[2] The narrator, a version of Borges himself, meets Ireneo Funes, a teenage boy who lives in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, in 1884.
Borges's cousin asks the boy for the time, and Funes replies instantly, without the aid of a watch and accurate to the minute.
As he enters, Borges is greeted by Funes's voice speaking perfect Latin, reciting "the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis" (by Pliny the Elder).
A poor, ignorant young boy in the outskirts of a small town, he is hopelessly limited in his possibilities, but (says Borges) his absurd projects reveal "a certain stammering greatness".
When dawn reveals Funes's face, only 19 years old, Borges sees him "as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids".
[3] The early death of Funes echoes the idea of unfulfilled potential, the wasted miracle of a plainsman with phenomenal abilities who lives and dies in obscurity.
The narrator mentions that Locke postulated then rejected an impossible idiom "in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch would have its own name; Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous"[4] since it did not take time into account: given that physical objects are constantly changing in subtle ways, Funes insisted that in order to refer to an object unambiguously one must specify a time.
Because Funes can distinguish every physical object at every distinct time of viewing, he has no clear need of generalization (or detail-suppression) for the management of sense impressions.
The neuroscience aspects of Funes are also discussed in detail by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga in his book Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain.
Jill Price, the actress Marilu Henner[8] and a few others, can remember with great accuracy most days of their lives starting from the average age of eleven.
The scientific term for their unique condition is "hyperthymestic syndrome", more recently known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM).