Per this video and this Wiki notechimps are notably superior to humans in remembering flashed pattern number sequences. Why (evolutionarily or otherwise) would this be the case?
A WAG: our trick that is part of what give us as as pecies our huge leg up is not a superior ability to remember every specific item as individual items (every tree as individual trees) but to use categoriazation and abstract thought to give us frameworks to organize information and to communicate about it (we remember less about each individual tree but we know more about the forest as a whole and about what classes of trees are in it). Or to put it differently, since chimps do not have the same reasoning capacity to determine which item is a key feature more brain real estate is used to remember every feature of every possibly salient item; we use more of our brains analyzing for the key aspect and storing by it, and less on memorized every aspect of each specific exemplar.
Just a guess, but maybe it’s because they lack language.
Illiterate humans usually have better memory than literate humans. You’ve only got one brain, if you’re optimising some of it for writing, you’re not optimising it for something else.
So, without speech and without writing, there could be less brain resources being taken away from memory.
Okay, I’ll bite. Cite?
I’m sure it’s called “over-compensating” or something.
I have read (although I don’t remember where) a somewhat similar explanation for why little kids often remember things in amazing detail. The adult brain is better able to prioritize important details and store them, while insignificant details are forgotten. Kids, not having the same capability or experience, take in and store everything they see.
I think it’s because humans are less focused. Let’s face it other than being fed and finding the occasional romp in the trees, what else does a chimp have to do?
Even toddlers have big plans that leave many things on their minds, beside food and such.
The more things on your mind the easier the distraction.
In the oft-cited Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond opens the book with a New Guinea native whom he credits with the ability to memorize the vast quantity of edible and non-edible plants in his environment. (This is part of his argument that aboriginal people are not any less intelligent than western Europeans.) Aboriginal people have to be able to this because they do not have books, writing, or computers to assist their memory. Diamond contends that the average Westerner would be incapable of this feat of memorization, but the average aboriginal person is quite capable it. There is strong selective pressure for this ability–aboriginal people acquire this ability or they die.
But that doesn’t seem to say that illiterate people have better memory than literate people. If that were true, then wouldn’t that imply that an illiterate person would have better memory than a literate person living in the same society?
Humans in general remember a massive amount of information about survival in their environment, why is New Guinea different from the rest of the world? Seems like it’s the same type of stuff everyone does.
According to many psychologists, some young children have the capacity for eidetic imagery, by which they can maintain a vivid and detailed visual memory of a stimulus for several seconds or minutes after it has gone out of view. However, virtually all lose this ability by or before the age of twelve. (Almost everything about eidetic imagery, including its very existence, is disputed, but I think the preceding represents the scientific consensus quite well.)
If standard descriptions of eidetic imagery are accurate, it would seem very likely that a child who has it would be able to do this task quite as well as the chimp. Perhaps chimps are like human children in this respect, retaining mental abilities that, in humans, are lost later in life as we acquire other more useful mental skills in their place. It would certainly have made more sense to compare the chimp performance on this test with that of eidetic children than with a “memory champion.” By their own accounts, competitive memory champions (yeah, it is some sort of “sport”) do not rely on anything like eidetic abilities, or, indeed, on innate gifts, but on learned mnemonic techniques, often specifically adapted and tuned to the particular sorts of memory task they are competing over. It might (conceivably) be possible to develop a mnemonic technique by which an adult human could equal or beat the chimp on this test, but competitive memorists like Pridmore have yet to develop it, and in its absence ther is no reason to expect them to perform better than any random person.
That’s not a comparison to what literate people can remember. I can remember hundreds of books I’ve read and who the authors are. I can remember hundreds of movies I’ve seen, who directed them, who stared in them, and what era they took place in.
I agree that the average human living in an aboriginal-type environment is indeed capable of memorizing a massive amount of information necessary to survive, but do you think that the average civilized westerner, dropped into such an environment, could do the same?
IIRC, Diamond stated that, even after much time (30+ years) spent with New Guinea aboriginals, he could not even begin to duplicate this feat of memorization (that of distinguishing between thousands of edible and non-edible plants and animals).
As Diamond puts it:
The section goes on to describe a specific example in which the native New Guineans were insulted that Diamond questioned them about some mushrooms, and that “only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones.”
To switch gears away from wild plants and animals…
Even in the development of western civilization, I’d contend that preliterate people were capable of greater feats of memorization than most people today, such as traveling poets being capable of reciting the Iliad from memory, for example.
I’m not saying that a literate person today is not capable of developing this skill, and I’m not saying that literate people today are incapable of memorizing things. I’m saying that illiterate humans will tend to develop this skill to a greater extent than that of literate humans, because they don’t have the “crutch” of writing.
Can you recite any one of these books word-for-word from memory, like the preliterate bards did with the orally transmitted epic poems?
Nope, but I can recite all the epic poetry that my Dad used to recite to me instead of reading me bedtime stories. 
I’d guess it’s because I heard them so many times - though that was more than 40 years ago. Surely the pre-literate people who memorized epic poetry weren’t any different from us today? We just don’t have the motivation to do the feat. Same goes for Mr Guns & Germs, he doesn’t have any real motivation to memorize the edibles, since he can buy groceries.
Almost certainly, preliterate bards did not have their poems memorized word-for-word. They had a fairly detailed structure of the story memorized, and some specific details and phrases, and then improvised within those constraints.
Do you mean an average westerner born and raised in that environment? or do you mean an average westerner of age 30 that moves into that environment?
A person raised in that environment will be learning about that environment from the start, while their brain is still a sponge. A person transplanted into that environment at a much later age will be at a disadvantage in the same way that someone from New Guinea transplanted to our environment at a later age will probably take longer to understand and remember all of the things we do.
Exactamundo.
But I still don’t accept GG&S as an authoritative cite on the subject. Diamond is offering an anecdote, not scientific fact. Not to mention that the entire book is pretty much hypothesis anyway-- not accepted scientific theory.
The section I quoted above cites referenced studies, which are only then followed up by a specific anecdote.
This is true enough, but the points made above are fairly objective and are not part of Diamond’s actual hypothesis.
P.S. Do you folks really have such a problem with preliterate people being capable of prodigious feats of memorization that might perhaps exceed those of the average literate person?
After all, squirrels are capable of prodigious feats of memorization, too, to keep track of their nuts. Squirrels that don’t have this ability don’t make it through the winter. If squirrels had record-keeping, this wouldn’t be necessary, and there would no longer be evolutionary selection pressure to maintain this ability.
Now, an argument could be made that there has not been enough time for there to be any significant evolutionary changes for humans. However, we’re talking about some pretty severe selection pressure here–a New Guinea native unable to keep track of the edible plants and animals in his environment dies.
If evolutionary pressure seems a stretch, you might instead liken it to developing an innate ability–preliterate people must develop this skill to survive in their environment because they can’t look things up.