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."

Just Call Them "Machine-Metaphor-Misguided"

A recent interview on the website www.vox.com inadvertently gives us a portrait of the scrambled thinking of modern neuroscientists, whose thinking about the brain is senselessly guided not by the low-level characteristics of the brain discovered by neuroscientists, but by silly mechanical metaphors in which the non-mechanical brain is constantly compared to machines invented by men.  The article containing the interview begins with the statement, "It’s difficult to talk about the human brain without inadvertently talking about computers."  No, that isn't true. 

The interview is with a zoologist named Matthew Cobb, who has written about the history of ideas about the brain.  Cobb had some insightful and intelligent-sounding things to say about the improbability of eukaryotic cells evolving, which I quoted in a 2017 post.  But in this interview his answers are empty-sounding. 

Cobb makes it sound like scientists have a history of comparing the brain to whatever is the most impressive communications technology available in a particular time. So when the telegraph was the latest and greatest in communication technology (around 1850), the brain was compared to a telegraph; and when telephone technology was the latest and greatest in communication technology (in the early twentieth century), the brain was compared to a telephone switchboard; and when computers and Internet-capable devices were the latest and greatest in communications technology, the brain was compared to a computer. 

None of these metaphors ever made sense. Telegraph systems, telephone systems and computer systems all are based on the signal transmission in copper wires that transmit signals with near-100% reliability.  The chemical synapses in the brain that are by far the most common type of synapses have no such reliability. Tests have shown that in a chemical synapse the probability of successful transmission is less than 50%. 

In an interview, an expert on neuron noise states the following:

"There is, for example, unreliable synaptic transmission. This is something that an engineer would not normally build into a system. When one neuron is active, and a signal runs down the axon, that signal is not guaranteed to actually reach the next neuron. It makes it across the synapse with a probability like one half, or even less. This introduces a lot of noise into the system."

So according to this expert, synapses (the supposed storage place of human memories) transmit signals with a probability of less than 50 percent. That's very heavy noise – the kind of noise you would have if half of the characters in your text messages got scrambled by your cell phone carrier.  A scientific paper tells us the same thing. It 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."

Another reason it never made sense to compare the brain to a telegraph system is that telegraph systems are based on a particular signal transmission code (the Morse Code) invented by Samuel Morse; but no one has ever discovered any evidence of any code system in the brain by which complex learned information can be reliably transmitted or stored or retrieved.  No one has ever discovered a "brain code" or a "neuron code" analagous to the Morse Code.  

It also never made any sense to compare the brain to a telephone switchboard. In an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, a caller would be routed exclusively to one particular telephone number.  For example, a switchboard operator (after getting a request) might cause the caller with the number 342-2352 to be exclusively routed so that one and one phone number would ring: the number 342-4252.   But the brain does not work like that. Most neurons are connected to very many other neurons.  A scientific paper tells us, "Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synapses."

This is actually an extremely strong reason for rejecting all claims that memory recall occurs in brains or that memories are stored in brains or that brains produce thinking.  In my long post here I discuss this point at great length.  I'll give just a short summary of my reasoning: reliable signal transmission only occurs when there is an exclusive or near-exclusive relation between a receiver and a transmission source. That's why TV sets never receive ten channels at the same time. When a receiver is bombarded by signals from very many sources at the same time, it would be like a TV that is simultaneously getting broadcasts from very many TV channels. The result would be an unintelligible jumble kind of like the mess shown in the visual below:

A jumble rather like the one above is something we should expect from a brain in which each neuron is always getting signals from very many other neurons, except that the jumble and unintelligibilty would be far worse; for most neurons receive signals from very many other neurons. 

But what about the modern-day "brain as computer" metaphor? It never made any sense. To understand why, just read my post entitled "The Brain Has Nothing Like 7 Things a Computer Uses to Store and Retrieve Information." Below are the things I mentioned, things that are crucial components of computers, but have no counterpart in the brain:

• An Operating System
• An Application to Store and Retrieve Data
• The ASCII Code for Encoding Information
• A Decimal to Binary Conversion Table or Utility
• A Medium That Allows a Permanent, Stable Storage of Information
• A Storage Location System by Which the Exact Position of a Data Item Can be Specified, Allowing Fast Retrieval from an Exact Location
• Read/Write Functionality Allowing Data to Be Written to a Specific Location and Also Read From the Same Location

Asked about when scientists first started assuming that thinking comes from the brain, we get a very revealing answer from Cobb, an answer that inadvertently reveals the lack of any sound foundation for such an idea.  The answer is a minor classic of empty  insubstantiality. Here is Cobb's answer about when scientists first started assuming that thinking comes from the brain:

"Not in one moment. You mustn’t get the idea that somebody suddenly did an experiment and said, 'Aha!' Instead, there’s this slow accumulation of certainty. First, there’s anatomical demonstration that the 'viscera' like the heart have other functions. The heart is a pump, which was demonstrated at the beginning of the 17th century — so it doesn’t have the wherewithal to do the mysterious business associated with perception and thinking and so on. On the other hand, the brain, as anatomical studies showed, has got all these neurons, and it’s connected by the neurons to all the sense organs and everything else. So gradually, in the course of the 17th century in particular, people became increasingly confident that it was the brain that was doing thinking. How it did it, they weren’t quite sure."

Cobb confesses that there was never any experiment that caused scientists to assume that brains think.  He suggests that showing that hearts probably don't think was some reason for thinking that brains think, which makes no sense at all. You do not show that one organ does something by showing that some other organ does not do that thing.  The fact that neurons are connected to sense organs does nothing to show that brains cause thinking.  The phrase "slow accumulation of certainty" is very misleading. There has never been any certainty that brains think, nor any sound basis for believing that they do think.  

To the contrary, there are the strongest reasons for thinking that brains cannot possibly be the cause of lightning-fast human thinking. They include the following:

• The fact that no one has the slightest idea of how any arrangement of neurons could ever cause the arising of abstract ideas. Cobb's claim that neuroscientists aren't quite sure of how a brain could think is misleading. The truth is they haven't the slightest credible idea of how such a thing could occur.  
• The fact that severe slowing factors should make it impossible for brains to produce the lightning fast thinking that occurs in people such as math savants who can produce very complex calculations with astonishing speed. 
• The fact that unreliable synaptic transmission (discussed above) should make accurate memory recall and very accurate thinking impossible, contrary to the reality that humans such as Hamlet actors can recall large bodies of text with perfect accuracy, and other humans can do very complex mental calculations "in their head" with perfect accuracy.

An extremely important point about human thinking is that some people are capable of doing very complex thinking with blazing speed and perfect accuracy.  The natural limitations of the brain (very heavy signal noise, many internal slowing factors, and unreliable synapse transmission) rule out the brain as a source of such phenomena. An example of such a person is Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash, called "the world's fastest calculator." He can do things such as accurately multiply 869,463,853 times 73 in just 20 seconds. This is despite the fact that he had a very bad brain injury in a motorcycle crash, an injury to the front of his head so bad it required 85 stitches, multiple operations and a medically induced coma to treat.  He still has a prominent scar on his forehead as a reminder of the accident. 

Later in the interview discussed above, Cobb makes this very misleading statement comparing brain wiring to undersea transatlantic cables:

"They looked, for example, at the structure of undersea cables that were carrying telegraph messages across the Atlantic, and they could see that there was a central core of copper and then around it was insulation. And then they looked at neurons, at nerves, and they said, 'Well, this is exactly the same.' " 

Many readers probably read that statement and thought: "Gee, I didn't know there are copper wires inside the brain." There are no such things. There are what are called myelinated axons in the brain that transmit signals quickly. But in the grey matter cortex of the brain the great majority of axons are not well myelinated. A scientific text co-written by a Yale scientist says this:

"The axons of grey matter are not heavily myelinated, unlike white matter, which contains a high concentration of myelin. The grey matter contains the majority of neuron somas, making it appear tan with circulation but grey when prepared for examination outside of the body. These somas are circular structures that house the nucleus of the cells."

Besides the lack of myelination in the grey matter of the brain, there's a crucial reason why the "transatlantic cable" analogy is profoundly misleading. The 1866 transatlantic cable was capable of transmitting eight words per minute across the Atlantic ocean, because of a lack of any "speed bumps" that would slow down the signal. In the cortex there are "speed bumps" all over the place.  They include the following:

(1) The speed of transmission through dendrites, which can be 200 or more times slower than the "100 meters per second" estimate based on transmission through well-myelinated axons. According to one expert, dendrites make up 90% of neural tissue. 
(2) Synaptic delays, each about .5 millisecond, which end up being a huge slowing factor because so very many synapses must be traversed to pass through a decent amount of cortex tissue.
(3) Synaptic unreliability or noise, the fact that a signal across a synapse is typically transmitted with only between 10% to 50% likelihood, a factor that is typically ignored but which has a huge impact on effective speed.
(4) Synaptic fatigue, the fact that a synapse will so often need a rest period after firing, a period that can be more than a minute.
(5) Tortuosity, the fact that nerve signals must travel through sinuous paths that are not straight lines.
(6) Folding of cortex tissue, a further slowing factor. 

(7) Low myelination in the cortex, where the gray matter has little myelination. 

Every one of these factors is ignored by 95% of discussions of brain signal speed in the popular press. Altogether these factors should cause us to conclude that the brain cannot possibly be the source of very fast recall and very fast thinking in people such as mathematical savants. 

After discussing how brains were first compared to telegraph systems and then compared to telephone systems, Cobb is asked "what came after the telephone?" He describes the latest silly machine metaphor, whose silliness he fails to perceive:

"Well, the dominant metaphor is that the brain is something like a computer. It’s carrying out some kind of calculations. And that idea, which came into being in the 1940s and early 1950s, still dominates over 70 years on." 

To see why this metaphor makes no sense, read my post entitled "The Brain Has Nothing Like 7 Things a Computer Uses to Store and Retrieve Information."  Among the reasons why it is senseless to claim that brains make minds and brains are like computers, some additional reasons are:

• Minds are conscious, and computers are not.
• Minds can have novel abstract ideas, and computers cannot. 
• Minds can have curiosity and morality, but computers cannot. 
• Minds have experience and feelings, and computers do not. 
• Minds can be interested in things, but computers cannot. 
• Minds can experience pleasure and pain, but computers cannot.

A very general question that we should be asking again and again to scientists is: "What forced you to believe that?" When there is a good evidence basis for thinking something, scientists will be able to discuss some evidence that forced them to believe some particular thing, regardless of whether they wanted to.  There is nothing at all that forced scientists to believe that brains produce thinking. They simply adopted such a belief because they didn't want to believe in souls or because they wanted to say they had an answer to a deep question they did not understand.  The lack of any good evidence  basis for believing that brains produce thinking is suggested by the very wobbly "not in one moment" answer given by Cobb quoted above. 

Neuroscientists should not be asking, "What machine created by humans should we compare the brain to?" Instead, neuroscientists should be asking, "What low-level facts that we have learned about the brain should cause us to reduce and limit our ideas about what the brain could be capable of?" Above I have listed many such facts, senselessly ignored by neuroscientists.  There are many other such facts mentioned in other posts on this blog. 

Exceptional Memories Strengthen the Case Against Neural Memory Storage

Materialist thinkers often act as if their motto was "make humans seem like something much less than humans."  There are various different ways in which they do this:

• They sometimes make the utterly preposterous claim made by Darwin that there is no fundamental difference between the mental abilities of humans and the mental abilities of higher mammals, a claim contrary to all human experience.
• They senselessly classify humans as animals, and arbitrarily put the human species in an animal kingdom (given the abundant mental and behavioral differences between humans and animals, a sensible classification of organisms would be to have four kingdoms: a microbe kingdom, a plant kingdom, an animal kingdom and a human kingdom).
• They refuse to acknowledge hundreds of years of written testimony from reliable witnesses such as doctors and scientists (and many decades of compelling experimental evidence) that humans have faculties such as clairvoyance and ESP that are beyond any biological explanation.
• When describing human mental faculties, they tend to describe them as being far weaker than they are. 

It is interesting to read the writings of neuroscientists who try to portray human memory as something weak and unreliable.  Again and again they will try to suggest that learning something requires multiple exposures to some source material, a claim that is contrary to the facts of actual human experience, which is that humans can very often reliably learn things after a single exposure, that people can recognize faces they have seen briefly only one time, that people can remember stories they have heard only one time, and that people can remember events they have seen only one time. 

Neuroscienitsts often try to make us think that humans can't remember very well things they experienced years ago, or that each time we remember something there will be a high chance of error.  Such claims are contrary to abundant human experience. It is rather obvious why neuroscientists tend to speak in such a way. The more you believe that human memory is not very reliable, and something that requires multiple exposures, the more likely you may be to believe that human memories are stored in the brain. 

A neuroscientist's portrayal of weak and unreliable human memory can be refuted by citing a host of ordinary human experiences. Such a portrayal can also be refuted by citing cases of exceptional human memories.  Below are some examples:

• Steven Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw an entire skyline after seeing it only one time. 
• Mathematician and computer scientist Herman Goldstine wrote this about the legendary mathematician John von Neumann: "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."
• According to an article in the LA Times, Kim Peek could recall the contents of 12,000 books he had read, even though his brain was severely damaged, and he lacked most or all of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. 
• According to one book, "John Fuller, a land agent, of the county of Norfolk, could correctly write out a sermon or lecture after hearing it once; and one, Robert Dillon, could, in the morning, repeat six columns of a newspaper which he had read the preceding evening. More wonderful still was George Watson, who... could tell the date of every day since his childhood and how he had occupied himself on that day."
• The mathematician Leonhard Euler could recite the entire Aeneid from beginning to end, a work of 9896 lines.  Another mathematician (Alexander Aitken) also memorized the whole Aeneid, and could recite the first 1000 digits of pi.  George Vogan de Arrezo also memorized the entire text of Virgil's Aeneid (consisting of 9,896 lines). 
• Young Leste May Williams memorized 12,000+ biblical verses including the whole New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, which has only 63,719 words.
• 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.
• A scientific paper says, "Rajan S. Mahadevan ...was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (McWhirter, 1983) for reciting pi to 31,811 places."  The same paper says that after about three minutes of study Rajan can perfectly recall all numbers in a grid of 50 random numbers, recalling not just the numbers but also their positions in the grid. 
• Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. A scientific paper says this about Shereshevsky: "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."
• Mezzofanti could speak very well thirty different languages. 
• A four-year-old girl demonstrated on TV her ability to speak seven different languages. 
• Numerous Muslim scholars have memorized all 6000+ lines of their holy book, and some did this as early as age 10. 
• According to a book, "The great thinker, Pascal, is said never to have forgotten anything he had ever known or read, and the same is told of Hugo, Grotius, Liebnitz, and Euler. All knew the whole of Virgil's 'Aeneid' by heart." 
• The famous conductor Toscanini was able to keep conducting despite bad eyesight, because he had memorized the musical scores of a very large number of symphonies and operas.  According to the 1920 newspaper article here, he had so well-memorized 150 opera scores that he "never even glances at a score when conducting."
• A 1902 newspaper story said that Professor Asa Gray claimed to be able to name 25,000 types of plants. It also says that thousands of Hindu Brahmins have memorized 10,000 verses of the Rig Veda. 
• Zafrullah Khan recited to a newspaper reporter 28 different roads he had taken and all the places they had passed through, while describing a long auto trip he took in 1954, just as if he had a photographic memory of a map of the complex route. 
• It has been estimated that the Babylonian Talmud contains roughly 1,860,131 words. According to page 4 of the document here, "Stromeyer mentions Luria’s famous mnemonist and the case of the 'Shass Pollaks,' who memorized all 12 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, and Oliver Sacks has reported a similar case of a person who among other things knew by heart all 9 volumes and 6000 pages of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians."
• According to a book, a waiter in San Francisco could recall exactly what any customer had previously ordered, even if the customer had not visited the restaurant in years. 
• The artist Franco Magnani (famed as "the Memory Artist") was able to draw "photographically accurate" drawings of his hometown that he had not seen in more than 30 years. 
• G. C. Leland says: " It is recorded of a Slavonian Oriental Sect called the Bogomiles, which spread over Europe during the middle ages, that its members were required to memorize the Bible verbatim. Their latest historian, Dragomanoff, declares that there were none of them who did not memorize the New Testament at least; one of their bishops publicly proclaimed that, in his own diocese of four thousand communicants, there was not one unable to repeat the entire scriptures without an error."
• Akira Haraguchi was able to recite correctly from memory 100,000 digits of pi in 16 hours, in a filmed public exhibition.
• The scholar and librarian Antonio Magliabechi of Florence, Italy was legendary for his memory.  According to the source here, " He not only knew all the volumes in the library, as well as every other possible work, but could also tell the page and paragraph in which any passage occurred."  The wikipedia.org article on him says, "Many stories are told of his marvellous memory that was 'like wax to receive and marble to retain.' "
• The fascinating 47-minute video here "The Boy Who Can't Forget" documents cases of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also called hyperthymesia.  According to the article here a scientist named McGaugh "is adamant that the super memory demonstrated by the small number of people he and others have identified represents a genuine phenomenon." People with such a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (including Jill Price and Aureilien Hayman) can recall what happened to them every day in the past ten years. 
• A book tells us this: "The geographer Maretus, narrates an instance of memory probably  unequalled. He actually witnessed the feat, and had it attested by four Venetian nobles. He met in Padua, a young Corsican who had so powerful a memory that he could repeat as many as 36,000 words read over to him only once. Maretus, desiring to test this extraordinary youth, in the presence of his friends, read over to him an almost interminable list of words strung together anyhow in every language, and some mere gibberish. The audience was exhausted before the list, which had been written down for the sake of accuracy, and at the end of it the young Corsican smilingly began and repeated the entire list without a break and without a mistake. Then to show his remarkable power, he went over it backward, then every alternate word, first and fifth, and so on until his hearers were thoroughly exhausted, and had no hesitation in certifying that the memory of this individual was without a rival in the world, ancient or modern."
• Encyclopedia.com refers to the "miraculous photographic memory" of Thomas Babington Macaulay.
• A newspaper account states, "That Italian prodigy of learning, Ignatius de Rosal, made the boast that if any one could repeat a line from any of the four great poets of Italy he would follow it by reciting 100 lines following in due order of succession, and on a trial being made be actually accomplished the feat."
• Describing both high recall capacity and very quick speed of recall, a 1914 newspaper account tells us that the boy Cleo Smith of Denver, Colorado "has accomplished the unbelievable task of being able to give from memory—'right off the reel'—the population of all the cities in the world having more than 90,000. the names of all the capital cities of the world, giving their altitudes; the population of every county seat in the United States; the altitude of every city in the United States, and of every mountain peak in the world; the number of miles of railroad in each state in the United States and in every country in the world; the number of farms in every state; the population of every city of more than 100,000, both in the United States and Canada; the length of every principal river in the world; the population of every country in the world; the foreign population in every city and in every state, telling the number of Indians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.; the total number of foreigners in every state; the number of counties in each state; the date of admission to the Union of every state; the number of manufactories in every state and in Canada, and in every principal city in the United States."
• According to an article on bbc.com, "Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work."
• 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. 
• A child (identified only as "Prodigy 1" in the paper here) was born seven weeks early, but still has a working memory in the 99.9 percentile, and "reproduced complicated musical pieces such as The Entertainer after only one or two hearings at age four," eventually scoring 149 on a test of nonverbal IQ. 
• A nineteenth century work describes a similar ability in a prodigy known as Blind Tom: "The doctor then called for some one of the audience to come and play a piece of music for the first  time in Tom's hearing, promising a very faithful imitation ; Miss Jones was persuaded to play a piece of her own composition, and hence unknown to Tom and the audience....When the lady was through and escorted from the stage, Tom sat down and played it through perfectly. " The next page states, "Tom executes some of the most difficult pieces of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bach, Gottschalk, Thalberg and others, and these he learnt by hearing them played."

Thomas Babington Macaulay

A scientific paper tells us this about the autistic savant Daniel Tammet:

"DT [Daniel Tammet] speaks 10 languages, including Estonian and Finnish, has invented his own language (Manti) and learnt Spanish in one weekend. He performs mathematical calculations at lightning speed, including multiplying six-digit numbers together. He commented that 31, 19, 79 and 1979 are all prime numbers, an indication of how he sees patterns in numbers very rapidly. As mentioned earlier, as part of a formal competition he recited Pi to 22,514 decimal paces, earning the title of European champion."

If normal human memory abilities are inexplicable as being produced by brains with very rapid protein turnover, very high levels of signal noise of several different types, and nothing like an indexing system, a position notation system or any known mechanism for reading or writing memories, brains that replace about 3% of their proteins every day, which is certainly the case, then cases of exceptional memory such as these are all the more inexplicable as being neural effects. 

Brain studies of people with exceptional memories have failed to present  any robust evidence for any brain difference that could explain such memories. The paper here  claims to have studied the brains of 11 people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).  The abstract makes no specific claim of having found any specific difference in the brains of such people.  The abstract does vaguely claim to have identified "nine structures as being morphologically different from those of control participants," but the text of the paper does not justify any claim of any significant morphological difference in the 11 people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).  We read in the paper nothing different from what you would get by randomly picking 11 people and comparing their brains to 11 other random people. 

It is interesting that Table 1 of this paper shows us the nine regions that were supposedly "morphologically different" from controls.  There are nine up arrows to indicate little regions of neural superiority in the HSAM subjects with amazing autobiographical memory, and down nine down arrows to indicate little regions of neural inferiority in such subjects.  "That's a wash," as they say: the negatives cancel out the positives. Overall there is no indication of neural superiority in these HSAM subjects with amazing memories. 

A more recent paper on this topic can be read here.  The paper fails to show any robust evidence of any significant brain activity difference between those with astonishing HSAM memories and normal controls. The very marginal differences discussed are merely the type of differences we would expect from comparing about 10 randomly selected people with 10 other randomly selected people. 

The fact that people with vastly superior recall ability have brains that are not structurally superior (and are sometimes very structurally inferior) to those with normal recall abilities, and the fact that brain scans of such people show nothing very noteworthy are both facts that strengthen the case against the claim that memories are stored in the brain. 

Postscript: Below is a quote from page 53 of the book The Mind and Beyond published by Time-Life Books:

"As reported in the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, in 1967, one Mehmed Ali Halici of Turkey recited from memory 6,666 verses of the Koran in six hours. And in 1989, Englishman Tony Power memorized in correct order a random sequence of thirteen packs of shuffled playing cards – 676 cards in all – after looking at them only once. But the world record for a single eidetic memory feat may be held by Bhandanta Vicitasara of Rangoon, Burma who in 1974 correctly recited from memory 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts."

On page 266 of the June 4, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, Cox describes a state of extraordinary memory, what sounds like a case of photographic or eidetic memory. Cox describes himself as having a similar memory. Cox states this:

"The Rev. Henry Christmas, formerly of Sion College, possessed an extraordinary memory. I have seen him read a page of Greek or Latin opened at random, close the book and repeat the whole of the page verbatim, beginning with the broken sentence in the first line. He knew by heart the entire of many volumes of poems. He could repeat the whole of Horace from memory : one perusal usually sufficed. He informed me that this marvellous memory of his was a memory not of sound but of sight. He did not recall the words, but the page on which they had been printed when he learned them, and in his mind’s eye he saw that page and read from it. I suspect such a form of memory to be not uncommon. It is possessed by myself. When I desire to repeat anything learned by rote I am compelled to recall to my mind the book and the page of the book from which I learned it. I see in my mental vision the very misprints, creases, and spots upon the paper, and I mentally read it from the ideal representation of the book. This is plainly memory for objects of sight, not for language."

Memories Can Form Many Times Faster Than the Speed of Synapse Strengthening

The main theory of a brain storage of memories is that people acquire new memories through a strengthening of synapses. There are many reasons for doubting this claim. One is that information is generally stored through a writing process, not a strengthening process. It seems that there has never been a verified case of any information being stored through a process of strengthening.

If it were true that memories were stored by a strengthening of synapses, this would be a slow process. The only way in which a synapse can be strengthened is if proteins are added to it. We know that the synthesis of new proteins is a rather slow effect, requiring minutes of time. In addition, there would have to be some very complicated encoding going on if a memory was to be stored in synapses. The reality of newly-learned knowledge and new experience would somehow have to be encoded or translated into some brain state that would store this information. When we add up the time needed for this protein synthesis and the time needed for this encoding, we find that the theory of memory storage in brain synapses predicts that the acquisition of new memories should be a very slow affair, which can occur at only a tiny bandwidth, a speed which is like a mere trickle. But experiments show that we can actually acquire new memories at a speed more than 1000 times greater than such a tiny trickle.

One such experiment is the experiment described in the scientific paper “Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details.” The experimenters showed some subjects 2500 images over the course of five and a half hours, and the subjects viewed each image for only three seconds. Then the subjects were tested in the following way described by the paper:

Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen. The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose. Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high  (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images.

In this experiment, pairs like those shown below were used. A subject might be presented for 3 seconds with one of the two images in the pair, and then hours later be shown both images in the pair, and be asked which of the two was the one he saw.

Although the authors probably did not intend for their experiment to be any such thing, their experiment is a great experiment to disprove the prevailing dogma about memory storage in the brain. Let us imagine that memories were being stored in the brain by a process of synapse strengthening. Each time a memory was stored, it would involve the synthesis of new proteins (requiring minutes), and also the additional time (presumably requiring additional minutes) for an encoding effect in which knowledge or experienced was translated into neural states. If the brain stored memories in such a way, it could not possibly keep up with remembering images that appeared for only three seconds each in a long series. It would be a state of affairs like that depicted in what many regard as the funniest scene that appeared in the “I Love Lucy” TV series, the scene in which Lucy and her friend Ethel were working on a confection assembly line. In that scene Lucy and Ethel were supposed to wrap chocolates that were moving along a conveyor belt. But while the chocolates moved slowly at first, the conveyor belt kept speeding up faster and faster, totally exceeding Lucy and Ethel's ability to wrap the chocolates (with ensuing hilarious results).

The experiment described above in effect creates a kind of fast moving conveyor belt in which images fly by at a speed so fast that it should totally defeat a person's ability to memorize accurately – if our memories were actually being created through the slow process imagined by scientists, in which each memory requires a protein synthesis requiring minutes, and an additional time (probably additional minutes) needed for encoding. But nonetheless the subjects did extraordinarily well in this test.

There is only one conclusion we can draw from such an experiment. It is that the bandwidth of human memory acquisition is vastly greatly than anything that can be accounted for by neural theories of memory storage. We do not remember at the speed of synapse strengthening, which is a snail's speed similar to the speed of arm muscle strengthening. We instead are able to form new memories in a manner that is basically instantaneous. The authors of the scientific paper state that their results “pose a challenge to neural models of memory storage and retrieval.” That is an understatement, for we could say that their results are shockingly inconsistent with prevailing dogmas about how memories are stored.

There are some people who are able to acquire new memories at an astonishing rate. The autistic savant Kim Peek was able to recall everything he had read in the more than 7000 books he had read. Here we had a case in which memorization occurred at the speed of reading. Stephen Wiltshire is an autistic savant who has produced incredibly detailed and accurate artistic works depicting cities that he has seen only from a brief helicopter ride or boat ride. Of Wiltshire, savant expert Darold Treffert says, "His extraordinary memory is illustrated in a documentary film clip, when, after a 12-minute helicopter ride over London, he completes, in 3 hours, an impeccably accurate sketch that encompasses 4 square miles, 12 major landmarks and 200 other buildings all drawn to scale and perspective." Again, we have a case in which memories seem to be formed at an incredibly fast rate. Savant Daniel Tammet (who one time publicly recited accurately the value of pi to 22,514 digits) was able to learn the Icelandic language in only 7 days. Derek Paravicini is a blind and brain-damaged autistic savant who has the incredible ability to replay any piece of music he has heard for the first time. In 2007 the Guardian reported the following:

Derek is 27, blind, has severe learning difficulties, cannot dress or feed himself - but play him a song once, and he will not only memorize it instantly, but be able to reproduce it exactly on the piano. One part of his brain is wrecked; another has a capacity most of us can only dream of.

Other savants such as Leslie Lemke and Ellen Boudreaux have the same extraordinary ability to replay perfectly a song heard for the first time. 

Cases such as these are inconsistent with prevailing theories of memory. Are we to believe that such people (typically with substantial brain damage) can somehow synthesize proteins in their brains ten times or thirty times faster than the average human, so that their synapses can get bulked up ten times or thirty times faster? That's hardly credible. But if memories are not actually stored in brains, but stored in or added to a human psychic or spiritual facility, something like a soul, then there would be no reason why the brain-damaged might not have astonishing powers of memorization.

Some people can form memories 1000 times faster than should be possible under prevailing theories of brain memory storage, which involve postulating protein synthesis and encoding operations that should take minutes. This thousand-fold shortfall in only one of three thousand-fold shortfalls of the prevailing theory of brain memory storage. The two other shortfalls are: (1) humans can remember things for 50 years or more, which is 1000 times longer than the synaptic theory of memory storage can account for (synapses having average protein lifetimes of only a few weeks); (2) humans can recall things 1000 times faster than should be possible if you stored something in some exact location of the brain. If you stored a memory in your brain (an organ with no numbering system or coordinate system), it would be like throwing a needle onto a mountain-sized heap of needles, in the sense that finding that exact needle at some later point should take a very long time.

The imaginary conversation below illustrates some of the many ways in which prevailing dogma about brain memory storage fails. It's the kind of conversation that might occur if memories were formed according to the "brain storage of memory" dogmas that currently prevail among neuroscientists. 

Costello: Alright, guy, I'm now going to teach you an important geographical fact: which city is the capital city of Spain.

Abbott: Go ahead, I'm all ears.

Costello: Okay, here it is. The capital city of Spain is Madrid.

Abbott: Okay, I'll try to remember that.

Costello: So what is the capital city of Spain?

Abbott: I haven't formed the memory of that yet. It takes time. I'm still synthesizing the proteins I need to strength my synapses, so I can remember that.

Costello: So try hard. Remember, Madrid is the capital city of Spain.

Abbott: I'm working on forming the memory.

Costello: So do you remember by now what the capital city of Spain is?

Abbott: Don't ask me too soon. It takes minutes to synthesize those proteins.

After five additional minutes like this, the conversation continues.

Costello: Okay, so it's been five minutes since I first told you what the capital city of Spain is. You should have had enough time to have formed your memory of this fact.

Abbott: I'm sure by now I have formed that memory, because there has been enough time for protein synthesis in my synapses.

Costello: So what is the capital city of Spain?

Abbott: I can't recall.

Costello: But you formed the memory by now. Why can't you recall it?

Abbott: The problem is that I don't know exactly where in my brain the memory was stored. So I can't just instantly recall the memory. The memory is like a tiny needle in a haystack. There's no way I can find that quickly.

Costello: Can't you just search through all the memories in your brain, looking for this one?

Abbott: I could try, but it would take hours or days to search through all those memories.

Costello: Sheesh, this is driving me crazy. How about this? I can teach you that Madrid is the capital city of Spain, and when you form the memory, you can tell me the exact tiny spot where your memory was formed. So maybe you'll tell me, “Okay I stored that memory at brain neuron number 273,835,235.” Then I'll just say to you something like, “Please look in your brain at neuron number 273,835,235, and retrieve the memory you stored of what is the capital city of Spain.”

Abbott: That's a brilliant idea!

Costello: Thanks.

Abbott: On second thought, it will never work.

Costello: Why not?

Abbott: Neurons aren't numbered, and the brain has no coordinate system. It's like some vast city in which none of the streets are named, and none of the houses have house numbers. So if I put a memory in one little “house” in the huge brain city, I'll never be able to tell you the exact address of that house.

Costello: So how the hell am I supposed to teach you anything?

Abbott: Beats me. And if I ever learn anything new, I'm sure I won't remember it for more than a few weeks. That's because there's a big problem with those proteins that I will synthesize to store those new memories. They have average lifetimes of only a few weeks.

As long as they cling to “brain storage of memory” dogmas, our neuroscientists will never be able to overcome difficulties such as those mentioned in this conversation.

Postscript: I did an experiment with results similar to the experiment mentioned above.  I used the card game "Stare!" which includes a deck of cards, each containing a unique picture.  A subject was given several minutes to study 40 picture cards, having no more than 5 seconds to study each card.  Two hours later, the subject was shown 80 picture cards, 40 of which were the ones previously examined, and 40 of which were similar-looking picture cards the subject had never seen.  These 80 picture cards had been thoroughly shuffled. The subject was asked to answer "yes" or "no" as to whether the card had previously been seen.  Making "yes" answers about 50% of the time, the subject correctly identified 38 out of 40 of the cards that the subject had previously seen.