The tale of the man who remembered everything but desperately wanted to erase his memories

From major milestones in life to trauma and scenes that have a major impact on the mind, people seem to remember significant things while the trivial details fade away. But Solomon Shereshevsky's brain did not function in that manner since it did not differentiate between special and trivial memories. For a long time, Solomon believed that this was the norm and that everyone remembered things the same way. He only realized that he had a gift when his editor noticed that as a reporter he noted nothing in his meetings. 

The editor was shocked to see him remember verbatim the long instructions given at the meetings. The editor picked up a newspaper, read it in front of Solomon, and asked him to repeat everything and to his surprise, Solomon completed the task easily. This prompted him to send Solomon to a memory specialist Alexander Luria who analyzed Solomon's memory. He worked with Solomon for more than a decade and was awestruck to find out that his memory just had no limits.

Luria gave him a long list of random words and numbers and Solomon was able to recount them successfully. When Luria conducted the same exercise 15 years later, the result was still the same. “I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” Luria writes in his case study of Solomon called “The Mind of a Mnemonist,” which was published in 1968 in both Russian and English. This extraordinary ability did not come without pitfalls as he suffered from several cognitive deficiencies that even made Solomon try to rid himself of certain memories. He used to write things he wanted to forget on paper and burn them so that somehow it got purged out of his brain but to no avail. Luria believed that Solomon had an extraordinarily strong case of synesthesia, which is a condition in which senses intermingled with the mind. Whenever he heard a word, Solomon associated it with a sound, smell, and color in his brain. Having all these channels open to the world was difficult for his brain to handle. 

Solomon just couldn't conceive the world in abstract terms since everything was filled with details for him. If anyone talked to him about 'restaurants' his mind conjured up food, customers, entrance, and everything related to that particular word, which left very little scope for him to calm down. The case study does not reveal what happened in Solomon in his last years, which caused Reed Johnson to conduct his own investigation, to find Shereshevsky’s autobiographical account of how he became a mnemonist. As a reporter, Solomon excelled in writing satirical pieces which fell out of favor during Stalin's rule. He collaborated with a circus trainer and performed many shows putting his abilities on display.  For a while, he became the talk of the town but His shows were canceled in the post-war era as the job market dried up. Moreover, he became the target of the secret police who made it their aim to destroy his shows through heckling. Hence the man who remembered everything disappeared from everyone's memories.