
Sparking a myth about a man who could not forget - danso
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory
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nathan_f77
The whole article is fascinating, but this part was very surprising:

> Shereshevsky avoided such things as reading the newspaper over breakfast
> because the flavors evoked by the printed words clashed with the taste of
> his meal.

I've heard of synesthesia, but I never knew it could have real-life
consequences like this.

Unrelated: That's the first time I've seen the word "reëxperience" with an
umlaut. Wiktionary has it as an "alternative form" [1]. And I found this
Wikipedia article [2], which says you can use it in other words, like:
coöperative, daïs and reëlect. And apparently it's called a "diaeresis". So
that was interesting to learn. It's also interesting that the New Yorker must
follow a style guide that requires diaereses.

Oh wow, I just found the New Yorker article specifically about their usage of
diaereses. [4]

[1]
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reexperience](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reexperience)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks#Native_English_words)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_\(diacritic\))

[4] [http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-
of-t...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-
diaeresis)

~~~
skrebbel
Worthless trivia time! Diaereses are very popular in the Dutch language,
because the language is full of consecutive vowels, which have a distinct
sound. We're just not trained t guessing where to break syllables without
help. If "cooperative" was a Dutch word and spelled like that, we'd say coo-
perative, get confused, backtrack, oh wait co-operative ahyeah.

For example, "ie" in "fiets" (bike) is pronounced like English "ee". But now
imagine you're a sixteen year old deejay with big ambitions and you want a
name people can remember you by. You come up with "Tiesto" which sounds cool,
but all your friends would pronounce it "Teesto". Ok no biggie, "DJ Tiësto" it
is.

Another public favourite is the plural of sea (zee): zeeën. Leaving the dots,
"zeeen" would make people very nervous - is it "ze-een" (she one) or "zee-en"
(seas)?

------
danmaz74
I read about this case several times; these are the facts that stuck out the
most for me from the long article.

S actually studied to become a professional mnemonist, after leaving
journalism, and learned from circus people how to make his performances more
engaging. He didn't actually have 100% recall: "His uncle, Reynberg said,
could be forgetful. If he didn’t consciously try to commit something to
memory, he didn’t always recall it later."

"Reynberg told me that his uncle trained hours a day for his evening
performances." "Luria doesn’t deny Shereshevsky’s use of mnemonic devices, but
he maintains that these came later, and that they merely complemented
Shereshevsky’s immense natural abilities."

"The strength and durability of his memories seemed to be tied up in his
ability to create elaborate multisensory mental representations and insert
them in imagined story scenes or places; the more vivid this imagery and
story, the more deeply rooted it would become in his memory."

"Instead of burning memories on scraps of paper, Shereshevsky found a
different kind of erasure in his final years, according to his nephew: he
turned to drinking."

