I followed a link to this site after reading about photographic memory. A person posted the question “Is it real or not” and the moderator’s answer was that it was most likely a myth. So, in response to that, I would like to say: I am a real skeptic about almost anything that can’t be proven scientifically. I Don’t believe in ‘magic’, hypnosis, and other things or that nature. However, I was prescribed a drug called KEPPRA to try and prevent Cluster headaches several years back. The medicine did NOT help with the headaches, but it did have2MAJOR~side effects, (1) True PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY, and (2) intolerable nightmares. For approx. 6 - 8 weeks, I considered myself a genius. At the time I was studying Computer Science at Indiana University and after quickly skimming thru a C++ programming book, I could recite it word for word. It was truely incredible. It was NOT like memorizing anything at all, it was like recalling the picture of something and being able to read it word for word from the picture in my head. I could not stand the horrific nightmares and had to stop taking KEPPRA. If it weren’t for that nasty side effect, I would still be taking KEPPRA today and I’m sure I’d be holding many PHD’s by now. My experience with this has led me to believe 100% that in the future, people will be able to greatly enhance intelligence and memory skills by simply taking a pill a day. I can’t wait for that day and I’m tempted to try the drug again to see if I could regain that incredible memory abilities. I went for a B- student to a Straight A+ student in every class, correcting my professors when necessary, and knowing my (prefect) grades before even turning the work in. It was fantastic !! PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY DOES EXIST AND IS AS REAL AS WATER AND AIR !!
So I guess you didn’t really have a question.
I’ve read that there are a few people who have it, but I don’t see how it would make you a genius, especially in a C++ class. It would just be the equivalent of being able to use online help, which is nice, but doesn’t write programs for you.
Memorizing stuff isn’t particularly helpful unless you actually understand it and can use it to find novel relationships with other material. They don’t hand out PhDs for rote memorization skills, but for the research and synthesis of novel information.
Isn’t Bill Clinton supposed to have one?
Stephen Fry has a really good memory. I don’t know if it’s “literally” photographic, in that they can remember every detail or can re-examine something accurately through memory. I expect it’s just reliable recall.
Imagine having a photographic memory and amnesia at the same time. Everything would just be a series of blank pages.
That was a pornographic memory. Slightly different and much more common.
I’m in the middle of reading Joshua Foer’s excellent book, “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” and it very clearly states and backs up with cites that photographic memory is a myth and has never been proven.
There was a single published case of someone having photographic memory but it was not reproducible and the study has a lot of problems (including the fact that the researcher ended up marrying his subject, and she was never tested again).
I’ll find the cite and post it shortly.
Strictly anecdotal but a close friend of mine in college had a perfect 4.0 in undergrad and then was #1 in his class at U of Arkansas Law School. We figured he was a genius-like but he confided to us that actually he just had a photographic memory and for tests and the like he could recall with perfect clarity whatever pages he had read. In Calculus he could see the formulas on the page. For Law he could see the written decisions, etc.
So for him at least it was less a case of being a genius than that everything was for him an open book test.
Here’s an article written by Foer for Slate on the subject (prior to his book being published).
I’ll recap… The researcher was Charles Stromeyer III from Harvard and published his paper on photographic memory in *Nature *in 1970. His paper was about a young woman named Elizabeth who was shown a pattern of 10,000 random dots in her right eye, and then a day later she was shown another pattern of 10,000 dots in her left eye. She was able to mentally fuse the two images to form a single new image where the dot patterns overlapped.
In 1979 another researcher, John Merritt, decided to investigate Stromeyer’s claim. He placed the same memory test in magazines and newspapers across the country w/ 2 random images - hoping that someone would be able to come forward replicating Elizabeth’s feat. He figured that over 1,000,000 people tried the test, but of that number only 30 wrote in with the correct answer. Of those 30 people, none were able to pull off the trick with scientists looking over their shoulders.
That, plus the marriage between the subject and scientist, and the inability to find anyone else with the ability, has caused some to conclude that there was something fishy about the Stromeyer’s findings. He denies it, but admits that his one-woman study is not strong evidence for other people having photographic memory.
They had a 60 Minutes segment about “superior autobiographical memory” this past year. Marilu Henner of Taxi fame has one. I suppose this isn’t a “photographic” memory, but she can remember what she had for breakfast on August 2, 1973, etc.
http://www.popeater.com/2010/12/20/marilu-henner-60-minutes-super-memory/
Long before Foer looked into it, the scuttlebutt amongst memory researchers was that Stromeyer’s results were fraudulent. As I first heard the story (in the 1980s), it was not that Stromeyer was dishonest but that he had a reputation for being gullible, and his girlfriend (later his wife) and some other friends were playing a prank on him, a prank that got out of hand.
Previous threads on this topic:
Photographic memory - eidetic hoax
Photographic Memory Response?
My wife claims to have photographic memory. I am still not convinced, however there are times that she does things that lead me to believe this might be the case. She has never proven it to me by recieting pages of books by memory, but she can remember things like telephone numbers that we only called once years from the time she first heard them. Once I paid a bill over the telephone. I didn’t have a paper and pen handy for the confimation number, 10 digits or so. She listened to them being read off. A week or so later I was reconciling my checkbook and came across the entry for that bill. She recieted the confirm number to me. I wrote it down. When I got the printed reciept in the mail it had the confirm number on it. Exact match. I was impressed as I can’t ever remember anything.
I don’t know about photographic memory, but SWMBO can recall, in excruciating detail, every screw-up I have made in our 18+ years together.
And there are a lot of them.
If you define “photographic memory” to mean “very good memory for certain sorts of material”, or “memory that is better than mine,” then certainly it exists (although it is not obvious why even a perfect memory for numbers, for example, should be called “photographic” rather than “excellent”). However, this is not what people commonly mean by the phrase.
Actually, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that people sometimes use “photographic memory” to mean “very good memory for certain sorts of material”, and sometimes use it to mean the ability to recall visual scenes in enormous and highly accurate detail, comparable to what might be recorded in a photograph. The first exists and is not uncommon. The second does not exist. The trouble is that using the phrase “photographic memory” leads people to conflate the two, and thus to draw false inferences about what memory (including, sometimes, their own memory) can actually do and how it works.
I don’t see how people can so blithely say that some ability does not exist, based on a small number of studies of a relatively small number of people (even a million people is a tiny fraction of the world’s population). It’s not like we’re talking about something inherently impossible for a human, like flying; we’re just talking about some people who are much, much better at something that everyone can do, namely recall the details of a scene.
Obviously you can define “photographic” strictly enough to make it impossible, but I think for most people, it’s not necessary to say that someone never forgets anything they’ve ever glimpsed for even an instant. After all, a camera doesn’t constantly record everything around it; it only records what it’s focused on, and only during the fraction of a second when the shutter snaps, and at varying degrees of resolution that depend on the distance, available light, and field of view. Someone who can quote a book verbatim after reading it at normal speed would qualify as demonstrating “photographic” memory for me.
We all know that there are rare people who can do extraordinary things, sometimes at the cost of other “normal” abilities. I’m not saying anyone should assume that photographic recall exists without proof, but I find it amazing that anyone could think or imply that one fraud, or even several negative studies, could disprove it.
Slightly off topic, but somewhat relevant:
I recall reading (no cite) that in Medieval times, students at the time were required to commit everything to memory.
It was considered commonplace for a scholar to be able to recall perfectly 300 lines of poetry after only one reading; equivalently, it was normal for them to recite verbatim large bodies of text.
Similar performance was “normal” in other areas of study.
I have no idea how this was done (if, in fact, what I read was true), but it does suggest that memory is an acquired and trainable ability.
Similarly, I once took a speed reading course. It worked fantastically well; for example, I could read and retain a physics text book in one evening. However, not any more.
Law school exams usually are open book tests (at least they were for me). The way to do well in these tests is not to repeat decisions verbatim, but to extract legal principles from the decisions and apply them to novel fact sets. A very good memory is very helpful in that you can recall ratio decidendi from decisions in cases that are similar to the novel fact set, but I’m not sure that a photographic memory alone is going to be of much use.
I really don’t see a question in the OP, but it looks like a lovely topic for a debate, so I moved the thread to GD.