Super Minds
Tony Crisp
SuperMinds
Copyright © 1999 by Tony Crisp
ISBN 294-0-000-78981-0
Smashwords Edition 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Animal Children - Information was taken and quoted from The Daily Star of 17/4/91. The feature on Djuma was written by Dennis Newson.
Padre Pio - Information taken from Padre Pio - The Pierced Priest, by Jim Gallagher. Published by Harper Collins Religious. UK. 1995. ISBN: 000627881 7.
Helen Keller - I am indebted to the summary of Helen Keller’s life appearing in ABC’s Of The Human Mind, published by Reader’s Digest General Books. USA.
Edgar Cayce - The book by Thomas Sugrue, There Is a River (A.R.E. Press) supplied all the information.
Donald Powell - My Six Convicts - By Wilson. Published by Hamish Hamilton. UK 1951. Gave information about Hadad the yogi.
John Hodgson - With thanks for reading through the book and helping with readability.
For Hyone
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
The Man Who Remembered Everything
Chapter 3
Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Schermann - Graphologist Extraordinaire
Chapter 7
Journey through the Mind – Jesse’s Experience of Madness
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Helen Keller — The Sighted Blind
Chapter 12
George Washington Carver - From
Chapter 13
SuperMinds
Chapter One
The Weird and Wonderful Mind
What would you do if you had a squiggy grey jelly in a round container about the size of a football? You could of course scare your friends with it by getting them to touch the wet slimy jelly. Supposing the jelly talked to you though; supposing it created full surround virtual reality worlds you could explore, did your homework for you, designed a supersonic aeroplane, or cried - what would you do with it then?
Sitting inside your head, your brain is just such a pearly-white jelly-like substance that is the visible body of your mind. It appears quite small if you look at it. If you explore it in the right way though, it is bigger than all the sky with all the stars and all the planets and space. Because a healthy brain has about ten billion nerve cells working in it, and each little cell can connect with the other cells, your brain can make more patterned interconnections than there are atoms in the universe. The number of these connections is much bigger than ten billion.
Let me make this big number a little clearer. If you wrote the number one on a piece of paper, you would then have to stick not just one metre of paper strips together to hold all the noughts after the one, not even a thousand kilometres of paper, but ten million kilometres of zeros! That means your brain can do a lot more than you usually ask it to do!
The potato you ate yesterday remembers your address today
We often take for granted some of the most astounding facts about our everyday life. They seem so normal we barely notice them. But just think, the potatoes or rice you ate yesterday, is today capable of sitting and laughing at a television program. When you digested the food you ate, in some way that is truly astounding it transformed into your movements, and feelings, and being able to do maths and enjoy a video. Not even the brainiest person in the world has been able to make a robot or creature that can eat potatoes and change them into the ability to read this book. If we can already do that amazing thing, what else might we be able to do?
Little Brain – Huge Mind
Your experience of remembering things, laughing, enjoying television and knowing who you are is called your mind. So we are going to explore your amazing, unbelievable, wonderful mind. We are going to roam around in the lives of people who do things with their mind that some people do not believe possible. Solomon Shereshevskii for instance remembered everything that ever happened to him – even the number-plate on the car that passed him on the road twenty years ago. Yes it’s true!
Djuma was reared by wolves in Russia because his parents were killed when he was a baby. What do you think his mind is like?
Those are the easy ones. Eileen Garret was able to hold an object and look into its past, describing clearly the people who used it and their life and surroundings. Edgar Cayce could apparently look into another person’s body, even when they were at a great distance. Hadad could heal people of serious illness, even when they were not present.
You have an amazing mind too
Even though you probably have two arms, two ears, and are like other people in many ways, some things about you are completely different. You are unique. Not only is your body slightly different in such ways as your fingerprints, but also your mind is different and special. There may be things some of your friends can do that you can’t. If you think about it and test yourself though, you will find you have skills and abilities they do not. To explore some areas of your specialness, we will try out some of the secret methods people with amazing minds have used in practising their unusual skills. Some of the things we will learn are how to remember things easily; how to quieten the body and melt fears; how to move beyond our eyes and ears to sense things; how to let the body tell us what it knows; how our body can heal itself, and many more.
Get ready for the journey into mind
So get ready to meet some really interesting people. They will help you discover something of the miracle it is to be human, and some of the amazing things you are capable of. What these interesting people did in various ways questions some of the ideas many people have about our mind, what it is capable of, and what the limits of human ability are. Their lives suggest we are much more wonderful than is often thought, and are part of a limitless and eternal existence.
SuperMinds
The Man Who Remembered Everything
Solomon Shereshevskii had a memory so perfect that he could recall every minute of his life in graphic detail. This fantastic capacity was further distinguished by the fact that he could “feel” images, “taste” colours, and “smell” sounds.
Solomon was born in Russia about 1886. His talent for remembering was discovered when he worked as a newspaper journalist in Moscow in 1905. His editor noticed that Solomon never took any notes when at meetings planning the day’s work. This had irritated the editor enough for him to eventually confront Solomon and criticise him for not doing his job properly. In some ways Solomon was quite a shy and awkward person, and the editor’s criticism embarrassed him. On being questioned however, he explained to his editor that he didn’t understand why anyone needed to take notes. He asked what purpose they had. This led the editor to ask more questions and discover that Solomon remembered everything his editor had said to him at every meeting. The editor realised what an unusual mind Solomon possessed and introduced him to Professor Luria.
A remarkable mental athlete
Professor Luria was a famous doctor who helped people with brain damage, and studied people with special abilities such as Solomon. Luria immediately wanted to try out a series of tests on Solomon. So together they began to explore the limits of what he could remember. To start with Luria asked Solomon to listen to lists of numbers that were read out to him and then repeat them from memory. Solomon was able to perfectly recall the numbers in each of these tests, and Luria gradually increased the length and complication of the list until it got to 70 numbers. Each time Solomon was able to repeat them perfectly and Luria became more astonished with each performance. If you imagine Solomon as a sort of mental athlete, then these test were not even getting him out of breath. So to show Luria a little bit more of what he could do, he repeated the lists backwards without having to hear them again.
The tests proved that Solomon’s ability to remember was almost boundless. Not only did there seem to be no limit to what he could recall, but each memory was indelible. It was never wiped out. So fifteen years later when Luria looked at his records of the lists of numbers he had used in the tests, and asked Solomon if he could repeat them without hearing them again, Solomon remembered without any hesitation. As usual he could repeat them forward or backward.
Because Professor Luria was a scientist, he wanted to make sure Solomon wasn’t faking his ability to remember, and he wanted to find out how such a phenomenal memory worked. He also wanted to know what it was like for Solomon himself. What was it like not to be able to forget anything – even the tiniest details of a room you visited, or a person you met? So once Luria trusted that Solomon had such a memory, he started to ask just what Solomon could remember.
Imagine having a memory so incredibly vivid that late in life you can still clearly recall your mother’s face corning into focus as she bent over your cot. What would it be like to remember every event of your babyhood and school years? Most adults have forgotten their childhood. In some ways this is a blessing, but it means they can’t remember what it was like to feel so helpless, to depend upon someone else to do everything for them, and to have such passionate feelings about events and people. Solomon clearly remembered not only the events from when he was an infant in a cot, but also what he felt in response to what was happening.
Your voice tastes good and seeing you is like music
Luria discovered that when Solomon experienced something, he didn’t simply hear a sound or see something. Instead his impressions of things seemed to merge together. This was not unique to Solomon, and is called ‘synesthesia’. This means that when Solomon heard something he might have an experience of tasting it also – or when he saw something he might also experience it as sound or smell. It is this blending of all his sense impressions that is a clue to the perfection of his memory. When Solomon heard someone speak, their voice might sound ‘crumbly and yellow’. He experienced another person’s voice like a ‘flame with fibres protruding from it’. One event Luria recorded in his book about Solomon (The Mind of a Mnemonist) was that Solomon refused to buy ice cream from a woman because he experienced her voice as ‘black cinders bursting out of her mouth’.
Not only did a persons voice produce these accompany images or sensations, but the sound of words also linked with particular inner experiences too. This would often produce a similar difficulty for Solomon as he experienced with the woman selling ice cream. In Russian the word for pig is svinya. This sounded “so fine and elegant” to Solomon so it didn’t suit the pig. The word khasser – Yiddish for pig – sounded just right though, and seemed to sound, and feel, and be experienced as the right quality for the pig. It made Solomon have an impression of a pig’s “fat greasy belly caked with mud.”
These strong mental pictures and sensations were the secret of Solomon’s inexhaustible memory. To remember the long sequence of numbers in the tests Luria had given him was easy. Each number connected with a particular mixture, a sort of mental hologram or many dimensional experience. These mental holograms were made up of sound, colour, taste, touch and smell. Each one was different and because it linked with so many sensory experiences, was easily memorable. As the numbers were read out, Solomon imagined placing these dimensional pictures along a road. To remember the sequence he simply imagined walking along the road again and repeated the numbers.
If only I could forget!
Because these multi-faceted mental holograms accompanying each experience were so intense, Solomon did not lose them as most of us do. For most of us our memory of experiences fades quite fast. For Solomon they would last for hours, crowding his mind with impressions, and making it difficult for him to give attention to what was happening in the present. This was such a problem Solomon tried various methods to get rid of some memories. He tried imagining a great sheet of canvas covering them over. He tried writing down the things he wanted to forget and burning the paper. Nothing worked.
Another problem Solomon faced was that he often found it difficult to recognise people he had know for some time, or recognise whose voice it was on the telephone. Solomon’s awareness of detail was so acute that slight changes in a person’s facial colouring or voice made it difficult to recognise them. Most of us do not even notice such small changes of complexion or vocal sound.
A mental giant with problems
Perhaps because of Solomon’s difficulty in dealing with the immense flood of impressions he met each day, he did not appear to be a mental giant. In fact he struggled with things that many of us deal with easily, and in this sense was mentally crippled by his ability. Sometimes he was timid and cautious. To others he looked awkward and often appeared mentally slow, spending a lot of time daydreaming amidst his vast internal virtual reality world. He worked at dozens of different jobs trying to find something in which he could feel skilled, and, at the same time use his remarkable abilities. Eventually he worked on stage as a memory man - Mnemonist - showing his mental ability to a paying public.
The magic of imagination
Because of the way his mind functioned Solomon demonstrated other remarkable talents than memorising. Being able to walk around his memories and knowledge as if it were a real landscape enabled him to solve problems which required detailed planning, visualisation and thinking. Through using his vivid mental imagery, Solomon said that he could rid himself of pain. He would create an image of the pain, then slowly move that image further and further away until it disappeared over the horizon. He said that at this point the pain disappeared. Using this image making ability he could also change his temperature. If he wanted to feel warmer he would imagine himself in a hot place. If he wanted to feel cold he would imagine himself amidst ice fields.