The Dog at Three Fourteen

00:00The boy who always knew the time

In a small town in Uruguay, in the 1880s, there was a boy who always knew what time it was. Ask him, without warning, and he'd tell you to the minute, without a watch. People in town thought he was a bit odd. A few years later he was thrown by a wild horse and left unable to move, lying on a cot in a dark back room, smoking. And from that fall on, he remembered everything. [pause] That's the setup of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," first published in 1942. It's about ten pages long. I want to spend today on one paragraph in the middle of it, because it makes a claim that sounds like poetry and turned out to be something closer to a scientific prediction. [pause] [casually] This is Qing, and this is a story about a man who couldn't forget, a real man in Moscow who had the same problem, and why your brain throws things away on purpose.

01:12A memory like a garbage heap

Here's what Funes's memory is like, as Borges tells it. He doesn't just remember a day. He remembers every leaf on every tree he saw that day, and every time he saw each one. He could reconstruct an entire day from memory, but it took him an entire day to do it. He taught himself Latin from a dictionary and a borrowed volume of Pliny's *Natural History*, and when the narrator comes to visit, Funes is lying in the dark reciting, in Latin, a chapter of Pliny about people with famous memories. He'd also invented a number system where every number had its own name, not "seven thousand and thirteen" but something like "Máximo Pérez," and he thought this was progress. [pause] And then there's the paragraph. Funes, Borges writes, was bothered that the word "dog" covered so many different animals of different sizes and shapes. But it bothered him even more that the dog he saw at three fourteen in the afternoon, from the side, should have the same name as the dog he saw at three fifteen, from the front. To him they were two separate things. His own face in the mirror surprised him every time. [pause] [slowly, thoughtfully] Then comes the line that the whole story turns on. "To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to abstract." Funes, the narrator says, was not very good at thinking. His world was nothing but details. Funes himself has a phrase for it. "My memory, sir," he says, "is like a garbage heap." [pause] It's a lovely idea, and if you read it as a philosophy student you might stop there: a writer's intuition about what thinking is. But it's also a testable claim. It says that a person with a truly perfect memory wouldn't be a genius. He'd have trouble with exactly the things that look simplest, like recognizing a face, or understanding that two things are the same kind of thing.

03:25Moscow, a man who took no notes

At around the same time, though Borges couldn't have known it, a young psychologist in Moscow named Alexander Luria was sitting across from a man who seemed to be Funes. [pause] The story, as Luria told it, starts at a newspaper in the 1920s. The editor handed out assignments every morning, with addresses and names, and noticed that one young reporter never wrote anything down. He asked him why. The reporter, Solomon Shereshevsky, seemed puzzled by the question. Didn't everyone remember? The editor tested him, then sent him to the psychology lab, and Luria spent the next thirty years or so studying him. In the book he eventually published, *The Mind of a Mnemonist*, he calls him simply "S." [pause] What Luria found was a memory that didn't seem to have an upper limit. Give S. a table of fifty numbers, and he'd read it back, forwards, backwards, by column, by diagonal. Give him long lists of nonsense syllables, and he'd recall them years later. Luria once read him the opening lines of Dante's *Divine Comedy* in Italian, a language S. didn't speak. Some fifteen years afterward, with no warning, Luria asked him to repeat them, and he did, with the stresses in the right places. [pause] The way he did it was through images, and through a very strong synesthesia, where one sense spills into another. Sounds had colors and textures for him. When he met the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, he told him, "What a crumbly, yellow voice you have." To remember a list, he'd walk down a familiar street in his mind, Gorky Street in Moscow, and place each item somewhere along the way. When he did forget something, it was usually because he'd placed it badly, an egg against a white wall, say, so that on his mental walk back he didn't see it. Luria said these weren't failures of memory. They were failures of seeing.

05:37What it cost him

So far this sounds like a superpower. But the most valuable part of Luria's book is the second half, where he writes about what this memory did to the rest of S.'s life. And it reads like a list of Funes's complaints. [pause] Faces were hard for him. Not because he forgot them, but because they wouldn't hold still. A face, he said, was very changeable. It looks different when someone is happy or tired, in a different light, from a slightly different angle. Each version was its own image, and he had trouble seeing them as the same person. That's the dog at three fourteen and the dog at three fifteen, almost exactly. [pause] Reading was hard, too, especially anything that needed him to hold a general idea. Every word threw up its own image, and the images crowded each other out. If a story said a man was leaning against a tree, he'd see the man and the tree, and then the next sentence would bring a new scene that didn't fit with the first. Abstract words, things like "nothing" or "infinity," gave him trouble because there was nothing to picture. And poetry, where words mean something other than what they say, was hardest of all. A metaphor asks you to drop the literal image and keep only the shape of the idea. S. couldn't drop it. [pause] He also couldn't throw things away. He'd memorized so many tables of numbers for performances that the old ones would come back and get in the way of the new ones. He tried writing them down on paper and burning the paper, hoping that would make them go away. It didn't. Later in life, he reported that he could make something fade if he simply decided he didn't want it anymore, though Luria never tested that properly. [pause] He moved from job to job, and ended up making his living on stage, as a professional memory performer. Luria's portrait is affectionate, but it's clear that this was a man whose gift was also a kind of weather he lived inside.

07:54The woman who remembers every day

You might think S. was a one-off. But in 2006, three memory researchers in California, Elizabeth Parker, Larry Cahill and James McGaugh, published a case report on a woman they called "AJ." Her name, it later came out, is Jill Price. She could tell you, for almost any date since she was a teenager, what day of the week it was, what she did, and what was in the news. They proposed a name for it: hyperthymesia, or as it's now usually called, highly superior autobiographical memory. [pause] Her memory isn't the same kind as S.'s. His was for anything you gave him. Hers is for her own life. But the shape of the trouble is related. The researchers described her remembering as nonstop, uncontrollable, and automatic. One date triggers another and another. And here's the twist that I find most telling. On standard memory tests, the kind where you memorize a list or a passage, she wasn't exceptional. At school she was an average student. Her memory was enormous, but it wasn't the kind you can point at a problem and use. [pause] So now we have a short story from 1942, a case study that ran from the 1920s into the 1960s, and a case report from 2006, all pointing the same way. A memory that keeps everything doesn't give you more thinking. It can give you less.

09:32Forgetting on purpose

In 2017, two neuroscientists in Toronto, Blake Richards and Paul Frankland, wrote a review in the journal *Neuron* that turned this around. Most memory research, they pointed out, treats forgetting as a failure, something to fix. They argued that forgetting is part of the design. [pause] The goal of memory, in their view, isn't to store information. It's to help you make good decisions in a world that keeps changing. And for that, you need two things working together. You need persistence, holding on to what matters. And you need transience, letting go of details. Forgetting does at least two useful jobs. It clears out information that's gone stale, like where you parked last week. And it keeps you from overfitting to particular past events, so that what you keep is the general pattern, not the snapshot. [pause] That word, overfitting, comes from machine learning, and it's a useful way to hear Borges's line again. If you train a model on examples and it memorizes every one of them exactly, it looks perfect on the examples and fails on anything new. Engineers deliberately make their models forget a little, blur the details, so they'll learn the pattern instead. They call it regularization. Funes is a model with no regularization at all. Every dog is a new dog. [pause] Richards and Frankland point to real mechanisms behind this. The brain actively weakens and prunes connections. New neurons being added in the hippocampus can overwrite old traces. In other words, the brain spends energy to forget. It's not just leaking.

11:26I remember him

So what do you do with this? Not much, maybe, except stop apologizing quite so often for losing details. When you can't recall exactly what someone said in a meeting last month, but you remember what they meant, that's not your memory failing. That's your memory doing the job Funes's couldn't. [pause] There's one more thing in the story I didn't mention, and it's in the very first line. The narrator opens by saying, "I remember him." And then he stops himself, in brackets: he has no right to say that sacred verb, he says, because only one man on earth had that right, and that man is dead. [pause] Then he tells us what he remembers of Funes: a dark room, the end of a cigarette glowing, a voice reciting Latin. He admits he can't reproduce Funes's words, and that he's giving us only a summary. Funes died young, in 1889, Borges tells us, of a congestion of the lungs. [pause] So the man who remembered everything left nothing behind. And the man who remembered only the outline, the shape, the gist, is the one who could turn it into a story. [casually] That's it for this one. Talk to you Monday.