The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ by David Shenk Page B
Authors: David Shenk
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This is my mom’s cell phone number. Call her, tell her how much you like the book so far. Believe me, she won’t mind.
While our long-term memory capacity is apparently limitless, new memories are almost pathetically fragile : the average healthy adult can reliably juxtapose only three or four new, unrelated items. Such a limit, noted Ericsson and Chase, “places severe constraints on the human ability to process information and solve problems.”
Seven items are remembered correctly 50 percent of the time. (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82.)
Excerpt from my earlier book The Forgetting , on the importance of a limited memory:
Why? Why would millions of years of evolution produce a machine so otherwise sophisticated but with an apparent built-in fuzziness, a tendency to regularly forget, repress and distort information and experience?
The answer, it turns out, is that fuzziness is not a severe limitation but a highly advanced feature. As a matter of engineering, the brain does not have any physical limitations in the amount of information it can hold. It is designed specifically to forget most of the details it comes across, so that it may allow us to form general impressions, and from there useful judgments. Forgetting is not a failure at all, but an active metabolic process, a flushing out of data in the pursuit of knowledge and meaning.
We know this not just from brain chemistry and inference, but also because psychologists have stumbled upon a few individuals over the years who actually could not forget enough—and were debilitated by it.
In his New Yorker profile, Mark Singer wonders if Martin Scorsese is such a person—burdened by too good a memory. “Was it, I wondered, painful to remember so much? Scorsese’s powers of recall weren’t limited to summoning plot turns or notable scenes or acting performances; his gray matter bulged with camera angles, lighting strategies, scores, sound effects, ambient noises, editing rhythms, production credits, data about lenses and film stocks and exposure speeds and aspect ratios … what about all the sludge? An inability to forget the forgettable—wasn’t that a burden, or was it just part of the price one paid to make great art?”
For some perspective on the inability to forget, consider the case-study that psychologists call S. In the 1920s, S. was a twenty-something newspaper reporter in Moscow who one day got into trouble with his editor for not taking notes at a staff meeting. In the midst of the reprimand, S. shocked his boss by matter-of-factly repeating everything that had been said in the meeting—word for word.
This was apparently no stretch at all for S., who, it emerged upon closer examination, remembered virtually every detail of sight and sound that he had come into contact with in his entire life. What’s more, he took this perfect memory entirely for granted. To him, it seemed perfectly normal that he forgot nothing.
The editor, amazed, sent S. to the distinguished Russian psychologist A. R. Luria for testing. Luria did test him that day, and for many other days over a period of many decades. In all the testing, he could not find any real limit to his capacity to recall details. For example, not only could he perfectly recall tables like this one full of random data after looking at them for just a few minutes—
—and not only could he efficiently recite these tables backwards, upside down, diagonal, etc., but after years of memorizing thousands of such tables, he could easily reproduce any particular one of them, without warning, whether it was an hour after he had first seen it, or twenty years. The man, it seemed, quite literally remembered everything.
And yet he understood almost nothing. S. was plagued by an inability to make meaning out of what he saw. Unless one pointed the obvious pattern out to him, for example, the following table appeared just as
This is my mom’s cell phone number. Call her, tell her how much you like the book so far. Believe me, she won’t mind.
While our long-term memory capacity is apparently limitless, new memories are almost pathetically fragile : the average healthy adult can reliably juxtapose only three or four new, unrelated items. Such a limit, noted Ericsson and Chase, “places severe constraints on the human ability to process information and solve problems.”
Seven items are remembered correctly 50 percent of the time. (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82.)
Excerpt from my earlier book The Forgetting , on the importance of a limited memory:
Why? Why would millions of years of evolution produce a machine so otherwise sophisticated but with an apparent built-in fuzziness, a tendency to regularly forget, repress and distort information and experience?
The answer, it turns out, is that fuzziness is not a severe limitation but a highly advanced feature. As a matter of engineering, the brain does not have any physical limitations in the amount of information it can hold. It is designed specifically to forget most of the details it comes across, so that it may allow us to form general impressions, and from there useful judgments. Forgetting is not a failure at all, but an active metabolic process, a flushing out of data in the pursuit of knowledge and meaning.
We know this not just from brain chemistry and inference, but also because psychologists have stumbled upon a few individuals over the years who actually could not forget enough—and were debilitated by it.
In his New Yorker profile, Mark Singer wonders if Martin Scorsese is such a person—burdened by too good a memory. “Was it, I wondered, painful to remember so much? Scorsese’s powers of recall weren’t limited to summoning plot turns or notable scenes or acting performances; his gray matter bulged with camera angles, lighting strategies, scores, sound effects, ambient noises, editing rhythms, production credits, data about lenses and film stocks and exposure speeds and aspect ratios … what about all the sludge? An inability to forget the forgettable—wasn’t that a burden, or was it just part of the price one paid to make great art?”
For some perspective on the inability to forget, consider the case-study that psychologists call S. In the 1920s, S. was a twenty-something newspaper reporter in Moscow who one day got into trouble with his editor for not taking notes at a staff meeting. In the midst of the reprimand, S. shocked his boss by matter-of-factly repeating everything that had been said in the meeting—word for word.
This was apparently no stretch at all for S., who, it emerged upon closer examination, remembered virtually every detail of sight and sound that he had come into contact with in his entire life. What’s more, he took this perfect memory entirely for granted. To him, it seemed perfectly normal that he forgot nothing.
The editor, amazed, sent S. to the distinguished Russian psychologist A. R. Luria for testing. Luria did test him that day, and for many other days over a period of many decades. In all the testing, he could not find any real limit to his capacity to recall details. For example, not only could he perfectly recall tables like this one full of random data after looking at them for just a few minutes—
—and not only could he efficiently recite these tables backwards, upside down, diagonal, etc., but after years of memorizing thousands of such tables, he could easily reproduce any particular one of them, without warning, whether it was an hour after he had first seen it, or twenty years. The man, it seemed, quite literally remembered everything.
And yet he understood almost nothing. S. was plagued by an inability to make meaning out of what he saw. Unless one pointed the obvious pattern out to him, for example, the following table appeared just as
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