Pliny considers it a blessing to possess an extraordinary memory. In fact, he starts chapter 24 of book VII saying:
“Memoria necessarium maxime vitae bonum cui praecipua fuerit, haut facile dictu est, tam multis eius gloriam adeptis [As to memory, the boon most necessary for life, it is not easy to say who most excelled in it, so many men having gained renown for it].”7
Pliny also describes the fragility of memory, arguing that it can be lost, in whole or in part, due to illness, injury, and even panic. As an example he tells the story of a man who lost the capacity to name letters after being struck by a stone, and of another who forgot certain people after falling from a roof. He also mentions Messala Corvinus, the orator, who lost recollection of even his own name.
Borges, it is known, was fascinated by encyclopedias and by the Naturalis historia8 ( perhaps the first encyclopedia in history), which in fact he mentions in “Funes the Memorious”: Funes asks the narrator (Borges) for any Latin text, and Borges obliges with volume VII of Pliny’s encyclopedia and Quicherat’s Thesaurus, just so the rube will be rudely disappointed upon finding out that one cannot learn such a complicated language using only a book and a dictionary. On their next meeting, however, Funes welcomes Borges by reciting, mockingly, in perfect Latin: “ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum” (which, literally translated, means: “Nothing that has been heard can be repeated with the same words”).9
Through Funes, Borges, just like Pliny, enters the realm of memory, though his reaction differs from the Roman’s in a crucial regard: while Pliny considers it a virtue to have a prodigious capacity to remember, Borges looks beyond and argues that an extraordinary memory can become a curse. Says Funes, midway through the story:
Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo. . . . Mi memoria, señor, es como un vaciadero de basura.
[I alone have more memories than all men may have ever had since the world exists. . . . My memory, sir, is like a rubbish heap.]
Given their historical significance, Pliny’s stories are of undeniable value. It is, nonetheless, impossible to judge their veracity, and in fact the characters described in the Naturalis historia seem more legendary than real (perhaps arousing Borges’s curiosity even more). To a large extent this is due to the fact that many of Pliny’s descriptions are based on word-of-mouth information, inevitably altered in the telling. For example, when he describes cases of astonishing eyesight in chapter 21 of book VII, Pliny writes that Homer’s Iliad was written in such small script that the complete manuscript could fit in a nutshell; he also mentions a man called Strabo, who could recognize objects 135 miles away and who, during the Punic Wars, could sight and even count the enemy ships docked in Carthage from a promontory in Sicily.
The first properly documented case of extraordinary memory is that of Solomon Shereshevskii, studied by the celebrated Russian psychologist Alexander Luria starting in the 1920s. As Luria reports in his book The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, subject S. (as he refers to Shereshevskii to protect his name), unlike everyone else, had to make an effort if he wished to forget something. As we shall see in the following chapters, Shereshevskii possessed a very strong synesthesia—an involuntary link between different senses, like associating numbers with colors— that gave his memories a much richer content and thus made them easier to recollect. These associations, as well as the use of simple mnemonics, allowed Shereshevskii to remember long sequences of numbers and letters many years after first hearing them. After studying Shereshevskii for more than 30 years, Luria confessed his inability to find a limit to S.’s memory, a surprising statement considering that it comes not from an amateur but from one of the foremost psychologists of his time.
Alexander Luria (1902–1977), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and William James (1842–1910).