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. 

Their Memory Performance Far Exceeded What a Brain Could Ever Do

We do not know that brains remember anything; we simply know that people remember things. 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, and the length of time things can be remembered. There has never been found in the brain any component known to be capable of a fast storage or retrieval of learned information, or the storage or retrieval of learned information at any speed. The protein molecules that brains are built from 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 only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  

Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast learning and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that learning, memorization and 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). Attached to unstable dendritic spines that do not last for years, 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.")  So 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), and the more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very voluminous learning and memorization, the  stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall and memory formation occur from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and very carefully study and ponder 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 and throughput of the best cases of human memory 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, and the more cases of humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do, and the more cases of humans that seem to learn at a speed, reliability and capacity too fast and accurate for a noisy, relatively slow and transmission-unreliable brain to do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  

A case of exceptional memory performance is well documented in the book "The mind of a mnemonist : a little book about a vast memory" by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. You can read the book on www.archive.org using the link here. The book describes a subject it calls S, a subject now known to be Solomon Shereshevsky. A scientific paper says this about the book:

"According to Luria, Shereshevsky could 'easily remember any number of words and digits' and 'equally easily he memorizes whole pages from books on any subject and in any language.'  He could accurately quote information from a decade earlier, including tables of numbers and strings of nonsense words....What Luria learned was that Shereshevsky’s memory differed from that of the vast majority of individuals; time did not erode his memories. Neither did a new stimulus affect his memory of an earlier one."

On page 17 of Luria' s book we are told that when 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 page 20 we are told that after Shereshevsky viewed a stimulus a certain length of time, he could continue to see the thing vividly in his mind's eye. We read, "He told us that he continued to see the table which had been written on a blackboard or a sheet of paper, that he merely had to 'read it off,' successfully enumerating the numbers or letters it contained." Around page 23 we are told that  Shereshevsky had to some degree synesthesia.  When tested with electronic sounds, he reported that they would produce some type of visual stimulus. On page 24 we are told, "Every sound he heard immediately produced an experience of light and color and, as we shall see later in this account, a sense of taste and touch as well."

On page 51 we are told that in 1936 Shereshevsky was asked to memorize a hard-to-remember table that started out like this, and had at least two additional rows like the rows below. 

We are told that he reproduced the table correctly, and that four years later he was asked to describe how he did it. Shereshevsky was able to describe in exact detail his memorization technique, and while doing so reproduced all the rows shown above, and two additional rows. On page 57 we are told this:

"On April 6, 1944, eight years after obtaining this record

from him, I had occasion to ask S. to repeat this performance (once again without giving him prior warning). He had no difficulty

whatsoever and came through with a faultless reproduction."

Here is an excerpt from page 61, in which the author talks about the astonishing lack of fading over time in Shereshevsky's memory:

On page 69 we read that  Shereshevsky scorned the idea of writing down things on paper in order to remember them, saying that if you did that, you would tend to forget what was written down. 

On page 139 we are told that Shereshevsky demonstrated that he could will his pulse rate to increase from 70 to 100. When asked how he could do this, he replied that he simply visualized himself running to catch a departing train. 

Recently the Cornell physics paper server included a paper by neuroscientist Bastian Wiederhold, one entitled "An introduction to memory competitions, records and techniques," one you can read here. Below are some quotations from the paper, quotations that may shock very greatly those who have failed to study cases of human best memory performances. 

• "The best competitors manage to memorize a one-hundred-digit number in under 15 seconds."
• "The record for memorizing the sequence of cards in shuffled deck of 52 playing cards was two minutes in 1993 and is now 12.74 seconds by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh set in 2018."
• "Nowadays, tens of thousands of digits are being recalled in π competitions. Modern records include memorizing 35 packs of cards or an over 3000-digit decimal number in one hour, a sequence of 145 words in 5 min, the names of a class of 30 students in under 30 s, a shuffled deck of 52 playing cards in around 12 s or a 50-digit binary number in one second."
• "But didn’t Daniel Tammet memorize 22514 digits of π? Recently, Susanne Hippauf, a policewoman, broke the German record with 18026 digits."
• "For example, in auditive digits, the objective is to memorize a sequence of decimal digits, read aloud at one digit/s [1 digit per second]. The score is the number of digits counted until the first error. The current world record of Lance Tschirhart is 456, over seven minutes of perfect memorization."
• "We tried to estimate the memorization time of the π-record using the function R(t). The π world record of Suresh Kamar Sharma stands at an impressive 70030 digits, a multiple of around 20.5 of the hour world record of 3412."
• "The speed of historic dates [is] the fastest among the five-minute disciplines (Figure 1). The objective is to memorize the year between 1000 and 2100 of fictional events (Appendix B). After memorization, the events are scrambled and competitors recall the respective years of the events. The current world record is 148 by Prateek Yadav." This presumably involved the correct memorization of the years of 148 fictional events, all within a five minute period. 

Listing these feats, our neuroscientist has no neuroscience hypothesis to offer to explain how people could memorize so quickly.  When neuroscientists attempt to explain learning and memory formation, they discuss processes that occur at a very sluggish rate, processes such as synapse strengthening and protein synthesis. Such explanation attempts are very lame and inadequate. When human memory performance is fastest, humans do not learn and recall at the speed of brains, but instead learn and recall at the speed of souls. 

Newspaper Accounts of Memory Marvels (Part 4)

 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 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. 

The 1906 account below is one that is rather hard-to-believe, as it is a claim that a man memorized the entire Bible.

You can read the claim on the newspaper page here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026843/1906-08-24/ed-1/seq-5/

It is well known that quite a few Muslim scholars memorized the entire Quran, a work of 6236 verses. In the newspaper story here, we read of a 90-day scripture memorization contest; and we have the claim that the winner memorized the entire New Testament (a work of 7,957 verses) and also a good deal of the Old Testament: 

"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 length of memorization claimed above (roughly 10,000 verses) is in the same league as the claim made in a scientific paper that between age 59 and age 67 a person memorized all 10,565 lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, recalling the entire work over a three-day period. But the total number of verses in the Bible is about 31,102.  So a person memorizing the entire Bible would seem to display an unprecedented human ability of memorization, in terms of the total length. 

The 1923 news story here in the Washington Times claimed that  H. H. Halley had memorized the entire New Testament. The 1926 newspaper account here claims that H. H. Halley of Chicago, USA memorized the entire Bible. The same paper (the Indianapolis Times) had made the same claim in the 1925 newspaper account here. 

In the 1888 newspaper article here, we read of a Rev. Nathan Smith here, and it claimed that he had memorized the entire Bible. We are told he can name the verse, chapter and book of any Bible quotation. 

The newspaper page here has in its "Lived Under All Presidents" article a claim that an old woman named Elizabeth Freeman "memorized nearly the entire Bible."

The newspaper account below appeared in 1925.

"Germans believe that a member of the staff of the Prussian State library has the finest memory in the world. He has specialized in weather reports and from memory he can describe the weather of any day from 1881 up to the present time. His wonderful memory recently was tested by the Berlin Meteorological society and he came through with flying colors. Colonel Charratle of England once memorized the entire Issue of a newspaper on a wager; a stoker memorized Haydn’s  'Dictionary of Dates,' and Lord Randolph Churchill, also of England, was able to repeat a page of print after a single reading."

You can read the account on the page below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83032307/1925-08-27/ed-1/seq-5/

The account above refers to a perfect recall of weather reports over a period of 44 years (1881 to 1925), involving about 16,000 days. If we assume that each weather report would require on average a number of words equal to a single verse, the claim above is roughly equivalent to a claim that a man memorized  a body of material about as long as 16,000 verses.

Below are some accounts of extraordinary memory powers held long ago, from the newspaper account here:

The newspaper account claims that Thomas Cranmer memorized an entire translation of the Bible, and that Lord Granville memorized the entire New Testament. We also have a claim that a Corsican could repeat in order 36,000 names, and could also repeat the names in reverse order. 

In the newspaper account below, from the page here, we have a claim that a man memorized a catalog of more than 1,100 pages, and that he demonstrated his memorization of the catalog:

In the 1963 newspaper account here, we read of a man who every week would memorize the entire Saturday Evening Post, a magazine that at that time would have very many pages in each edition, with a page typically consisting of three of four columns of small print adding up to more than 700 words per page.

In the newspaper account here, we read of an opera singer with an astonishing memory: 

"Julia Rosewald, the prima donna with the Abbott opera company, has, perhaps, the most astonishing memory on the lyric stage. Her repertoire consists of sixty-eight operas, in nine of which she sings double roles. Besides this marvelous selection she adds ten oratorios, and what is more wonderful still, she memorizes the entire work and will instantly detect the slightest error in harmony or instrumentation. The rapidity with which she studies is almost incredible. On one occasion, to save the company, she studied an entirely new role in twenty-four consecutive hours, and without rest appeared in the part without an error. This is vouched for by the conductor, Tomasi, and the entire company."

Derek Paravicini was born 25 weeks early, with severe brain damage, but he has reliably demonstrated countless times the ability to very accurately play back on a keyboard any song that is played to him, note for note, even if he has never heard the song before. In the newspaper account below, which can be read here, the claim is made that such an ability was demonstrated repeatedly by an entire orchestra, which could play from memory some newly written march it had only heard once.. We read this:

"Practically all Latin Americans possess, in marked degree, what is known as ‘musical memory'....This ability to memorize has been exemplified on many occasions in San Antonio, Tex., when the visiting Mexican band has been asked to ‘stand by’ while the latest march from the United States is being played by the American band. With all standing at attention, the Mexican bandsmen have waited until the finish of the first strain and then came the marvelous test; the playing of this number in harmony by the entire group. Audiences have been astounded at this exhibition and some in the audience have expressed the thought that ‘there was some trick in it.’ That is absolutely true, for there is a trick, but it has taken thousands of years to produce it, and it is in the form of this musical memory . .. Leaders of the great orchestras in Latin America, with but little effort, are able to memorize the entire scores of dozens of operas.”

In support of such a claim, you could cite the huge number of opera roles memorized by Placido Domingo, who knew 151 opera roles in several different languages. 

On the newspaper page here, we have the claim that the Belgian shcolar Joest Lips (also called Justus Lipsius) memorized the entire text of the Histories of Tacitus, a work of 50,000 words. The page also claims that he once challenged a man to stand over him with a dagger, and to stab him if he transposed a single word. 

Lighting-Fast Readers Exceed the Speed Limits of a Brain

The paper "A Review of the Savant Syndrome and its Possible Relationship to Epilepsy" by neurologist John R. Hughes has some astonishing accounts of extraordinary mental abilities. We read of "the hyperlexics, who (in one case) can read a page in 8 seconds and recall the text later at a 99% level."  We read of "one savant who could recite without error the value of Pi to 22,514 places," a reference to Daniel Tammet.  Later more specifically we are told that "on American TV many viewers witnessed Daniel at 26 years of age in front of Oxford University dons reciting (without a single mistake) the value of Pi to 22,514 decimal places over a 5-hour period."

We read this:

"Thioux et al.. [5] described Donny, a young autistic savant, 'who is possibly the fastest and most accurate calendar prodigy ever described'. The title of this report likely justifies the latter statement : 'The day of the week when you were born in 700 msec.' " 

This seems to be reference to an ability to name the day of the week in which anyone was born, while taking less than a second to perform such a calculation.  We read of a case of hyperlexia:

"The life of one of the most famous savants, Kim Peek, was dramatized in the popular movie, 'Rain Man', played by actor Dustin Hoffman. Kim reads the left side of a page with his left eye and simultaneously the right side of the page with his right eye (without a corpus callosum). The time taken for these two pages for Kim is usually 8 seconds and upon testing for retention he was 99% correct of the material just read [2]. These values are in contrast to 45 seconds for reading and 45% correct on testing seen in a group of normal individuals."

The corpus callosum is the bundle of fibers connecting the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain. We might expect under "brains make minds" assumptions that not having a corpus callosum would produce terrible cognitive problems everywhere. But Kim Peek (born without a corpus callosum) had enormous memory abilities and way-better-than-normal reading abilities, as the quote above suggests. It is widely reported that Kim Peek remembered almost everything in thousands of books he had read, a claim that Hughes makes on page 7 of his paper.  

On the same page Hughes refers to acquired savant syndrome, which he describes as when "after some brain injury or brain disease, savant skills unexpectedly emerge, sometimes at a prodigious level, when no such skills were present before injury or illness.” He states this:

"Many examples were given by Treffert, including a 10-year-old boy knocked unconscious by a baseball, then later could do quick

calendar calculations, an 8-year-old boy with the similar talent after a left hemispherectomy [removal of half of the brain] and a 3-year-old child after meningitis was later considered a  musical genius. Also included was a 9-year-old boy who was shot with a bullet to the left brain, leaving him with a right-sided hemiparesis, later developing special mechanical abilities. Finally, two painters were mentioned who had significant qualitative improvements after strokes involving the left occipital lobe and thalamus." 

An old newspaper article describes a very fast reader:

As impressive as the case above is, the article below reports a speed-reading ability ten times faster: a rate of 8000 words per minute. We read that the subject had a 100% comprehension of the material read at this blazing-fast speed, based on test questions he answered about the material. 

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93065779/1954-07-29/ed-1/seq-8/

The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:

"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."

In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population."  Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."

The newspaper article here notes that a 1990 version of the Guinness Book of World Records recorded that Howard Berg could read at 25,000 words per minute. 

In the paper here, we read this:

 "Some hyperlexic children can read anything placed before them, even though they may never have heard or seen those words before,

nor do they understand them. They rarely mispronounce even the most difficult words."

An old newspaper article refers to the phenomenal reading ability of William Gladstone: 

"Perhaps the fastest reader the world ever knew was Gladstone. He could read and digest a novel of 50,000 words, a scientific work as large or larger, a political treatise or a history by merely glancing at the leaves as he turned them over. His eye and mind seemed to photograph with the rapidity of an instantaneous camera."

A 1972 newspaper article tells us this:

"Glen Pesely may be the world's fastest reader. The 18-year-old California boy can read 27,000 words per minute with nearly 100 per cent comprehension."

The 1972 newspaper article below gives us more details on this Glen Peseley, saying he could read up to 27,000 words per minute:

You can read the story here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SCS19721001.1.1&srpos=27&e=-------en--20--21--txt-txIN-%22fastest+reader%22-------

A 1969 newspaper article tells us this: "Jeanne Crandell, age 11, sixth grade, probably is the fastest reader in the world, reading as many as 70,000 words a minute." 

Reading some papers on Google Scholar, after searching for "hyperlexia," it seems that there exists a small number of super swift readers, often autistic, who have a stunning ability to read with astonishing speed, one that does not seem to the result of practice using speed reading techniques. 

The ability of humans to read at any fast rate is something beyond any explanation of neuroscientists or evolutionary biologists, who are also unable to explain the origin of language. We can imagine no "survival of the fittest" scenario that would explain the origin of language. All fast reading involves symbol recognition occurring at a blazing speed. Neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how any type of recognition could occur by means of the brain. Humans manufacture things such as books and computers that allow a fast recall of information. From such activity, we know the type of things that make possible fast recall: things such as addressing, indexing and sorting. The human brain has no such things. The brain has no addresses and nothing corresponding to indexes; nothing in a brain is sorted; and the brain has no indexes. The brain has many severe slowing factors which should make impossible very fast reading if such reading were to happen purely by brain activity. Such factors are discussed in my post here.  

The severe slowing factors include relatively slow dendrites, and synapses which each require a synaptic delay to transmit a signal. Because there are very many synapses for every neuron (as many as 1000), the cumulative delay caused by synaptic delays should utterly rule out phenomena such as very fast reading, if such phenomena occur by brain activity. Then there's the fact that only about half of the axons in the cortex of the brain are the faster myelinated type of axon (as discussed in the scientific paper here). The other half of the axons are very much slower unmyelinated axons, which have a transmission speed 10 to 100 times slower than myelinated axons. The diagram below schematically depicts the "speed bumps" in the brain.  Such "speed bumps" vastly outnumber the fastest parts (myelinated axons).  The result is that brains must be too slow to explain phenomena such as very fast reading with good understanding of what is read. 

An ability to read fast is something we should never expect to occur in any naturally arising organism.  An ability to read fast is something we should expect to arise in a species only if some higher power or higher agency wanted for a species to develop a civilization like humans have, one with things like cities, architecture, literature and art. 

In the diagram below we see four colored areas. At the center is the simplest phenomenon of consciousness, merely being awake and aware of something. The yellow area represents some of the commonly known mental phenomena that are more than mere consciousness. The orange area represents little-known powers of the human mind (or types of human experiences) that are not disputed by professors. The green area represents paranormal abilities of the human mind or types of paranormal human experiences that are disputed by professors, even though the evidence for such abilities and experiences is very good. The professors who dispute the reality of such abilities and experiences are typically those who have never bothered to seriously study the evidence for such abilities and experiences.  Almost none of the items mentioned in the diagram can be credibly explained as being caused by the brain. You might call the phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram "icing on the cake" for the person arguing that the brain cannot explain the human mind. The phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram strengthen the case against thinking that your brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of memories. But that case can be adequately made without even appealing to such disputed phenomena. 

Some of the items mentioned in the green part of the diagram are discussed in my posts and free online books here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here (some of which may require pressing Older Posts at the bottom right of the page to fully explore the relevant evidence). 

The diagram helps show the stupidity of the approach taken by many of today's thinkers, an approach in which the thinker tries to make his explanation task a million times easier by the silly trick of describing a mere "problem of consciousness" that needs to be solved.   The human mind and its capabilities and experiences is a reality a million times more than mere "consciousness."  It is an absurd problem misstatement to describe the problem of explaining human minds as a mere problem of explaining consciousness.  The person who makes that mistake is committing a blunder as bad as the person who tries to reduce the problem of explaining the arising of human bodies to a mere "problem of solidity origination." 

Postscript: In the paper here we read of some more interesting cases of acquired savant syndrome:

"In his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks (2009), records the case of Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who was struck by lightning in 1994. He had no prior interest in classical music, bur rapidly became an obsessive and skilled pianist following his recovery. A comparable striking case of acquired mathematical ability is the case of Jason Padgett, who became a talented mathematician after being struck on the head with an iron bar in 2002 (Padgett & Seaberg 2014). According to his narrative, following the attack Mr. Padgett first experienced symptoms of OCD and PTSD, and then began to develop visualisation of mathematical theories he was unable to name."