I took Keppra for temporal lobe epilepsy and the side effects on the body made it a bad medicine for me. I have always been able to bring back pictures of events and pages i’ve read so this is just a norm for me, it’s hard me to visualize life without that ability. The Keppra probably blocked a bad chemical reaction or made it so you couldn’t uptake a mineral which you’re body takes up in excess and throws off the balance. I think Keppra is based on asparagains so eating asparagus may help you by mellowing out stray signals in the brain. Less side effects also. There are a lot of foods with asparagains
Early on, my son (who has Aspergers Syndrome) either had a photographic memory, or something pretty damn close. He could read a 400 page book (this was back in the second grade) and not only could tell you almost any detail in the book, but actually turn back to the page and show you.
He remembered addresses and phone numbers, the digits of pi, the periodic table with all the relevant facts about the various elements, all without any apparent effort. It was scary. The strange thing was how he could manipulate facts and figures. He could relate almost any two random facts to each other and then quote all relevant sources. When he was about eight, we got him a World Book encyclopedia. He read the whole thing and practically memorized it.
As he grew up, we worked with him to help him become more social. We taught him how to interpret other people’s emotions, how to look at someone and pay attention without giving them* the eye*. He became much more mature, less prone to outbursts, and less frustrated. And, he developed empathy.
A few years ago, he told me he has lost much of his photographic memory. He can’t memorize entire books of tables anymore by simply reading them once or twice. He actually has to write down phone numbers.
I use to joke that he was able to memorize everything because his brain wasn’t full of things like “I left my keys on the table”, “I need to to verify that I put on pants before I leave the house in the morning”, and all the dreck our brains are filled with.
I might not have been too far off. Our brains must have some limit of capacity, and we fill ours with social intelligence. Is that person happy? Is this a proper thing to say? Should I complement this person, or will they think I’m being patronizing? It’s a lot of brain power to operate in society and keep track of all of your relationships.
I wonder when my son was free of that burden, if he could then use all that spare processing power to develop a photographic memory.
It is possible that you’re son has chosen to eat foods that dampen his intellect so he fits in with his friends and relatives. I was been doing this subconsciously for many years. Many people do it and don’t even know it. Some people don’t want to leave their friends and wind up associating with the highly intellectual societies.
Which foods dampen the intellect?
I’m curious how he had the ability to sit down to take an exam and then open his book the previous day. That would be a cool ability to have. But apparently it wasn’t that useful, because it only made the other students in class have excellent scores.
His intellect is not dampened.
His amazing capability to link disparate topics is undiminished. His ability to problem solve is amazing. He is a physical chemist with a deep understanding of physics and chemistry. His specialty is quantum chemistry. He’s also a Rabbi – something he earned on the side as he was going to college. Other rabbis have commented on his sharp analytic skills and the wonderful insights he can pull from the text.
What he can no longer do is effortlessly memorize whole texts and series of random digits. Instead, he is now able to analyze what other people are thinking and how they might respond to him. He’s much more social and able to make friends. His sense of humor is extremely strong and can be quite sophisticated.
It may have been a trade off - social skills for near photographic memory, but in the end, he’s much happier this way.
Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times Magazine: Secrets of a Mind-Gamer.
The brain has an amazing capability for rote memory. We simply don’t use it any more.
As for that mental imagery idea… if you keep doing it all the time, won’t the images of Michael Jackson kicking the pope up the butt etc. get old and be just as forgettable as the cards? Of course those are the experts, so I guess not. But I don’t go along with the idea of trying to make everything sensational in your mind to remember it as that author suggests at one point.
I do agree with you on the rote memory being a lost art though. In old times people would often recall long conversations they had verbatum.
I just saw Telefon for the fifth or so time the other night. Who’s going to call Major Bronson a liar? You? Lee Remick? I hope it ain’t Donald Pleasance cause his ass gets crunk and dead.
Of course, these people don’t memorize the order of these cards for months, or even weeks. They only need to keep up these images for a matter of minutes – just long enough to put the cards back in order. Once done, everything is forgotten.
The image of Michael Jackson kicking the pope will quickly fade from memory. (Okay, maybe this particular one won’t).
Eidetic memory is the medical term, and is an established medical fact. The SHORT-TERM storage of sensory data is commonly observed, especially in children. It is also documented (although less rigorously so) in cases of “sporadic eidetic memory”, often in response to traumatic events. These sporadic occurrences are not triggered consciously in most cases, and are therefore difficult to study. And, as they tend to present in traumatized individuals, would present ethical challenges in being studied as well.
Most interesting, of course, would be* long term *eidetic memory that would be *of use *to the person possessing such a skill. And this is where the scientific record is silent. In the 18th & 19th centuries, some Lithuanian rabbis were famous (or infamous) for true photographic memory, which they used in the study of Torah. This has been subsequently reported in some Polish rabbis of this century. It’s not hard to imagine why such individuals might not bother to be the subject of a “scientific” study. But in the absence thereof, it is difficult to know if this represented some qualitatively different mental process, or was just the result of having looked at the pages of their Beloved Torah so many times, that any good memory might have acheived the same level of memorization.
I suspect that eidetic memory, which can be other than visual (although the word, itself, comes from the Greek word for “seen”) IS a special process. I say this for two reasons. 1) It does not seem reasonable to me that what is true in the traumatized brain is impossible in the non-traumatized brain (if there is such a thing), and 2) I personally have a peculiar gift for auditory information. It got me through some medical school tests for which I had not studied but could close my eyes and literally hear the professor talking about whatever word was salient for a particular question. It allows me to recognize what recording of a particular piece of music I am listening to in a few notes. And it facilitates the learning of foreign languages (in that I can memorize expressions that mean absolutely nothing to me. For this latter reason, I suspect that the ability to learn languages (and games; and see mathematical patterns) is at least soemwhat related to this understudied phenonoma. One of the reasons it IS understudied is because the most successful mnemonists (is that the word?) do NOT rely on such methods, but rather on other, much better studied techniques which lend themselves to much greater success in contests, partly because it is a memory that is fueled by activity in the motivation centers of the brain. Those with eidetic memory are stuck with a head full of details and experiences that are of no apparrent value.
I have the rather annoying ability to ‘see’ what book I need, where in the book the page I need, and where on the page the information I need, but I can not see the damned words. It does make it easy to walk into a library, go to a specific shelf, grab a book, flip it open and point to the data I need, which can be mindbogglingly amazing if you don’t know I can do it. For doing closed book tests, not so good 
I am also quite good at guessing music on the opening notes like in Name That Tune - and having a liking of a rather wide and eclectic array of music, can be great for playing music trivial pursuit sorts of games.
I also have a memory for stupid trivia, so I am quite good at trivial pursuit as long as I avoid sports and about half hte TV questions [I do not follow most popular TV, I watch movies, documentaries and very few actual weekly shows, and absolutely NO soap operas.] And if it is an obscure Buick question, try “cruiser-air venta ports”
Could this explain why I can learn to play easier Beethoven Sonatas (some pieces are fairly intermediate, but not easy) but suck at sight reading pieces like "The happy farmer"or something like hotcross buns? At times, I’m completly going by how I remember it sounding (Glenn Gould recordings) instead of actually reading the music.
Maybe you just haven’t worked on your sight-reading enough – it’s a skill that requires regular practice. Also, knowing music theory helps, so you don’t have to decipher dense chord-clusters piecemeal. You can “fake it” by guessing that thick close-voiced chord somehow “fits.” Don’t know how that would help you playing “Hot Cross Buns,” especially if you can play some standard Ludwig van (I agree – even his easy stuff is not that easy to play well), but I’d say, you just want to practice sight-reading more. I go to Haydn’s sonatas pretty frequently when I want to get my fingers going, and most of his stuff has got to be easier than LvB.
I remember 
it not taking too long to work through the entire World Book set when I was about your son’s age, either. My parent’s idea of productive road trip reading for me and my sister was a stack of Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew books and a couple volumes of World Book. I ate it up with a spoon. Sister wasn’t so into it. Oddly enough, she’s much more successful in life than I am by most objective measures. She got her doctorates long before I finished my first terminal degree.
I like to blame my loss on the boxing and cumulative traumatic brain injury but I often wonder if I wouldn’t have lost my heightened memory naturally over time anyway - the possession and loss of said type of memory from childhood to adulthood is a somewhat common occurrence. Enhanced memory is linked to synesthesia and there’s a good deal of evidence to indicate that all infants have a sort of synesthetic mash going on before they learn to differentiate and/or develop distinct senses.
I’ve read many of the replies to this topic and I must say, those of you that quickly dismiss the idea of anyone truely having the ability of ‘photographic memory’ must have a pretty closed mind. I did not have the ability to do this before taking the drug KEPPRA and I lost the ability soon after stopping the drug, so that convinces me that it was KEPPRA that caused this to happen to me. It was a trade off for me … the ability to skim thru any text anywhere, or seeing any event in person or on TV, and then retaining a full color picture of it in my mind that I could recall and read back at anytime I wanted to … BUT also suffering from MAJOR nightmares which would happen every night which got to the point where it was happening multiple times per a night and then non-stop everytime I fell asleep (Even if just for a few minutes). I was quickly afraid to fall asleep.
And for some that think that this ability wouldn’t help someone pass a bar exam, that is completely ridiculous !! :smack: Critical thinking was only enhanced … and I wasn’t then and I’m not now any kind of moron with or without mental problems such as autism, etc. That’s super if you passed a bar exam. I’m proud of you and I bet your parents are too. But, I think you’re holding your own IQ level awefully high on a pedastal. That’s just my opinion.
I have the ability to “photograph” things in my mind but have learned only to use it occasionally when needed. I think If you take too many pictures you will eventually run out of film. It comes in handy but you need to erase most of the junk you don’t need before setting it into long term memories while you sleep. This keeps the mind from getting too cluttered and keeps you from loosing you’re common sense. Common sense takes more neuronal activity and having vast amounts of worthless knowledge can clutter the pathways leading to distorted perceptions. There is no scientific proof or articles that I have read that study this hypothesis so it’s just a rant. Did you take the Keppra for epilepsy?
No it is not. Its existence is highly controversial. See, for example:
Gray C.R. & Gummerman K. (1975). The Enigmatic Eidetic Image: a critical examination of methods, data, and theories. Psychological Bulletin (82) 383-407. [Their abstract begins relevantly: “Eidetic imagery, widely but mistakenly known as photographic memory, has been studied for decades”]
Haber R.N. (1979). Twenty Years of Haunting Eidetic Imagery: Where’s the Ghost? Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2) 583-629 (and see particularly the peer commentaries printed with the main article).
Gray and Gummerman come to the conclusion that it is not a real: It is just ordinary memory imagery of the sort that almost everyone experiences all the time, as over-enthusiastically described by children. Haber does think it is real, but even he admits, having spent 20 years trying to study it, that it is a gosh-darned elusive phenomenon. (And several of the peer commentators on his article do not accept that it is real at all.)
I am not aware of any more recent, authoritative and comprehensive reviews of the topic after these. Probably, in the wake of Haber’s extensive but inconclusive work, most researchers decided it was not a topic worth studying. If anyone knows of a more recent scientific review of the evidence, however, I would be glad to hear of it.
What is a well established fact is that if eidetic imagery is in fact a genuine phenomenon, it does not enhance memory. Tests have shown that people who claim to experience eidetic imagery (and who convinced Haber that they were telling the truth) cannot recall the contents of visual scenes (of which they claim to have an eidetic image) any better than other people can (see the article by Haber).
I haven’t got a clue how or why I can remember images that I deem are important and I’m not interested in being some sort of test rat either. I may have a little autism which is what they percieve is going on in the Wikki article I just read but don’t care. I used to be able to multiply numbers like 4268 X 6253 faster than my daughter could punch it into a calculator and get the right answer. I got tired of being her calculator when she was doing her homework and have lost that seemingly worthless ability after bumping my head on a forklift cage and having a mild concussion. Oh well, didn’t need it anyway. Whatever the reason for this gift I sure have appreciated having it all my life. It was nice being able to figure anything out and put everything together without reading instructions. Wouldn’t trade that for a million dollars