Numbers are handled by a different department altogether, in the next building. And if you want curses, as the Monty Python Flying Circus skit reminds us, you'll need to go down the hall. An early investigator of the brain, John Hughlings-Jackson, recounts a story about a woman patient of his who lived completely without speech. As investigators probed the brain further, the riddle of the mind revealed itself to be deeply specific. Contrarily, the minds of other apparently normal individuals have lost the ability to retain concrete nouns, while perfectly able to identify abstract things.
Memory is a palace, say the ancient philosophers, where every room parks a thought.
Yet with every clinical discovery of yet another form of specialized forgetfulness, the rooms of memory exploded in number. Down this road there is no end. Memory, already divided into a castle of chambers, balkanizes into a terrifying labyrinth of tiny closets. There are records of aphasias that interfere with the use of the past tense. The absurd capriciousness underlying such a memory system is best represented by the categorization scheme of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, as interpreted by the South American fiction master J. L. Borges.