User:FarukMustafic/sandbox

Franco Magnani is a memory artist. Magnani was born in Pontito in 1934. Pontito is a small town in the hills of Tuscany which had a population of 500 people before the second world war, which decreased to just 70 people, made up of the elderly and retirees, following the war. The small town fell into disarray when the agrarian economy had dwindled. In 1965, this prompted the thirty-one year old Magnani to leave his childhood home of Pontito, a decision which was deeply troubling as he had decided not to return. After making his decision, Magnani became very ill. It is unclear what this illness was exactly but, symptoms included high fever, weight loss, delirium, and possibly even seizures. For this, Magnani was placed into a sanatorium. Here he had vivid dreams of his hometown, not of his family or friends or even of events, but of the town itself. According to Magnani, the dreams were in a detail beyond anything he could consciously imagine.

After getting released from the hospital, Franco Magnani considered, but ultimately rejected medical possibilities that were suggested. These possibilities included some sort of freudian splitting of the ego which could have resulted in hypermnesia hysteria. While Magnani rejected these notions, he never allowed them to be properly explored. Once relocating to San Francisco, Magnani picked up painting, which he had no formal training in. His first painting was of his childhood home in Pontito. Magnani painted the house in remarkable accuracy, so much so that he himself was amazed. This was especially surprising considering the fact that at this point, Magnani had not been to Pontito in over 25 years. Over time, he grew an obsession to painting the town in which he grew up in, famed psychologist Oliver Sacks noted in 1987, Magnini seemed "possessed."

That same year, photographer Susan Schwartzenberg went to Pontito to photograph the scenes of many of Magnani's paintings. This was done as part of a study to document the astonishing accuracy of the artists work. This study would be revealed in an art exhibit on memory in 1988. This garnered lots of attention by researchers such as Bob Miller who suggested that this work could reveal the accuracy, distortions, and inventions of Magnani's memory. These photographs showed something interesting about Magnani's work that was not previously evident. The Exploratorium, which hosted the exhibit for which Schwartzenberg took photos for, explains this observation while examining a drawing of a church. "This drawing, looking down from a point high above the path approaching the church, shows a view that Magnani could never have seen." Work done by Baddley and Hitch in 1974 showed the importance of the visuospatial sketchpad in their model of working memory. The VSS stores visual and spatial information as part of Short Term Memory which is used in working memory for problem solving. This is miraculous due to the fact that Magnani imagined and painted with incredible accuracy, perspectives that he couldn't have possibly ever seen. His visual sensory information was stored long term which he was able to recall more than a quarter of a century later in intricate detail. This prompted praise from Sacks, stating that this rare phenomenon made him an eidetic artist. Sacks went on to say, "he could seemingly reproduce with almost photographic accuracy every building, every street, every stone of Pontito, far away, close up, from any possible angle."