BOY PRODIGY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 283, 30 November 1933, Page 9

BOY PRODIGY.

" VISUAL " MEMORY. SPELLS WORDS BACKWARDS. FATHER LIVED IN WAIKATO. A boy prodigy, whose father and grandfather 'were Waikato residents, has been discovered in St. Kilda, Melbourne. He remembers everything he has seen or heard once- so thoroughly, that he literally knows it backwards. In the presence of witnesses, he has been given a sentence of 20 or more words to read, and in exactly six minutes he has spelled it aloud, backwards, without pausing. He is Basil Isaacs, aged eight, the son of Mr. Albert Isaacs, who was born in Cambridge. The lad's grandfather was well known many years ago as the founder of the Okororoire Sanatorium. A relative, who resides in Auckland, is Mr. A. Asher, of Devonport. Basil could not he regarded as a "backward" speller in the ordinary sense, states the "Star," Melbourne. He is a pupil of the Elwood School, and his teacher, Mr. T. Carrigg, says: "Basilj is the best reader and the quickest speller of his age that I have ever heard of. | Immediately anything is shown to him lie understands it, and the customary repetition is wasted on him." Visual Memory. However, there is nothing abnormal about him, beyond his pow'er of memorising and his ability to spell backwards. He can do this not only with sentences first memorised forwards, but also with long words given to him on the instant. He does not memorise backward spelling, but conjures up in his mind a straight-forward picture of the word and mentally reads it backwards. Basil's brother Leslie does not share his peculiar ability, nor has any other member of the family shown any mental abnormality. An extraordinary accuracy in everything he does, including games, is the boy*& outstanding characteristic,

His parents and teachers say that he is very good-natured and thoroughly healthy and interested in everything. When submitted to a test recently, he correctly spelt backwards sentences from a Melbourne paper and rapidly inverted a "tongue-twister" of 42 words of similar sounds. The supreme test was with a German "omnibus" word of 78 letters. It took him less than ten minutes to memorise the word, which he spelt backwards without a pause. The word was tachtungskommissionsmitgliedstellvertreter. Alienist Explains. This visual form of memory is well known to mental experts, and it accounts for most feats of concentration, such as the performance of complicated arithmetical calculations. Several cases of children, who could calculate with abnormal ability, have been known, but the spelling faculty is rare. An Auckland mental specialist said that the case in point was one 'of the photographic-mirror memories. It was photographic, or visual, because the boy had only to look at a passage to memorise it. It was also a mirror memory, because he could reverse the mental picture and start with the end and work backwards. His mind could be likened to a moving picture film, which can be run backwards or forwards at will. The doctor recalled a point of interest in connection with mirror memories. The famous Italian artist, sculptor and philosopher, Leonardo da Vinci, had a mirror memory, and wrote much of his work in back-to-front writing. That is, he used the left hand and wrote inverted letters. They could only be read by a normal person when held to a mirror. It would be interesting to know if Basil Isaacs is lefthanded, remarked the specialist.