Hmm. So when the guy asked Cecil if there was such a thing as photographic memory, I was surprised at the response. Photographic memory is just a layman’s term for eidetic memory. While Cecil did mention the latter, why didn’t he just say that outright instead of calling photographic memory a ‘myth’?
As far as the second part of the question (if photographic memory can be ‘taught’), that answer is pretty obvious. Still, even the eidetic memory concept isn’t for skeptics, there’s no doubt that those with some serious mnemonic skills can definitely outperform the regular population in visual recall.
When you start a thread, it’s helpful to other readers to provide a link to the column under discussion. Yeah, it’s front page now, but it will soon sink into the Archives of thousands of such. So, saves searching time and helps avoid redundancies.
No. Cecil is right about this. “Popular” conceptions of photographic memory generally ascribe powers to it that go well beyond any powers that eidetic memory may provide. For the most part, people with eidetic imagery (the more accurate term) actually remember things, and the appearances of things, no more accurately than do others.
The story of the adult super-eidetiker, “Elizabeth,” is almost certainly a scientific hoax, as I have pointed out before on these boards (as I heard the story, it was a hoax perpetrated on the experimenter, Stromyer, by “Elizabeth”). More details of the story, and stronger reasons for believing the claims are fraudulent, have more recently been provided by Joshua Foer in an article in Slate magazine. It turns out that Elizabeth subsequently married the experimenter, Stromyer, but has steadfastly refused to have her alleged eidetic abilities tested again, in the 40 years since the original experiment. Furthermore, a concerted search throughout the USA failed utterly to find anyone with abilities even remotely approaching those originally claimed for “Elizabeth.” For further information, see here and here.
There are people with remarkable visual memories, one being the Russian, Shereshevskii (a.k.a. S), also discussed by Cecil. Unlike “Elizabeth,” there does not seem to be much reason that
Shereshevskii really did have the mnemonic powers ascribed to him, but they were nothing like those ascribed to her, and, although he does seem to have had unusually vivid mental imagery, it was probably not eidetic (let alone photographic), as that term is understood in psychology.
It really is a pity that Cecil is still promulgating the “Elizabeth” hoax. In scientific psychology the story has largely been buried by the simple expedient of no longer citing or referring to it in the scientific literature, and not telling students about it. Unfortunately, they might still hear about it from Cecil. I think this column is long overdue for an update/correction.
I am not sure what you think the “obvious” answer is, but the actual answer is a clear and resounding “No.” Photographic memory cannot be taught, because there is no such thing, and eidetic imagery ability (if it really exists) cannot be taught either: you either have it or you do not, and all, or very nearly all, people who do have it have lost it before they are 12 years old. Indeed, in the view of some psychologists, eidetic imagery is no more than an artifact of the rather hyperbolic language that some young children use to describe their experience of the normal visual mental imagery that almost everyone, adult and child, experiences every day (and which has been extensively studied by cognitive psychologists).
This, indeed, is true. Mnemonic skills, often involving the deliberate use of mental imagery, and including the techniques that Cecil mentions as being used by Shereshevskii, most certainly can be taught, to almost anyone. Indeed, they were very widely used, and taught, from ancient through to renaissance times, and occasionally still today (although they are not nearly as valuable as they once were, now we live in the post-Gutenberg, and a fortiori, the post-Berners-Lee, world). However, they have nothing to do with either “photographic memory” (as popularly understood) or with eidetic memory/imagery as it is understood by psychologists. You do not need to have eidetic imagery to use imagery-based mnemonics perfectly effectively.
I understand what you’re saying (and sorry for not linking the article). The article is old, but I guess I’ve never thought of photographic memory as a literal thing, as in, your brain snaps a photograph and you remember it always (or at least when needed).
I do know that I have an unusual memory that is picture and task (like ‘category’ oriented) and that’s only because I’ve gone through testing. The neuropsychologist even remarked on it - and I never thought he was talking about some Superhuman ability to remember things. (I thought everyone processed the way I did until I was 23 but I just may be better at some things -he informed me that I was incorrect.) Still, I felt that C.A. would have done the teeming millions more justice if he had said, “no, not the way it has existed in popular culture” and then just explained what that guy’s thesis was probably speaking of: mnemonic skills.
Some people are more likely to display certain skillsets than others, sure, but the brain is pretty remarkable.
Not sure how long his visual memory of these things lasts, and his abilities are because of a condition that leaves him otherwise quite disabled. But they definitely exist in this one example.
One feat that’s often attributed to photographic memory, the ability to glance at a page of text and then “read” it from memory, is certainly false. Even if the brain might be capable of that, the eyes aren’t: There’s only a very small part of the field of view with high-resolution vision, and to read, you need to scan that small region across what you’re reading.
I’m kinda getting lost in all this, “It doesn’t exist, and people who have it lose it after childhood, and only one in a thousand adults have it,” stuff. If it doesn’t exist, how can kids lose it? And if kids lose it, how can roughly 2 million Americans (0.1% of the adult population) have it?
Here are two things I know. (Anecdotal, yes, but factual nonetheless.)
When I was in high school, my friend’s dad, a private pilot, was preparing a flight plan to fly us to and from New Haven. He handed be a thick book that listed all the civil airports in the United States, and told me to look up the transponder frequency (or something like that) for Tweed New Haven airport. I began searching for an index, but he added, “It’s on page 242, in a yellow box in the bottom-left corner of the page, about a third of the way down the box.” I asked, “Why don’t you just tell me the frequency?” and he replied, “I’m not that good.”
At about the same point in my life, two friends and I liked to ambush each other with trivia questions. (I’m not going to explain further than this for fear of revealing terminal, acute nerdiness.) One day, one of them hit me with a question that stopped me cold. I knew I didn’t know it. Not, “I should be able to figure it out.” Not “Oh, I think I knew this once.” This was a piece of information I knew for a fact I had never had in my head. I was about to say so when a picture appeared in front of my eyes. It was a part of a page in a reference book I owned and had read a lot. The part I saw had a picture and a caption, and the caption contained the answer to the question. I told him the answer, and he swore at me, an action that strongly suggests I was correct.
I want to emphasize that this image did not trigger a memory in me. I did not think, “Oh! That’s right, I remember now.” I had never known this information before (it was a person’s name), and when I answered my friend, I was reading the name off the picure in my head.
And I was 16, which is a bit older than 12, which is when this is supposed to disappear. And it was the only time (so far, at age 52) this had ever happened to me.
Clearly he is a talented artist, but I wonder if his pictures have been checked for accuracy of detail. He may just be remembering the main, salient features of scenes (something that only requires average visual memory) and “inventing” most of the detail. That is actually how artists typically work, and so long as they do indeed get the main salient features right then that is enough to “fool” most people into thinking it is an accurate representation of the whole scene (because, of course, the main salient details are all that most people, with average visual memories, remember themselves).
In fact, looking at the pictures you link to, the fine details look sketchy and impressionistic, and even things like the shapes of buildings are not photographically accurate. That is probably a good thing from an artistic perspective, but it suggests to me that, rather than having some kind of super-memory ability, he simply has a lot of creative artistic talent (and he likes to draw examples of real architecture).
But let’s grant that he may have an exceptionally good visual memory. That does not amount to “photographic memory” (unless that ill-defined expression is simply being used to mean “exceptionally good visual memory”), and neither does it necessarily amount to eidetic imagery, unless it is being suggested that he “projects” his eidetic image onto the paper (it is part of the definition of eidetic imagery that it is “projected” out into the world like this, and usually upon a flat surface) and somehow traces around the outlines that he sees. That is certainly not how most artists work (I doubt whether it is even true that when artists draw or paint from memory or imagination that they are “copying” an image in their mind’s eye), and, frankly, I think it demeans this guy’s very obvious creative talent to suggest that this is what he does.
Sorry, but this argument will not fly. A mental memory image is not a “snapshot,” taken in the blink of an eye. In fact, there is now evidence, from multiple experimental studies, that a record of the eye movements involved in viewing something is stored as part of the visual memory of that thing, and when we recall a memory image the eye movement patterns involved in the original viewing are re-enacted. This does not just occur with eidetic imagery (as Cecil mentions) but with the ordinary, often not very vivid, imagery that virtually everyone experiences all the time.
Reading from a remembered and visualized page is certainly beyond the capabilities of my visual memory, and probably that of most people, but I do not think that we can rule out the possibility that some people may sometimes be able to do it, and certainly we can’t rule it out on the grounds that you suggest.
Yeah, sometimes it gets confusing when scientific issues are not fully settled, and experts disagree in their best guesses. Life is complicated, and sometimes things are not clear-cut. Deal.
Let me spell it out. The experts disagree with one another as to whether eidetic imagery is real (i.e., really a phenomenon qualitatively different from the “ordinary” mental imagery that nearly everybody experiences). By far the best (although still not very good) evidence for its reality comes from studies of young children, and evidence for its occurrence in adults, or even older children, is virtually non-existent. (The occasional claims of evidence for its occurrence in certain exceptional individual adults, such as “Elizabeth,” do not stand up to critical examination. Note also that even on the most charitable interpretation of the evidence, none of the alleged child eidetikers who have been studied had abilities even remotely like those ascribed to “Elizabeth”.)
Cecil, writing a decade ago, explicitly flags the claim that “fewer than one in a thousand adults” have eidetic imagery (and note that zero is fewer than one in a thousand) as being somebody’s “guess”. Given what we have learned since then, zero in a thousand is probably a better guess than one in a thousand. Perhaps there are a few rare individuals who retain some eidetic ability past childhood, but if so, science has not been able to confirm their existence.
I am not sure what your point is here. I do not find that particularly remarkable. I do not have particularly good visual memory myself, but I could probably do something like that with a familiar page with clear “landmarks” (such as the yellow box you mention). I expect most people could. It is memory imagery, which is something nearly everybody has. There is no reason to think that your friend’s father’s feat involved any very special or uncommon abilities such as eidetic imagery or “photographic memory” (unless “photographic memory” is just understood to mean the mundane ability to experience memory images).
That is a more unusual sort of feat, but, as I implied in my reply to Chronos (above) there is no reason to believe that it would have depended on special, rare abilities like eidetic imagery or the mythical “photographic memory.” (Eidetic imagery does not just mean “very vivid or clear imagery”. For one thing, an image does not meet the definition of eidetic unless it is experienced as “projected” out into the space in front of one’s eyes, as opposed to being seen “in the mind’s eye”.) What you describe is an unusual feat of visual memory, but it is not, as it were, “off the charts.” Only a few people are good enough runners to run a four minute mile, and even they can only do it under just the right circumstances, and when they are their peak of fitness. Nevertheless, we do not think they are doing a different sort of thing when they run from what a fat guy does when he runs a few yards to catch a bus. It is all running. It is just that some people, on some occasions, do it exceptionally well.
That’s no big deal; I do that kind of thing all the time. It was exceptionally frustrating in college; I could recall what page (not necessarily page number) and where the information on the page was spatially (like 3rd paragraph below 2nd picture on the page), and in many cases could visualize the page in an abstract fashion, but couldn’t recall the actual words or the information I was looking for.
It’s like my brain stored all the card catalog information, but left the book itself blank.
I also have a suspicion that our memories are stored in conjunction with information from our most effective learning method at the time- if you recall something because you heard it, you’ll probably remember the voice that told you, and if you saw it, you’ll remember where you saw it. I don’t remember the setting in which someone told me something, just like I don’t remember the ambient noise or conversations when I read something that I remember.
If that’s what “eidetic memory” is, then that is something other than the standard (mis)conception of what a “photographic memory” means. I think when most people think of “photographic memory”, there is no expectation that the imagery is projected back into space in front of the viewer, but rather that it is played back in the person’s mind. It’s just that the detail of the image in the mind is such that they can extract information that they previously did not consciously commit to memory.
Think of the TV show Psyche, where the main character pretends to be a psychic detective, but really uses his highly trained observation skills and his photographic memory to solve crimes. Example: he and his dad are in a diner, dad says “Close your eyes. Now tell me how many hats are in the room.” Guy closes eyes without glancing around, then recalls from memory “Baseball cap on the guy by the juke box, guy at the end of the bar on the left, guy behind me in the booth in the corner. Granny hat on the lady across from him. That’s 4. Five if you count the guy in the kitchen, which isn’t technically in this room, but the counter window isn’t a full wall and he’s in view most of the time.”
Or he walks into a room, glances around at paperwork on the desk, etc. Later someone tells him a name and he starts wondering where he saw it - bingo, it was written on a piece of paper on the desk in that office that he visited the day before. He didn’t at the time read off the name and think “Jubal Harshaw, Jubal Harshaw, Jubal Harshaw - must remember Jubal Harshaw.” But he thinks about that paper and what he saw on it, and then reads off the name.
Those are clearly feats of visual memory that most of us cannot pull off.
Quite so. Eidetic imagery is relevant merely because it is the phenomenon that comes closest to the popular conception of “photographic memory” while also, just possibly, being real. Many people do confuse them however (Cecil did not, but the OP did), and mistakenly treat (real or false) evidence for the existence of eidetic imagery as evidence for the existence of photographic memory.
Projection of the image, by the way, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of eidetic imagery (according to the most generally accepted definition). I can myself project images to a degree, and I doubt that this ability is rare, but I am by no stretch an eidetiker. To count as truly eidetic an image would also need to have a degree of vividness and stability that I cannot get close to.
Accuracy of visual recall, incidentally, is not a criterion of eidetic imagery (whereas “photographic memory” surely is popularly supposed to be super-accurate). Alleged child eidetikers were found to be no more accurate in their recall of visual details than other children are.
What about it? At best this would be phonographic rather than photographic memory. In general, though, it is not uncommon for people who are very expert in a certain domain to have very good memory for material that is structured according to the rules of that domain. Chess masters have been shown to have very good memory for board layouts from actual or possible chess games, but they are no better than anyone else at remembering the layout of pieces randomly placed on a chessboard in ways that would never arise in a real game (and are thus “meaningless” from a chess player’s perspective). Thus, the fact that Mozart had excellent memory for well structured music is not so remarkable; what would be remarkable (and evidence for something like “phonographic memory”) would be if he had been able to accurately recall and transcribe something like an orchestra playing random notes, with no sort of melodic, harmonic or rhythmic structure.
But, in any case, do you have a cite to confirm that this story is actually true? I don’t know about this one, but there is another oft-repeated story about Mozart’s phenomenal musical imagery that has since been shown to be entirely apocryphal, made up some time after his death by someone who had never met him. Famous geniuses tend to attract apocryphal stories like this.
The ability to accurately recall and transcribe music after one hearing may not be miraculous but it certainly would be remarkable. Transcribing music after repeated hearings is difficult enough; to do so after only one borders would be astonishing.
Powers &8^]
Sometimes I know the exact page and sometimes I just know what the page looks like. I clearly don’t have a snapshot capability, but I do (naturally) glance at a paragraph, zone in on key words and skim when ‘studying’.
When I take an exam, I go back to the page and ‘look’ (because I’ve categorized - something I have always done) for an answer or a clue if I have some tip of the tongue (er, pencil) problem.
I have a running stream of audio commentary, text at the ‘bottom’ of a picture in my head and pictures and memories going across a ‘screen’ in my mind. I have never been able to understand how people ‘think’. I can’t imagine a process different from my own.
That being said, I also read for pleasure and I can still picture articles I read years ago - the location on the page, the position of certain words, whatever.
I was thinking about how a friend of mine (or old acquaintance) is in Congress and his state is about to be gerrymandered something special. That puts him and another Dem rep in the same district - all with the most liberal counties, of course, so we’d lose a Congressional seat for sure. The Congressman in question may have to go against the other in a primary. Ouch.
So I was like, “the statement you made about blabla in blaba may hurt you in the primary if it resurfaces because you’ll be painted as the ‘too liberal’ candidate.”
The response: What?
Me: In the Gazette. 2003. Inside spread, bottom left hand corner, third paragraph.
Him: How do you remember that?
Me:…I don’t know.
Obviously the comment was something I read and noted. I read things all the time without caring what I read and I’m completely ineffective. I rarely read my textbooks. But I am the kind of person who, when seeing something that registers interest, I rarely forget. People are more likely to remember what is meaningful, but I seem to remember the dumbest things sometimes.
I’m also one of the* replicate complicated pictures *types.
shrug Some people just process things better than others. I took a version of this test ten years post head injury and discovered I’m not as dumb as I thought. :eek:
When I was a child, learning was…a non-issue, just like breathing. Math, science, language, reading, writing, art, whatever. It came so easily. Obviously, that’s changed, but I’ve had two neurologists and one neuropsych theorize that my increased ability to categorize certain things is a way of my brain trying to repair itself.
anyway, while ‘super photographic memory’ may not exist, I think it’s useful to explore what some brains are better at so-called ‘picture taking’ than others.
No. I thought that photographic memory was a layman’s term for eidetic memory because** I didn’t realize that people actually thought of photographic memory in any other way**.
Apparently I didn’t understand the ‘popular conception of photographic memory’. I thought that most people knew that photographic memory as presented on TV/media/whatever is a myth and when we say photographic memory, we are applying it to a different, but similar concept.
I have never known anyone who thought there was a human capable of reproducing incredible visual information with absolute accuracy.
Kind of like when someone says that the United States is a democracy or something. It is about what constitutes as a liberal use of a word.
It’s in virtually any biography of Mozart, and I cannot offhand find that anyone denies it. There is evidence for it in the form of a personal letter from the elder Mozart to his wife, and in the fact that Mozart is the most believable means for the score to have reached the hands of Dr. Burney, which we know it did.
I have two adopted sons. Both learn differently. Sean is the reader…a voracious reader while he was growing up. Adam never read very much. However, Adam could remember everything of what he did read. The reading comprehension of both boys was better than average in my view. When Adam was 7, in first grade and he had been studying his spelling words. He asked me to check him. I thought, well, let’s see if he can remember the words, himself. After his chagrin upon hearing that I wanted him to reproduce the words as well as spell them, he began with the first word. I think he was a bit surprised that he could remember any of them and then, he continued to recall all twenty words. Now, he was not prepared to do that. Later on he was, but not this first time. He did get two words out of order, however. I noticed that he was also an oral learner. He enjoyed talking about a subject and batting it back and forth with someone. He also loves people. But, it’s hard for him to read, because growing up, he was always wanting to do something and reading made him sit. Sean, on the other hand, realized he didn’t have to remember facts because they were contained in a book. Just get the book and look them up. But, I also noticed that Adam did work on his memory skills, even as a kid. After Adam graduated High school, he was working on a construction site, fell off of a falling ladder and really hurt his head, badly. He was in intensive care for about 7 days. I wondered if he would make it, but thankfully he is better. However, he no longer has his great memory. He forgets a lot. His wife has a pretty good memory and will tell him, no, that’s not right. I guess that’s because of his fall. Your brain is very fragile, it seems. He still has the same esay going personality, but the instant recall of names is not there. warm regards, Sundownhopper.
In general, though, it is not uncommon for people who are very expert in a certain domain to have very good memory for material that is structured according to the rules of that domain. Chess masters have been shown to have very good memory for board layouts from actual or possible chess games, but they are no better than anyone else at remembering the layout of pieces randomly placed on a chessboard in ways that would never arise in a real game (and are thus “meaningless” from a chess player’s perspective). Thus, the fact that Mozart had excellent memory for well structured music is not so remarkable; what would be remarkable (and evidence for something like “phonographic memory”) would be if he had been able to accurately recall and transcribe something like an orchestra playing random notes, with no sort of melodic, harmonic or rhythmic structure.