Luria is the author of 'The mind of a mnemonist', by the way.

The man S. he describes in the book is even more peculiar than you may think. Given the following matrix of numbers to memorise,

1 2 3 4
2 3 4 5
3 4 5 6
4 5 6 7...,

he memorises it perfectly like any other succession of numbers but fails completely to see a structure in it. He said about himself he most likely wouldn't recognise the alphabet when asked to memorise the string of letters starting wiht a, b, c,...His worst problem was that he couldn't forget and he had to learn a technique for forgetting.

Wolfgang