The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (34 page)

We know this not just from brain chemistry and inference, but also because psychologists have stumbled upon a few individuals over the years who actually could not forget enough—and were debilitated by it.

In his
New Yorker
profile, Mark Singer wonders if Martin Scorsese is such a person—burdened by too good a memory. “Was it, I wondered, painful to remember so much? Scorsese’s powers of recall weren’t limited to summoning plot turns or notable scenes or acting performances; his gray matter bulged with camera angles, lighting strategies, scores, sound effects, ambient noises, editing rhythms, production credits, data about lenses and film stocks and exposure speeds and aspect ratios … what about all the sludge? An inability to forget the forgettable—wasn’t that a burden, or was it just part of the price one paid to make great art?”

For some perspective on the inability to forget, consider the case-study that psychologists call S. In the 1920s, S. was a twenty-something newspaper reporter in Moscow who one day got into trouble with his editor for not taking notes at a staff meeting. In the midst of the reprimand, S. shocked his boss by matter-of-factly repeating everything that had been said in the meeting—word for word.

This was apparently no stretch at all for S., who, it emerged upon closer examination, remembered virtually every detail of sight and sound that he had come into contact with in his entire life. What’s more, he took this perfect memory entirely for granted. To him, it seemed perfectly normal that he forgot nothing.

The editor, amazed, sent S. to the distinguished Russian psychologist A. R. Luria for testing. Luria did test him that day, and for many other days over a period of many decades. In all the testing, he could not find any real limit to his capacity to recall details. For example, not only could he perfectly recall tables like this one full of random data after looking at them for just a few minutes—

—and not only could he efficiently recite these tables backwards, upside down, diagonal, etc., but after years of memorizing thousands of such tables, he could easily reproduce any particular one of them, without warning, whether it was an hour after he had first seen it, or twenty years. The man, it seemed, quite literally remembered everything.

And yet he understood almost nothing. S. was plagued by an inability to make meaning out of what he saw. Unless one pointed the obvious pattern out to him, for example, the following table appeared just as bereft of order and meaning as any other:

“If I had been given the letters of the alphabet arranged in a similar order,” he remarked after being questioned about the 1–2– 3–4 table, “I wouldn’t have noticed their arrangement.” He was also unable to make sense out of poetry or prose, to understand much about the law, or even to remember people’s faces. “They’re so changeable,” he complained to Luria. “A person’s expression depends on his mood and on the circumstances under which you happen to meet him. People’s faces are constantly changing; it’s the different shades of expression that confuse me and make it so hard to remember faces.”

Luria also noted that S. came across as generally disorganized, dull-witted and without much of a sense of purpose or direction in life. This astounding man, then, was not so much gifted with the ability to remember everything as he was cursed with the inability to forget detail and form more general impressions. He recorded only information, and was bereft of the essential ability to draw meaning out of events. “Many of us are anxious to find ways to improve our memories,” wrote Luria in a lengthy report on his unusual subject. “In S.’s case, however, precisely the reverse was true. The big question for him, and the most troublesome, was how he could learn to forget.”

What makes details hazy also enables us to prioritize information, recognize and retain patterns. The brain eliminates trees in order to make sense of, and remember, the forests. Forgetting is a hidden virtue. Forgetting is what makes us so smart. (Shenk,
The Forgetting
, p. 59.)

    
In one-hour sessions, three to five sessions per week, researchers read sequences of random numbers to S.F.
at the rate of one digit per second: 2 … 5 … 3 … 5 … 4 … 9 … At intervals, they stopped and asked him to echo their list back. “If the sequence was reported correctly,” the researchers noted, “the next sequence was increased by one digit; otherwise it was decreased by one digit.”

Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon write:

Immediately after half the trials (randomly selected), S.F. provided verbal reports of his thoughts during the trial. At the end of each session, he also recalled as much of the material from the session as he could. On some days,
experiments were substituted for the regular sessions. (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82.)

    
From there, the improvements continued unabated
:
to thirty digits, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, and finally to a staggering eighty-plus digits before the team concluded the experiment.

   The 1980 paper says seventy-nine digits in more than 230 hours, but in fact the experiment continued. In the book
Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition
, they report the higher figures. (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82; Anderson,
Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition
.)

    
Graph of S.F.’s memory-lab sessions
.

Fig. 1. Average digit span for S.F. as a function of practice. Digit span is defined as the length of the sequence that is correct 50 percent of the time; under the procedure followed, it is equivalent to average sequence length. Each day represents about 1 hour’s practice and ranges from 55 trials per day in the beginning to 3 trials per day for the longest sequences. The 38 blocks of practice shown here represent about 190 hours of practice; interspersed among these practice sessions are approximately 40 hours of experimental sessions (not shown). (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82;.)

    
Ericsson and Chase published their results in the prestigious journal
Science
, and their results were subsequently corroborated many times over
.

   In one experimental session, S.F. was switched from digits to letters of the alphabet after three months of practice and exhibited no transfer: his memory span dropped back to about six consonants.

More from that article: “After all this practice, can we conclude that S.F. increased his short-term memory capacity? There are several reasons to think not.” (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82;.)

Google Scholar lists this article as being cited 266 times by other researchers.

    
It was a double lesson
:
when it comes to memory skills, there is no escaping basic human biology—nor any need to. Remembering extraordinary amounts of new information simply requires the right strategies and the right amount of intensive practice, tools theoretically available to any functioning human being.

   We should acknowledge that evidence from other studies demonstrates that people do arrive at studies with different memory capabilities. “The conclusion is clear: the talent for being a memory expert reflects both experiential and individual-difference factors. In this case because of the age association and the extreme robustness of the individual difference finding, the likelihood is high that biology based factors are involved.” (Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda, “Innate talents: reality or myth?” p. 408.)

Relevant studies include:

Anderson, John R.
Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition
. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981.

Baltes, Paul B. “Testing the limits of the ontogenetic sources of talent and excellence.”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
21, no. 3 (June 1998): 407–8.

Kliegl, Smith, and P. B. Baltes. “On the locus and process of magnification of age differences during mnemonic training.”
Developmental Psychology
26 (1990): 894–904.

It is imperative to understand that I am not arguing against the existence of biological factors or biological differences among individuals. From the moment of conception, everyone has differences. But what has become clear is none of us really know what those biological differences are, or what each of our biological limits really are. When observing our lives in progress, we are not witnessing our biological differences, per se. What we witness even in the early stages of our lives is our life differences resulting from the dynamic interaction of both our unique biologies and our unique environments. The chess game is already in progress, and even after move number three we cannot say that the position on the board was caused by one player’s moves.

    
So began Anders Ericsson’s remarkable talent odyssey
.

   The stunning results from S.F.’s short-term memory (and a follow-up subject who did even better) led him to suggest a previously unknown memory mechanism called “long-term working memory” (LT-WM). “Information in LT-WM is stored in stable form,” he and his coauthor W. Kintsch reported, “but reliable access to it may be maintained only temporarily by means of retrieval cues in [short-term memory].” They went on to explain: