Solomon Shereshevsky
Solomon Shereshevsky
Russian reporter (Lurija 1987) profiled at length in How to Take Smart Notes as a famous case in the history of psychology: he could recount entire meetings verbatim from memory and never took notes. Psychologist Aleksandr Luria tested him extensively and found none of the usual memory limits — but the book uses him as a cautionary example: Shereshevsky’s near-total recall came at the cost of being unable to forget, so he struggled to extract the gist of things (like the meaning of Romeo and Juliet) from the flood of particulars, and was often overwhelmed by involuntary associations triggered by ordinary cues. The book’s takeaway is that forgetting via “active inhibition” (cf. MacLeod, 2007) is a needed filter, not just a failure of memory.