Rick Stevens writes: >Neisser's *Memory Observed* has a selection from >Luria's book and a bit on a mnemonist who had a >different, but amazingly good, memory. It makes >an interesting contrast since the second mnemonist >seems to have come to his abilities through (uggh!) >practice and hard work, not some genetic abnormality.
The introductory paragraph to the chapter in question (by Earl Hunt and Tom Love) says that the subject VP's "performance on tests of memory seem to be as good as S's" (S being Luria's subject). But this is belied by a comparison of the results obtained in the two cases. For instance, the authors report that using Hebb's test of short-term memory and learning capacity, VP recalled correctly 18 percent of nonrepeating strings of 25 digits and 63% percent of repeating strings. This is greatly superior to the test results of controls, and justify the authors conclusion from all their tests that they were "dealing with a man with a superior memory". But S's memory feats (including recalling on such tests with one hundred percent accuracy many years late) were in a totally different category (and, of course, were for the most part completely spontaneous – he couldn't not remember just about everything that happened in his life). I haven't looked closely at the people in the documentary cited by Stephen, but again their memory feats (without any deliberate efforts to memorise) seem to be of a different order to VP's: http://tinyurl.com/2594p8z In VP's case he was able to train himself to recall things that produced results far superior to controls. In the case of S, his ability for recall was nothing short of phenomenal, far beyond anything recorded in the chapter by Hunt and Earl. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org ------------------------------------------ Re: [tips] Minds of Mnemonists Rick Stevens Sun, 02 Jan 2011 07:34:24 -0800 I often read some of the descriptions of synesthesia (to pure tones) from the *Mind of the Mnemonist *in class. Neisser's *Memory Observed* has a selection from Luria's book and a bit on a mnemonist who had a different, but amazingly good, memory. It makes an interesting contrast since the second mnemonist seems to have come to his abilities through (uggh!) practice and hard work, not some genetic abnormality. Rick Stevens Psychology Department University of Louisiana at Monroe stevens.r...@gmail.com SL - Evert Snook --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7602 or send a blank email to leave-7602-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
