Shereshevsky participated in many psychological studies, most of them carried out by the
neuropsychologist Alexander Luria over a thirty-year time span. He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was scolded for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own astonishment in realizing that others could apparently not do so), he could recall the speech word for word. Throughout his life, Shereshevsky was tasked with memorizing complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices, and even poems in foreign languages that he had never spoken before, all of which he would memorize with meticulous accuracy in a matter of minutes. On the basis of his studies, Luria diagnosed in Shereshevsky an extremely strong version of
synaesthesia, fivefold synaesthesia, in which the stimulation of one of his senses produced a reaction in every other. For example, if Shereshevsky heard a musical tone played he would immediately see a colour, touch would trigger a taste sensation, and so on for each of the senses. The above list of images for digits is consistent with a form of synesthesia (or
ideasthesia) known as
ordinal linguistic personification but is also related to a well-known mnemonic technique called the
number shape system where the mnemonist creates images that physically resemble the digits. Luria did not clearly distinguish between whatever natural ability Shereshevsky might have had and mnemonic techniques like the
method of loci and number shapes that "S" described. Shereshevsky also participated in experiments in which he showed that he had control over his body's involuntary (
autonomic) functions. From a resting pulse of 70–72, he was able to increase it up to 100 by and decrease it to a steady 64–66. When asked how he could do this, he replied that he would either "see" himself running after a train that has just begun to pull out or by "seeing" himself lying in bed perfectly still while trying to fall asleep. Shereshevsky was also able to simultaneously raise the temperature of his right hand by 2 degrees while lowering the temperature of his left hand by 1.5 degrees. Once again, he stated that to do this, he simply "saw" a situation in which his right hand was touching a hot stove while his left hand was grasping a cube of ice. Shereshevsky also claimed to have been able to avoid pain by imagining that someone else was experiencing it and watching the other man experience it. As he described, "It doesn't hurt me, you understand, but 'him.' I just don't feel any pain." This, however, was never tested by Luria. Additionally, Shereshevsky claimed to be able to cure himself and others of sickness by imagining that the problem went away. This was dismissed by Luria as "naive magical thinking." According to autobiographical diary of Shereshevsky, found by Reed Johnson, he "did not, in fact, have perfect recall". Details of Shereshevsky's biography are different in his own writing from Luria's account; according to S, they first met with Luria on April 13, 1929. Shereshevsky's father was a bookseller. Shereshevsky lived in Moscow with his wife, Aida, and son, in "a damp room in the basement of a janitorial outbuilding tucked away in a courtyard". According to Mikhail Reynberg, Shereshevsky's nephew, his uncle was pressed to work for the "secret police" (
NKVD) because of his memory, but declined. Reynberg recalls that Shereshevsky "could be forgetful", and that he "trained hours a day for his evening performances", because he needed "consciously try to commit something to memory". Shereshevsky used
method of loci, imagining
Gorky Street in Moscow or "a village street from his childhood" as his memory palaces. He died in 1958 "from complications related to his alcoholism". ==Challenges==