Is abstract knowledge incompatible with literal memorization?

Summary:
Appears (empirically) as if our ability to abstract might be in direct conflict with our ability of rote memorization... Solomon Shereshevsky (Luria, 1968) had an almost perfect literal memory. He remembers strings of hundreds of digits for years after only having read them once. I would like to explain this by his awesome synesthesia: everything is encoded in so many ways that everything is considered as new, and so a new memory trace is formed to remember it (we know that "first time" experiences are well remembered (Robinson, 1993), as are distinctive features (Hunt & Worthen, 2006)).  Shereshevsky's gift was compensated by big difficulties recognizing... and had basically no understanding of abstraction: metaphor, figurative language. So then it follows that those with an

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