Solomon Shereshevski was a man with an amazing memory. He was one of the world's most famous me-monists . Born in Russia in about 1900, he spent much of his life performing memory skills that people found difficult to believe. He could memorize long lists of numbers after reading them through once, and he could then recite them forwards or back-wards. He could also remember the same numbers months later. He could easily remember lists of names, dozens of playing cards or hundreds of cities.   Although he had a wonderful memory, he found some normal skills very difficult. For example, he found it difficult to learn to read. He also found it difficult to recognize patterns in words or numbers. When presented with a long list of numbers like this: 1234 4231 5678 8765 6789 9876 he could not see that there was a pattern. If he could see or hear a collection of numbers, he could remember it. However, this did not mean that he could understand what he was looking at. He could remember long complex mathematical formulas, but could not understand what the numbers meant. Solomon suffered from a condition known as Synaesthesia. This meant that all of his senses were connected in a special way. In other words, when he heard a particular word he also experienced a unique taste, or saw a unique color1. Each word that he heard brought a particular description into his mind. Each word for him was unique, because he remembered it as a taste, a smell, a color1 or a sound, or all of them together.   He was not a clever man except this ability and people found him rather stupid. He found it difficult to become friends with other people because his mind was so different. In a way, his memory was a curse . He remembered everything, and that made it difficult for him to understand anything. Solomon had very powerful memory, but he .
could not read or write never knew what people meant when they said to him could not work out some simple math problems found everything he did was meaningless