Sparking a myth about a man who could not forget | Hacker News Reader

Sparking a myth about a man who could not forget

newyorker.com

78 pointsdanso7 comments

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

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

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

> The grave accent and the diaeresis are the only diacritics native to Modern English (apart from diacritics used in loanwords, such as the acute accent, the cedilla, or the tilde). The use of both, however, is considered to be largely archaic.

There is a documentary called 'Derek Tastes of Earwax' which is about synesthesia, where the main person in the documentary tastes words. He says during it that he finds it difficult to cook food and listen to people talk, because all the different signals become too much, and he needs to leave the room.

To your point about the diaeresis: The New Yorker does it in every instance where two same vowels are disconnected in pronunciation. Quite consistently, as far as I know.

Raymond Chen [1] does, too.

[1] See how he writes "coöperation" e.g. here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130607-00/?p=... -- I always wondered whether that meant that he read the New Yorker.

For some reason, diaeresis is very common in research papers, at least in papers on computer science and 3D rendering.

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)?

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."

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