The Failure of Neuroscientist Dogmas Is Intensified by HSAM Cases Such as Jill Price

The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be learned and recalled. There has never been found in the brain any component known to be capable of a fast storage of learned information, or storage of learned information at any speed. The protein molecules in brains have a high rate of molecular turnover,  and have an average lifetime of less than two weeks.  There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of less than a tenth of a meter per second. 

 I just found a paper from last year that documents the slow speed of signal transmission in dendrites (which make up more than 90% of brain tissue), with the paper saying that one of the two main transmission types occurs at the sluggish speed of less than a tenth of a meter per second (too slow to explain blazing fast human recall and thinking). I will discuss the paper in a future post. 

Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast thinking and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower.")  The more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human memory performance (as well all cases of exceptional human calculation performance). The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that memory is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability of the best cases of human mental performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to recall too quickly for a noisy address-free brain to do ever do, or humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  

In my post here I discussed the case of Daniel McCartney, a well-documented case of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) from the 19th century. The case was well-documented in the paper "Remarkable Cases of Memory" by W. D. Henkle in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January, 1871), Asked what he knew about dozens of random dates from the past 20 years, McCartney appeared to have the ability to recall the day of the week, the weather and what he was doing on each date. Henkle made transcripts of McCartney's answers, and verified the correctness of the days of week McCartney gave. In a later interview Henkle asked about the same dates. He reports that McCartney's answers were consistent from one interview to the next, but with variations, indicating he was really recalling what he remembered, and not some memorized words. Henkle also verified that McCartney had an astonishing math calculation ability, and was able to do many blazing-fast math calculations such as calculating the cube root of 76,507 in 17 seconds. 

A similar case is documented in the 2006 paper "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering" by Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill and James  L. McCaugh. We read about the astonishing memory skills of a subject AJ, who has since been identified as Jill Price. My references below to Jill appear in the paper as references to AJ. 

We read that Jill says her memory goes back to an event when she was only about 18 to 24 months, and was awoken by a barking dog. We read this:

"She says that from 1980, age 14 onward, her recall became 'automatic'… 'give me the day and I see it. I go back to the day and I just see the day and what I was doing'....She says her personal memories are vivid, like a running movie and full of emotion. As described in the Introduction, AJ told us that her remembering is automatic and not under her conscious control. Her answers were immediate and quick, not deliberate and reflective. Once given a date within her period of strong memory she would, within seconds, produce the day of the week, or what she did on that day, or what event took place on that day. If allowed to talk uninterrupted, AJ would go on at length telling stories about what she did on that day, or something she did before or after that day, such as a trip home from college with a friend, or the restaurant where she ate and with whom."

The paper authors tried asking Jill about what she was doing on dates they randomly selected. She gave the correct day of the week in almost all cases. She also would give detailed recollections on what she was doing on the days asked about. The authors were able to verify the accuracy of the recollections by consulting Jill's diaries. She had written diaries from the age of 10 to age of 34.  We read of this astonishing feat:

"In 2003, we decided to test this by asking her to write down all the Easter dates from 1980 onward. In ten minutes, with no prior warning, she wrote the 24 dates presented in Table 1. All but one date is accurate and it is off by two days. This struck us as particularly impressive in that Easter falls on different days, anywhere between March 22 and April 15, based on the Paschal full moon, and AJ is Jewish."

The feat is all the more remarkable for a Jewish person, given that Jews do not celebrate Easter. We read that two years later she was asked "without forewarning" to reproduce this table, and wrote all of the correct Easter dates for each of the 24 years, producing the results in under ten minutes. In the year 2000 Jill was asked to name the dates she had previously been asked about when she met with the paper authors. She answered "without hesitation" dates of June 24, 2000, July 8, 2000, July 15, 2000, July 23, 2000 and August 19, 2000, which were all correct. 

Below are answers Jill given when asked to identify the dates that particular things happened, and when asked to identify what happened on particular dates. The answers all seem to be correct, except that the date of October 5, 1983 was the date Lech Walesa won the Nobel Prize, not the date of the bombing in Beirut, which was October 25, 1983; and the date of the Atlanta bombing in 1996 was July 27 rather than July 26. 

Although having an enormously powerful memory for what happened to herself and others during the past twenty years, Jill's performance on short-term memory tests were normal.  Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. Asked to memorize the table of random numbers below, Shereshevsky reproduced the table perfectly, in 40 seconds, after only three minutes of studying it. 

On this test Jill performed very poorly, as bad as you or 1 would do. She also performed poorly when asked to recall the hard-to-recall short story "The War of the Ghosts." As discussed in the appendix of this post, a Latvian memory marvel called VP had remarkably good recall of the story an hour after reading it, and also six weeks after reading, even though he was not told he would be asked to recall it a second time. 

The paper here is a 2022 paper entitled "Individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory do not show enhanced creative thinking." The paper gives us this description of the memory tests given to 14 subjects with  Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), and also twenty-eight normal control subjects:

"We assessed participants’ ability to recollect public and personal past events using the Public Event Quiz and the Random Dates Quiz (LePort et al., 2012). The Public Events Quiz consisted of thirty questions, based on public events selected from five categories: sporting events, political events, notable negative events, events concerning famous people and holidays. For fifteen of these questions, participants were asked to retrieve the date of a given significant public (national or international) event (e.g., 'Please give the day of the week and precise date with day, month and year of when Federica Pellegrini, the famous Italian swimmer, won the gold medal at the Olympic game in Beijing'); the remaining fifteen questions requested participants to associate a given date with a highly significant public event (e.g., 'What happened on the 25th of June 2009?'). All questions concerned events that took place when the participants were at least 8 years old. For each question, individuals were asked to name the day of the week on which the date fell. One point was awarded for each correct response (i.e., the event, the day of the week, the month, the date and the year); the maximum total score was 88 points. The Random Dates Quiz consisted of ten computer-generated random dates, ranging from the individuals’ age of fifteen to five years before the testing. Individuals were asked to provide three details for each date: (1) the day of the week; (2) a description of a verifiable event (i.e., any event that could be confirmed via a search engine) that occurred within a few days before and after the generated date; (3) a description of a personal autobiographical event. One point each was awarded for the correct day of the week, a correct public event, and unverified personal autobiographical memory. A maximum of three points per date could be achieved (30 points total)." 

The results were spectacular.  The 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored more than 25 times higher on the Random Dates test, scoring an average of 68.57% of the maximum possible.  The control subjects scored an average of merely 2.62% of the maximum possible on the Random Dates test. On the Public Events test, the 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored more than 5 times higher, scoring an average of 58.20% of the maximum possible. The control subjects scored an average of merely 10.39% of the maximum possible on the Public Events test. The best-performing of the 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored 96.67% of the maximum possible, an almost perfect score. 

Such results of stunning memory recall ability are very impressive, but they are "icing on the cake" in terms of showing memory performance beyond what brains could ever do. The instant recall performance of ordinary people is enough to show ability far beyond what a brain could ever do. Every time someone asks you some obscure question such as "who was Brutus" and you instantly answer correctly, you are showing performance utterly beyond what a brain without addresses and indexes could ever do.  We do not recall at the speed of brains. We recall at the speed of souls. 

Appendix:  In the 1972 book "Coding Processes in Human Memory" we have a  chapter entitled "How Good Can Human Memory Be?" written by Earl Hunt and Tom Love of Washington University.  Registered users at www.archive.org can read the whole chapter using the link here. The authors start telling us about a subject they studied who they call VP. We are told VP was born in Latvia in 1935, and that by the age of five he had memorized the street map of Riga, a city of 500,000.  We are told he could play up to 60 games of chess simultaneously by correspondence, without consulting written records. 

The authors did tests on VP. The most impressive result is the result shown below, in which VP manages to recall a short story almost verbatim an hour after reading it twice, and also six weeks later, even though he had not been told he would be tested on the story a second time. 

At the end of the chapter, we are given the text of the story, VP's first recollection of it, and the recollection six weeks later. The story is about 350 words long. Here is one example of how good the recollection was. The story begins, "One night two young men from Eugulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they

were there it became foggy and calm." An hour later VP recalls all words of this sentence in correct order, missing only the "and." Six weeks later VP recalled the same sentence exactly as well as he did the first time. 

Later I will have to write a post entitled "The Failure of Neuroscientist Dogmas Is Intensified by a Case Such as John von Neumann." The case is one offering almost endless examples of someone thinking faster than a brain could ever do. Here is just one quote from the wikipedia.org article on von Neumann, a quote by Herman Goldstine:

"One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how A Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."

Newspaper Accounts of Memory Marvels (Part 5)

The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be recalled. There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast thinking and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower.")  The more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human memory performance. The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that memory is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability of the best cases of human mental performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to recall too quickly for a noisy address-free brain to do ever do, or humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  In part 1  and part 2 and part 3 and part 4 of this series, I gave many newspaper clips giving examples of such exceptional human memory performance. Let us now look at some more of such newspaper clips. 

In the news account you can read here, we read of individuals who had memorized the entire Babylonian Talmud, a work of 12 or more volumes, totaling 5422 pages. We read this:

"Some years ago, through the kindness of my friend Professor Hollander, of the Johns Hopkins University , my attention was directed to an achievement, memorizing in which 1 venture to report; since, so far as I know, it has remained unnoticed by psychologists, and yet should be stored among the data long and still richly gathering for the study of extraordinary feats of memory. The facts of the case I can hardly do better than to allow the witnesses themselves to state. And first, Rev. Dr. David Philipson of Cincinnati to whom I was first referred by Professor Hollander. 

'The Babylonian Talmud,'  he has been good enough to write me, 'consists usually of twelve large folio volumes comprising thousands of pages. All the printed editions of the Talmud with scarcely an exception, have exactly the same number of pages and the same words on each page. This must be borne in mind in order to understand the remarkable feat of memory about to be described. There have been as there undoubtedly still are, men who know the whole text of the Talmud by heart. Some years ago one of these men, a native of Poland, was in this country. I witnessed his remarkable feats of memory. Thus, one of us would throw open one of the volumes of the Talmud, say the tractate Berakhot, at page 10; a pin would be placed on a word, let us say the fourth word in line eight; the memory sharp would then be asked what word is in the same spot on page 38 or 50 or any other page. The pin would be pressed through the volume until it reached the page designated; the memory sharp would then mention the word, and it was found invariably correct. He had visualized in bis brain the whole Talmud; in other words, the pages of the Talmud were photographed on his brain. It was one of the most stupendous feats of memory I have ever witnessed, and there was no fake about it. To the company gathered about the table were a number of Talmudic experts, who would readily have discovered fraud had there been any. The technical name which was used by Jews of aforetimes to designate these memory experts was Shass Pollak; Shass is the abbreviation for the Hebrew terms for the Talmud, and Pollak is Pole; nearly all these memory experts came from Poland. A Shass Pollak then is a Pole who has memorized the entire contents of the Talmud and is able to give exhibitions of his mnemonic powers like those mentioned above.'  

And next let me quote from Judge Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, who in answer to my inquiry wrote as follows: 'I have met but one "Shass Pollak" in my life. He was brought into my library one evening by a friend. I conversed with him and experimented upon him. After he had been introduced as the expert in question, I expressed some curiosity, with perhaps a mein of incredulity. He was eager for the fray. 'You are of course aware that all (or nearly all) modern editions of the Talmud are paged alike and printed alike, each page beginning and ending with the same word in all the editions.' ...He would take a pencil and merely glancing at the page put it down anywhere and without looking told the word on which his pencil had lighted. This he did over and over again. There is no reasonable ground for the suspicion that he saw the words. 1 watched him closely, and am convinced that he did not. He had, I feel sure, a perfect image of the page and the position of every word on it in his "head." '

Finally let me give the testimony of Dr. Schechter of New York, late president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America —testimony the more interesting in that while it depends upon the recollection of an experience of many years ago, yet it is an independent account of the same kind of testing which Dr. Philipson reports — namely, by pricking through the pages —and consequently confirms the opinion of Judge Sulzberger that the success of the 'Shass Pollak' who was tested merely by pencil was not due to a sly catching of the word by the eye. President Schechter stated to me by letter that once he had come across a 'Shass Pollak,' but that it was too long a time ago to give an account of him with definiteness. 'It is at least forty-five years since the incident occurred,' he wrote. 'What I remember was that he could tell you the contents of every page of the Talmud by heart. 1 remember also that the people amused themselves by prying a needle into any volume of the Talmud, and he could tell exactly the word on which the needle touched. But I also recollect distinctly that it was nothing more than a verbal or rather local memory, the students all maintaining that he knew very little about the meaning of the contents, their interpretation and application. I heard afterwards of many similar "Shass Pollaks"  but it is a fact that none of them ever attained to prominence in the scholarly world.'  This absence of any scholarly grasp of the contents thus memorized, of which Dr. Schechter speaks, also appears in the judgment of Dr. Philipson. 'I looked upon his achievement at the time I witnessed it as purely mechanical,'  he writes. 'It is quite likely that he could not interpret the Talmud, though he knew its contents by  "heart.” ' 

And Judge Sulzberger, when proposing to his 'Shass Pollak'  that he use his knowledge to some scientific or literary end, was listened to with respect, but nevertheless received the impression that such proposals were deemed by his man to be nonsensical. All of which confirms the oft-repeated observation, that such extraordinary powers of memory may exist in a kind of intellectual disproportion where there is no corresponding development of other powers—where, indeed, there may be an actual stunting of other powers and interests; as though the mind had 'run' to memory, and been enlarged hero at the expense of other functions. As to the more precise amount of Matter that was memorized, it should be noted that a page of the Babylonian Talmud consists, as my colleague, Dr. Popper, has pointed out to me  of the text proper, called the Gemarrah,  printed as a more central portion on the page, and of a commentary printed below and around this text. Upon special inquiry whether the mnemonic feat applied only to the Gemarrah, or included also the commentary, Dr. Philipson states that the test which he witnessed was upon the Gemarrah only; and Judge Sulzberger was of the opinion that this was also true in the case that came under his observation. Even so, the task must have been a stupendous one; the reading matter upon each page is still great, and the number of pages is enormous.

Geo. M. Stratton, University of California, in the 'Psychological Review.'  Professor Popper has also referred me to the articles 'Talmud' and 'Mnemonics' in the Jewish Encyclopedia for evidence that at one period the Talmud was handed down solely by memory. The feat of the Poles here recounted may’ therefore be regarded perhaps as the survival of a custom among early Jewish students in many and widely-separated communities." 

The Babylonian Talmud is shown in the image below. We see a set of about 20 volumes:

Source: Wikipedia Commons (link)

An English translation of the Babylonian Talmud may be found on www.archive.org. Borrowing some of that translation, I see an alternating between passages that are marked Mishnah and passages marked Gemara (which must be the Gemarrah mentioned above). For example, here is a random page:

We can assume that an average page of the Babylonian Talmud had at least about 100 words in its Gemarrah or Gemara part. Judging from the photo above of the set comprising about 20 volumes each looking like they were at least 200 pages long, the Bablyonian Talmud had a total of roughly 4000 pages, with its Gemarrah or Gemara part consisting of roughly 400,000 words. 

The claim that is made in the newspaper article above is not an unprecedented claim of memory performance. In the newspaper story here, we read of a 90-day scripture memorization contest. We read this about the winner:

"On the day of the award it was found that among the older competitors the winner was Miss Leste May Williams, a young woman 16 years of age. With these ninety days, during which she had an attack of measles, she committed to memory and recited to the committee 12,236 verses of Scripture, covering the entire New Testament ...and including liberal selections from Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and other parts of the Old Testament."

The New Testament has about 180,000 words, and the average verse in the Bible has about 25 words. So it seems that when  Leste May Williams memorized 12,236 verses of the Bible, she had memorized a total of about 300,000 words.  That is a feat of memorization almost as remarkable as memorizing the entire  Gemarrah or Gemara part of the Babylonian Talmud, which I estimate as requiring the memorization of roughly 400,000 words.