He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was told off for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own astonishment in realizing that others could apparently not do so), he could recall the speech word for word. Along the years Shereshevsky was asked to memorize complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices and even poems in foreign languages he did not master, and did so in a matter of minutes.