A Russian newspaper reporter who was known for his unusually severe cases of
eidetic memory (
photographic memory) and
synesthesia. Solomon remembered damn near everything that ever happened to him in his entire life, even his mother's face as she stood over him in his crib as an
infant. He could remember a passing car's
license plate number from twenty years past. He was able to
memorize lists of 70 numbers after being read them once, then repeat them forwards and backwards. And he could
remember the same list of numbers without
flaw upwards of fifteen years after first hearing them.
Along with never forgetting anything ever, Shereshevskii experienced extremely
strong synesthesia (intermingled
sensory perception. see
synesthesia for more info on it.) For instance, if a doorbell rang, he wouldn't just 'hear' it. He wouldn't even 'hear' and 'feel' it. He would
hear,
see,
taste,
feel and
smell the doorbell. Anything that he experienced was not only stamped in his mind for good, it was stuck there with a connection to all five of his
senses.
For S (Solomon) this meant that one voice sounded "crumbly and yellow," another like "a flame with fibers protruding from it." He refused to buy ice cream from a woman whose voice made him see "black cinders bursting out of her mouth." - ABC's of the Human Mind
Needless to say, all of this
uncontrollable and
vivid sensory input coupled with the
inability for the memory of it to fade got to be overwhelmingly
confusing. Solomon tried out several different
methods of making his memories less
invasive. One method was to write down all the things that he no longer wanted to remember and then
burn up the paper he'd written them on. Another was to
imagine covering up all the memories he didn't want with a blank
canvas in his mind. He was eventually able to
will some of his memory away, but not much.
Shereshevskii eventually quit his reporting gig and bounced around from job to job for a while. He ended up becoming a professional
mnemonist, wowing folks with neat memory tricks and
getting paid for it.
A
Psychologist,
Alexander R. Luria, wrote an in-depth study of Shereshevskii spanning a period of about thirty years. Published in 1968, it's called
The Mind of a Mnemonist.