Abstract
The ability of humans to learn and remember facts is indeed impressive. William Shakespeare drew from a vocabulary of about 30,000 words to write his plays and sonnets. A good maitre d’hotel will know the names and favorite dishes of hundreds of regular customers. Aleksandr Luria discusses the remarkable memory of a mnemonist in the very readable little book, The Mind of a Mnemonist:
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Experiments indicated that he had no difficulty reproducing any lengthy series of words whatever, even though these had originally been presented to him a week, a month, a year, or even many years earlier.
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Partridge, L.D., Partridge, L.D. (2003). Information Storage. In: Nervous System Actions and Interactions. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0425-2_9
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