentlessly.
Jill Price's case has been exhaustively investigated by the discipline of neuropsychology and she herself has written a book recounting her story. Intelligence tests reveal that she has normal intellectual capacity, although some deficiencies are detected in abstract thinking and other executive functions.
As we can see, an unlimited memory does not make us smarter or, unfortunately, happier. It is often said that time heals everything, but in the case of Jill Price, the bad moments of her life are always alive in her head.
A very different case is that of professional mnemonists, those people who memorize long lists of numbers, words or dates at breakneck speed in "memory championships".
Well, surprising as it may seem, most of these "prodigies" do not have a qualitatively different memory than any of us. In fact, they achieve their extraordinary memory performance by training several hours a day for years.
The story of Joshua Foer, a journalist seduced by the subject when making a report and who, a year later, was proclaimed winner of the 2006 United States Memory Championship, is very illustrative. What was his secret? Massive training in mnemonic rules, as he describes in his entertaining book The Challenges of Memory.
The curious thing is that, apart from the specific information for which they are trained, these professionals make the same memory errors as the rest of the mortals. They forget where they parked their car or a friend's birthday just like anyone else. In reality, the cases of genuine photographic memory are so extraordinary that they do not represent a statistically relevant phenomenon in the population.
We return to the question from the beginning: what would happen if we could remember absolutely everything? The question is interesting because it allows us to question the very nature of this very important mental process in our lives.
Memory is not a precise and much less literal record of reality, nor is it a historical archive of the past. It is not reproductive but reconstructive: it abstracts, summarizes, schematizes, builds and generalizes from the moment the information is acquired.
As soon as we read or listen to a text, we forget much of the actual words that were used. This is how we distill the essence of the message, the nuclear, the symbolic, the cool. Memory becomes detached from details, becomes abstract, becomes semantic from the very beginning of his work. This is the way in which a healthy and working memory adapts to the demands of a changing environment.
Photographic memory, in the very few cases described by science, can be considered an aberration, due to excess, of memory. Or rather, an aberration of oblivion. Because this, despite its bad press, is as necessary as memory to allow memory to adaptively use information from the past in order to live in the present and anticipate the future.
So now you know: never forget to remember to forget.
Article originally published on The Conversation. Pedro Raúl Montoro Martínez is a tenured professor in the Department of Basic Psychology I at UNED; Antonio Prieto Lara is a PhD assistant professor in the Department of Basic Psychology I of the UNED; and Julia Mayas Arellano is a tenured professor of Basic Psychology at UNED.
