Rodrigo Quian Quiroga.

Borges and Memory: Encounters with the

Human Brain. Trans. Juan Pablo Fernndez. Cambridge (Mass.):

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012. ISBN:

9780262018210

Nick Kankahainen

In The Circular Ruins Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges pursues the
implications of (what we today might call) an intertextual view of reality to a
somewhat vertiginous conclusion, entertaining the notion that one may not
be a man, but the projection of another mans dream1 that we may be lit-
tle more than an assemblage of the various beliefs, anxieties and obses-
sions that gripped generations prior to our own. A similar logic applies to
books: no one person writes any book, nor is any reading of it independent
of all other readings. Inasmuch as universal history is the history of the
various intonations of a few metaphors,2 as Borges reminds us, quoting
Pliny the Elder: ut nihil noniisdem verbis redderetur auditum [nothing that
is heard can be repeated with the same words].3 Writer and reader are
each a combination of an infinite number of impressions, experiences, and
ideas, both remembered and forgotten.
Such is the case for neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, author of
Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain (2012), whose ef-
forts to understand the functions of human memory were clarified in a story
written by Jorge Luis Borges over 70 years ago. Quian Quiroga details how

COLLOQUY text theory critique 26 (2013). Monash University.

66 Nick Kankahainen

Borges story Funes, El Memorioso (Funes, His Memory [1998]) contrib-

uted to his understanding of the workings of memory in the human brain.
Quian Quirogas book is an instructive example of the benefits of paying at-
tention to the broader cultural context in which all research exists (science
and humanities alike), and how solutions to questions may lie beyond ones
immediate professional sphere.
In the course of his research into how memory works, Quiroga and
his colleagues were lucky enough to find neurons in the human brain that
respond to abstract concepts, ignoring particular details (5). The key to
abstraction and hence the creation of memories, is, paradoxically, the abil-
ity to forget. Quian Quiroga found that neurons in the hippocampus were
responsible for the conversion of raw sensory data into (factual) memory.
The neurons in the hippocampus encode perceptions into abstract form by
identifying their relation to abstract concepts already present in the mind,
thereby placing disparate fragments of information into a coherent order.
The identification of associations between data and concepts allows the in-
clusion of the former into a pre-existing body of knowledge, thereby becom-
ing a part of an existing memory-structure.
The creation of memory, in fact, involves a degree of forgetting. Raw
sensory data becomes meaningful through its alignment with already exist-
ing concepts and structures. Such a process necessarily involves a forget-
ting of specific details of the perception, and an ignorance of those aspects
of a scene or thing that is deemed irrelevant or uninterpretable. The role of
forgetting in the formation of memories was clarified for Quian Quiroga in
Borges Funes, El Memorioso. Indeed, Quian Quirogas own story resem-
bles a Borgesian account, in which the key protagonist is Borges himself.
Several of Borges stories relate a narrators astonishment at discovering,
in the most unlikely of places, a key piece of information, which solves a
particularly perplexing question or puzzle (5). A moment of apparent felici-
ty has the author encounter a source that holds the key to understanding
an until-then insurmountable mystery, be it a lost book or missing volume
(Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), a Christian missionary-turned-sinophile
(Garden of the Forking Paths), or even a jaguar (The Gods Script). It is
not without irony, then, that the solution to Quian Quirogas own neurosci-
entific conundrum would be found within one of Borges own tales:

[T]he scientist, obsessed with trying to understand discoveries

whose interpretation was already there, in a book written more than
half a century before, a book that I had read as a youngster and that
lay lost in my memory (5).

In Funes, El Memorioso Borges recounts the story of his meeting with

 Borges and Memory 67

one Ireneo Funes, who, after being thrown from a horse, awoke to a pre-
sent moment that was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as
was his oldest and even his most trivial memories.4 The fictional Funes re-
counts to the (equally fictional) Borges how, prior to the accident he had
lived as though in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without listen-
ing, forgot everything, or virtually everything.5 Borges listens as Funes ridi-
cules Plinys dictum, his senses no longer impeded by reductive abstrac-
tion:

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, or
with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Ro Negro on the
eve of the Battle of Quebracho.6

As Quian Quiroga shows, Funes abilities are exhibited by well-known con-

temporary savants, like Kim Peek (source of the film Rainman), Daniel
Tammet (who could recite the first 22,514 digits of ) and Stephen Wilt-
shire (renowned for his detailed and accurate drawings of vast city-scapes).
Yet, like Funes, each of these men has an amazing power to perceive and
memorise details but cannot turn them into general, abstract concepts
(1145). These parallels impelled Quian Quiroga to consider Borges tale,
as a source through which to reflect upon and interpret his own research,
revealing to him the integral role forgetting plays in the formation of abstract
concepts. Such a thesis is indeed evident in Borges own account of Funes:
it is only in virtue of the fictional Borges own fallible memory that he is able
to offer a coherent summary of the many things Ireneo Funes told him
that night.7 Funes himself, like the savants Quian Quiroga discusses, could
offer no such summary, only an endless succession of associated details,
devoid of any overreaching concept that might group them together.
Quian Quiroga is careful to point out that he is not trying to force a link
between Funes and his own research, or suggest that Borges foresaw
modern neuroscience (8). Instead, Borges and Memory shows how Bor-
ges tale and Quian Quirogas own research each provide an important
means of interpreting the other.
Yet efforts to understand human behaviour have never been the ex-
clusive preserve of science. As Quian Quiroga points out, it has been a top-
ic of contemplation and investigation for Ancient Greek philosophers, Car-
tesian rationalists, and British empiricists; not to mention the likes of Bor-
ges, the brilliant intellectuals who defy any categorisation who reached
astounding conclusions guided only by his reasoning and his prodigious
imagination (4).
68 Nick Kankahainen

Quian Quirogas book is enlivening because he does not ignore (or

forget) the parallel speculations he found between his own research and
that of academics and thinkers well beyond his professional sphere. In-
stead of merely referring to such sources in a buried footnote at the end of
a paper or book, or ignoring them altogether, Quian Quiroga seeks to un-
derstand how it is possible that Borges had perhaps already dreamed re-
sults like the ones I was lucky enough to discover (7).
Borges and Memory presents a timely reminder of the cultural context
that all research exists within; that we may all be simply sharpening and
rephrasing the same questions that Aristotle asked himself more than two
millennia ago (7). Nonetheless, Quian Quiroga demonstrates that any ab-
straction necessarily involves a degree of forgetting. While identifying the
important balance struck between remembering and forgetting in the for-
mation of memory, Borges and Memory more broadly suggests the value of
cross-disciplinary dialogue in conducting research.

Monash University
njkan2@student.monash.edu

NOTES

1
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, (New York: Penguin
Books), 100.
2
Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library: Non-Fiction 19221986, trans. Esther Allen,
Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger (London: Penguin Books), 353.
3
Borges, Collected Fictions, 134.
4
Ibid., 135.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 134.