Shereshevsky participated in many psychological studies, most of them carried out by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria over a thirty-year time span.
For example, if Shereshevsky heard a musical tone played he would immediately see a colour, touch would trigger a taste sensation, and so on for each of the senses.
Luria did not clearly distinguish between whatever natural ability Shereshevsky might have had and mnemonic techniques like the method of loci and number shapes that "S" described.
[5] When asked how he could do this, he replied that he would either "see" himself running after a train that has just begun to pull out or by "seeing" himself lying in bed perfectly still while trying to fall asleep.
Shereshevsky lived in Moscow with his wife, Aida, and son, in "a damp room in the basement of a janitorial outbuilding tucked away in a courtyard".
According to Mikhail Reynberg, Shereshevsky's nephew, his uncle was pressed to work to the "secret police" (NKVD) because of his memory, but declined.
Reynberg recalls that Shereshevsky "could be forgetful", and that he "trained hours a day for his evening performances", because he needed "consciously try to commit something to memory".
[11] Reportedly, in his late years, he realized that he could forget facts with just a conscious desire to remove them from his memory, although Luria did not test this directly.
A BBC radio play The Memory Man by Robert Ferguson was based on Luria's book Mind of a Mnemonist.
Dr. Barbara Oakley's book A Mind For Numbers references Shereshevsky's memory in a larger chapter about chunking.