The Power to Forget
Mr. Shereshevsky wished he could forget.
The legendary mnemonist went far to get rid of his curse. Some days, he wrote his thoughts on paper and cast them into the fire, wishing the flames would take his memories with them.
He remembered everything, and it was agony.
In strange irony, we do our best to barge into the prison he occupies: we try to remember everything we read.
The market shows it too.
Youtubers choke your feed with weird memory tactics.
Book influencers find "systems for remembering everything."
And school raises this golden bull as the ultimate prize of education, one to be worshipped in the exam hall.
But is it right?
Is it the young bud you want to invest your energy in, or a lifeless twig doomed to break off?
Let's first return to the Russian mnemonist's life to see what he can teach us.
Solomon Shereshevsky was a Soviet journalist, humble and ordinary, but with a secret that only a keen eye could spot -and you can’t dodge keen eyes forever.
During a staff meeting for the Moscow newspaper he worked for, Shereshevsky never bothered to lift a pen and take notes. Not once.
As the others scribbled away, even just to look busy, one editor noticed his rude apathy towards the men in charge. It wasn’t just taboo -it was 1920’s Soviet Union taboo.
After the meeting, the editor took him aside for a scolding, but his anger was quickly washed away by wonder.
I don't take any notes because I don't need to.
What?
How comes?
I remember it all.
The editor was baffled and pressed him for proof, asking Shereshevsky for a summary of what they just sat through.
He recited every shred of detail from the entire meeting, word for word, in perfect accuracy.
But the revelation was only half done. Shereshevsky told his editor he thought nothing of this superpower, believing it was how everybody else's mind ticked away.
And so began a long series of experiments on the journalist, all led by neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who made him the chief subject of his book The Mind of a Mnemonist.
Luria’s probing unveiled the truth: Shereshevsky had an extreme form of synesthesia, which is when the stimulation of one sense triggers a cascade of others to light up.
The most well-known form of this quirk is when you can ‘see’ the color of a letter, number or sound.
A violin’s bow stroke might ‘sound yellow,’ whereas to the next person, it appears as a ‘smoky terracotta’ or an ‘electric blue.’
It’s hard to put into words without feeling it yourself, just like it’s hard for us to describe what red is to someone born without eyes.
But numbers with colors are only the peaceful forest’s edge. Go deeper, and synesthesia gets more disturbing.
For Shereshevsky, touches triggered tastes, sounds excited his nose and even a simple word had a ‘character’ to it, whether loving or malicious.
It’s hard to picture why Shereshevsky saw the number 87 as a ‘fat woman and a man twirling his moustache,’ and who knows what that imaginary couple smelled like . . .
One sense triggered five others, and even the tiniest spark of input cracks open the dam to a whole tsunami of lights, colors, sounds and emotions.
This gave him a near-perfect memory because he could paint these vivid, multi-sense scenes to embed his experiences in, sort of like the ‘memory-palace’ you hear so much about online.
It sounds like a portable LSD trip to you and I, but even that would get old fast.
Not to mention, it has its bad trips too.
One day the journalist went to buy some ice cream, and once he arrived at the shop, he asked the lady at the counter what choices she offered.
‘Fruit ice cream,’ she answered.
Tempting, but Shereshevsky had to escape.
The way she said it, he described, made it feel as if a load of coal piled out of her mouth with a cloud of fiery soot to follow.
He lost his appetite.
Shereshevsky may have been able to recite foreign poems word-to-word, remember decade old conversations and even raise his heart rate at will by imagining himself on the run (it’s true), but the darker side persisted even in his reading.
He recalled struggling to get through text because every word would invite a spring of different senses, all pulling him away from the pages.
His struggle leads us back to the start of this letter: the question of memory.
As a reader, you fend off the curse of forgetting.
To fail to recall what a book was about is a stab in the gut. You stumble and reach for the ideas in your mind, but they slip away at every chance.
It’s like paying weeks of your life to revise for a test that ends up cancelled.
All your work -gone.
Now I’m not going to play the contrarian and use Shereshevsky’s strife to argue that remembering what you read is pointless. It’s not.
In a sense, the first leg of wisdom is memory.
When an author’s story speaks to you, you remember it, and if it truly matters to you, it changes how you see the world.
It steers your decisions, tempers your emotions and shapes the words that glide out of your mouth.
At that point, memory is no challenge.
The book’s knowledge is so deeply integrated into your character, there’s no chance of forgetting anything.
You couldn’t if you tried, just like the aged violinist doesn’t forget his scales even if the fog of dementia cleaves through his mind.
But as with any topic in the wide world of learning, there’s nuance.
Gurus and grifters want you to ‘remember everything,’ speaking to you as if you are foolish enough to take that at face value.
Why everything?
Shereshevsky remembered (virtually) everything, and his intellectual life was an uncomfortable trawl through the mansion of his memories.
You have a superpower he lacked -the ability to forget.
When you trim the fat off a book, you walk away with the ideas that truly matter to you and leave the rest behind.
If you strive to remember everything, the gems will be lost in a sea of comparatively irrelevant facts, figures and events, and you’ll load your shoulders with a pointless burden.
It’s like trying to love everybody the same.
Give flowers to every girl in the neighborhood, and see how your wife feels -it won’t be pretty because the value comes from the contrast.
This isn’t an email about how you can absorb the best ideas from a book, but it is a warning against chasing the shiny jewel of everything.
You can choose to become a walking encyclopedia, or you can choose to forget the fluff and fuse to the ideas that speak to you the loudest.
There you open the door for wisdom.
Take care,
Odysseas
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