A crucial reading experience for me came 40 years ago when I plunged into a wonderful, often poetic account of a man with an extraordinary, seemingly limitless memory. This was The Mind of a Mnemonist, and I read the first dozen pages or so thinking it was a novel because it reminded me of a short story about another man with a fabulous memory – this time by Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious.

Then I realised that the book was in fact a case history, the most detailed one I had ever read, full of minute observations and investigations, but imbued with all the drama and sensibility of a novel. The author, Alexander Luria publishing as A. R. Luria), was a famous psychologist in Russia – indeed, the founder of that systematic science we call neuropsychology. Yet he also felt, from an early age, that no “classical” science, no reductive approach, could ever embrace the fullness, the reality of a life.

In the preceding decades, Luria had also published a string of dazzling monographs on aphasia and on the development of language in children among other things, as well as his monumental Higher Cortical Functions in Man. But it was only in his final decade, spanning the 1960s and 1970s, that he felt free to publish examples of what he called “romantic science” – a science which embraced the fullness of what it means to be a unique individual.

Reading Mnemonist showed me that it was possible – indeed, necessary – to write about the impact of an unusual condition, whether this was the effects of a brain injury or something “positive” like a prodigious memory, in two different ways. First, I needed to write from the perspective of analytic, reductive science, and second, from that of a “romantic” narrative and an almost novelistic science.

Luria thought of his novelistic case histories as the most personal of his works, and they were the ones that, given Soviet repression, he had to wait almost 60 years to publish. Of these, The Mind of a Mnemonist in particular was the inspiration for my own book Awakenings which, of course, I dedicated to him. Luria’s endeavour – combining classical and romantic, anatomy and art, science and narrative – has become my own. His “little book”, as he called it (there are only 100-odd small pages), altered the focus and direction of my life.

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