In one of Stieg Larsson’s popular novels, Lisbeth Salander deploys her photographic memory to master a heavy mathematical tome.
The dragon-tattooed Swedish Superwoman breezes through Pythagoras’ equation (x2 + y2 = z2) and centuries of other mathematical challenges to confront the perplexing last theorem of Pierre de Fermat.
Whew!
For most of us non-fictional characters, memory doesn’t work that way.
And you wouldn’t want photographic memory if you read Anthony Greene’s fascinating report in the July/August issue of Scientific American Mind. Greene is a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
“Many people wish their memory worked like a video recording,” Greene says. “How handy would that be? Finding your car keys would simply be a matter of zipping back to the last time you had them and hitting ‘play.’ You would never miss an appointment or forget to pay a bill. You would remember everyone’s birthday. You would ace every exam.”
So you might think.
In fact, living with true photographic recall — known clinically as Eidetic memory — could be like confronting all of the information in cyberspace without the benefit of Google or any other aid for searching, sorting and organizing.
“It would not let you prioritize or create the links between events that give them meaning,” Greene says.
All about connections
During the 20th Century, scientists established that a memory is not at all like a tidy file in an organized cabinet. Instead, memories are dispersed across regions of the brain that are responsible for language, vision, hearing, emotion and other functions.
“Our brain has evolved not just for learning and memory but for the management of relations: past, present and future,” Greene said. “The ability to form and retain connections gives us not just a record of events but also the foundations of comprehension.”
Those management networks are physically supported by neurons as they connect to and communicate with other neurons.
“A small reminder can reactivate a network of neurons wired together in the course of registering an event, allowing you to experience the event anew,” Greene said.
We correctly express this process in certain clichés, he noted: I put two and two together…I connected the dots.
“We make use of these connections thousands of times a day. And knowing how they work is crucial to understanding how we learn,” he said. “Connections progress from simple relations between things to ever more complex cascades of inferences. Links between things, events, people and our actions — so-called item associations — are the reason certain objects evoke reminiscence and become keepsakes.”
So the smell of baking cookies puts me back in my grandmother’s kitchen where lush ivy crawls across painted cabinets and a hand-embroidered towel hangs from the oven handle. An oval-shaped picture shows the sod-roofed summer home in Norway’s fjord country where Grandma lived as a girl. She gossips with my mother in a thick Norwegian accent. I miss both of them.
It’s more than sentimental recall though. Memory forms the web of connections we need for functions like understanding cause and effect, learning from our mistakes and anticipating the future.
Rethinking education
Our present understanding of memory has revolutionary implications for education, Greene said.
“It means that memory is integral to thought and that nothing we learn can stand in isolation; we sustain new learning only to the degree we can relate it to what we already know,” he said. “The modern theory of memory can help us as we organize our experiences, teach our children and support those with learning problems.”
So Larsson’s precocious protagonist was justified in her loathing for the rote learning that early teachers tried to force on her.
Of course, Lisbeth Salander mastered the mechanics of arithmetic with almost no effort. But a multiplication table had little value until she could engage it in a complex web of mathematical rules.
Still, if I were a character in one of Larsson’s novels, I wouldn’t challenge her on that photographic memory thing. She’s tough.
Read Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes the Memorious” for a nice little thought experiment about Eidetic memory.