“Spot checks, so to speak. A bassoonist broke a key of his bassoon and told Toscanini, who thought it over and told him not to worry, he wouldn’t have to play that note that night. Things like that. And he conducted without scores, and wrote down missing parts for players, and so on.”

“Uh-huh. . . .”

“The musicologist Tovey had a similar power,” Ursula added. “It isn’t uncommon in musicians. It’s as if music is a language where incredible memory feats are sometimes possible.”

“Hmm.”

Marina went on. “A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University, early twenty-first century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all sorts— again music, but also verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis. ‘Interest is the thing,’ he was reported to have said. ‘Interest focuses the attention.’ ”

“True,” Sax said.

“He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An interest in meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of twenty-three words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on.”

“I’d like to learn more about him.”

“Yes,” Ursula said. “He was less of a freak than some of the others. The so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual images presented to them in great detail— they’re often impaired in other parts of their lives.”

Marina nodded. “Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known as V.P., who remembered truly huge quantities of random fact, in tests and in general. But both of them experienced synesthesia.”

“Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could calculate the election returns for the entire United States faster than any calculators of the 1930s. Talmudic scholars who had not only memorized the Talmud, but also the location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers who knew Homeric amounts of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have used the Renaissance palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried that himself after his stroke, with fair results. And so on.

“These extraordinary abilities don’t seem to be the same as ordinary memory,” Sax observed.

“Eidetic memory,” Marina said. “Based on images that return in great detail. It’s said to be the way that most children remember. Then at puberty, the way we remember changes, at least for most of us. It’s as if these people don’t ever metamorphose away from the children’s way.”

“Hmm,” Sax said. “Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes of continuous distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare bimodal distribution.”

Marina shrugged. “We don’t know. But we have one here to study.”

“You do!”