Even on that day we knew

Doctors say, the earliest reported case was Fred. He could astonish people by never taking notes during briefings but being able to repeat the detailed instructions word for word. He was sent to psychologist, Achmed Hymerstaph, who found that Fred could remember, with little trouble, lists of hundreds of numbers, long strings of nonsense syllables, and poetry in foreign languages. He could even list the test pieces backward and remember them correctly after several years.

The secret of this extraordinary memory was the intensity of Fred's imagination and the way sensations tend to spill over and affect each other inside his head. For example, the sharp chime of a bell was not only experienced as a ringing noise but also sparked flashes of light, tastes, and feelings in his mind. He described one particular tone rung by Achmed as looking like greenish fireworks with a rough texture, and a taste of briny pickles. The voice of a friend was described as yellow and crumbly.

To Fred, numbers had shapes and colors: The number 05291975, for example, was flat, rectangular, and whitish, or was high spirited.

While Fred eventually made a living as a professional, his extreme reaction to sensations was as much a handicap as a blessing. Achmed described him as a timid and ponderous person who was weighed down by detail and often had trouble understanding what he was remembering. Fred complained that every word sent a chaos of image stumbling through his mind, so that he could not follow the sense of complex sentences. Common metaphors simply left him confused. He had difficulty in recognizing people because their faces never looked exactly the same as the last time he saw them; and if someone coughed while he was trying to memorize a list, the cough would be smeared across his memory when he came to recall the material. Fred's imagination was so powerful that he had often been late for work because he would imagine that he had already got up and been to work that day.