Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Eidetic memory is one of those things only pre-pubescent kids are supposed to have, and mine survived into high school. I can still recall a couple history tests where I could not remember the answer but I knew for sure I wrote it in the margin on a page of my notes. When I finished the rest of the test I ran the clock down racking my brain trying to tease out the exact text.

Because of this I always thought of myself as a visual thinker. Until the last time we were discussing Aphantasia here and I realized to my horror that I hardly ever picture anything in my head anymore. Which is super confusing considering that while I'm awful with names, I will remember your face pretty much forever. We've met before, I'm sure of it. I am so assured of this, that on the rare occasion someone recognizes me but I don't know them, it's so unsettling that it borders on traumatic. Like the guy in the movie who discovers he's been spied upon.

What I've worked out is that I'm a spatial thinker, which goes to explain why I get very particular about the 'shapes' of code the way some craftsman get snippy about someone moving their tools. Once I teased that out I then discovered that a lot of my ways of processing complex data are functionally indistinguishable from a Mind Palace, but the decor doesn't matter, just the shapes. Like navigating your house at night without turning all the lights on. Careful, there's a chair there, and the dog bowl is over here. And at the store, this couch is great but it won't quite fit in our living room. Yes, I'm sure honey.

Wow. You just made me realize that I don't (can't?) do that anymore. I used to have the exact same ability though high school. I would remember where on the page I read something or wrote a note, then during English exams I would find a quote by flipping through pages while looking only on the spot of each page I expected the quote to be on.

I can't really picture things in my head as an image, yet I think very spatially. For me it is not an image, but shapes that I can feel. I design 3d models by feeling them in my mind, where I can feel my way around the model to find problems with my design etc.

I was going to respond to another responder that it feels like reaching up to adjust the shower head when you’re facing away, but that’s not entirely right. It’s more like... this is going to sound weird, but like it’s rotated in a higher dimension. It’s made me curious about 4D VR simulators. I had this feeling that perhaps they’d make a sort of sense to me, but the ones I’ve seen so far don’t, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m wrong, or they are.

That “feel” extends to fitting things together. I had a boss who would ask to fit something else into a UI, and every time I told him it won’t fit, he didn’t believe me. So then we had to waste a man-week to show him he was wrong, and then he would forget that I told him that already and we’d do it again in a few weeks.

Man I was so glad when he laid me off. Best severance I ever got.

If you had eidetic memory, you would know exactly what you had wrote in said margin.

Eidetic memory comes in grades. It usually seems to make use of or abuse spatial memory to remember facts in great detail that you then synthesize into semantic information. See "memory palace."

Eidetic memory used to be considered a negative mutation in that the bearer was not "properly using" their semantic memory, i.e. just remembering the fact without having to synthesize it from a raw sense memory.

From Wikipedia on eidetic memory:

> To constitute photographic or eidetic memory, the visual recall must persist without the use of mnemonics, expert talent, or other cognitive strategies. Various cases have been reported that rely on such skills and are erroneously attributed to photographic memory.

Eidetic memory is exceedingly rare more on the "single digit adults have ever had it", many scientists don't believe it is a thing. However, you also have things like:

> von Neumann also possessed the power of absolute recall. Once he was asked to recite “A Tale of Two Cities” before being asked to stop after a perfect 15-minute recitation.

> John von Neumann was able to memorize a column of the phone book at a single glance.

This is on a whole other scale than what the original poster said.

True, but note it is consistent with what I gave. There is more to memory and the study of the mind than Wikipedia. There are people with very good recall that do not fit that definition, or who recall things in a different way, but share similarities.

No, you said eidetic memory comes in grades. It does not, it is a binary ability the same as perfect pitch. Obviously there is more to memory than an ultra rare ability, but that was never part of this discussion.

> eidetic ī-dĕt′ĭk adj. Of, relating to, or marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images.

There are grades of "extreme detail" ranging from instantaneous recall of your lunch three years ago as well as what everyone was wearing and what you were talking about to very very well above average recall of useful information in the form of sensory memory.

The justification for this interpretation is on Wikipedia and is related to the physiological explanation of eidetic memory. Instead of semantic memory sensory memory is used, and you can see this occur to various degrees in people.

The qualifiers are loose and mean different things to different people. You are not sovereign of the English language. The second definition given in my source matches yours, but it is not the only one.

The English language isn't sovereign to scientific terms, the science community is. If you pulled out a dictionary definition of "policy" in the reinforcement learning community, you would be ridiculed. These terms have clear and agreed upon definitions.

Etymology or dictionary definition is not 1:1 with a scientific term.

I'm similar. My memory is very dependent on spatial reasoning and I've sort of innately created strategies as I was growing up while my photographic memory was losing its strength.

For example, I remember linear information, like dates, by instinctually visualizing circles within circles. A circle for the years, circle for months, then days, etc. with specific times as sections of the circle. There's no particular reason for where things are on the circle though. For example, the month of May is at 12 o'clock or at the top of the circle while January is at 7 o'clock. For years, the current year is always at 12 o'clock. Same with the current day of the month, with weeks being sections of the day circle.

Hours and minutes, on the other hand, is like Penrose steps with each of the four sets of stairs being quarters of the day that I travel on as the day continues.

I think you just described my brain. Are there resources around spatial thinking you find insightful?

I had mostly developed my own systems/coping mechanisms by the time I figured this out, so I didn't really go looking for external advice that much.

My main way of absorbing material is making hypotheses and knocking them down until I can't. Remembering a model is easier than remembering unconnected facts. But I'm not sure if that's more to do with the spatial thinking or the not getting advice half of that equation.

You might enjoy mind palaces, mind maps, graph theory, "Refactoring" by Martin Fowler - though I can't entirely explain why, and activities that demand proprioception (martial arts, dance, rock climbing).

john von neumann had it his whole life

I like to think such people are actually normal, and we all suffer from some kind of brain damage that we could fix somehow.

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