"funes the memorioum" ”funes el memorioso” "φουνές ο μνήμων"
recently, i came across a short story, published in 1944 by jorge luis borges ”funes el memorioso”, translated in english as “funes the memorious”.
this is the tragic story of a young man, ireneo funes, who after a horse accident was left paralysed and with a strange condition: he started to remember everything! every person, every detail, “..he knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once...” this was devastating for the poor young man. remembering everything was tiresome and at the end useless "..i have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was world...my memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal"
this is the tragic story of a young man, ireneo funes, who after a horse accident was left paralysed and with a strange condition: he started to remember everything! every person, every detail, “..he knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once...” this was devastating for the poor young man. remembering everything was tiresome and at the end useless "..i have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was world...my memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal"
what was the use of all this incredible capacity to store information? funes was overwhelmed and lack the capacity to abstract, to classify "...he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at 3:14 (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at 3:15 (seen from the front)". funes could not prioritise things according to their importance "...the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment".it was even very difficult for him to sleep, because to sleep is to abstract from the world, and he was not capable of this.
ireneo funes died in 1889 of pulmunary congestion.
half a century after borges published the short story of funes, it has been found by neuroscientists that the way jorge luis borges constructed the functioning of memory is very close to what modern neuroscience has found after hard research and experiments. it is found for example that the human brain is wired in a way “that we tend to remember concepts and forget irrelevant details”. if we memorize too much we think less. as borges put it: “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details”
this is a great lesson for systems and methods of learning. when students are crammed with endless information this may lessen their ability to think ... at least this is what those of us with poor memory capacity like to believe!
