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Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

There was a great 60 Minutes on this nearly 15 years back, where they picked random facts from historical record and got pretty shocking immediate recall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTkBgHNsWM

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I found it interesting that she didn't remember everything. Notably in one example, she couldn't recall what she had for lunch, but did for dinner.

I find it almost more weird that she can recall so many meaningless (in the grand scheme) details yet there is still a limit. Perhaps too meaningless?

I think where their attention is and therefore what gets encoded is similar to the rest of us. In one instance they were unable to recall what the interviewers were wearing after spending two hours with them. They remember their experiences visually, essentially. So if information was not actually recorded, it can't be searched for.

On a different note, I'm curious how long people with photographic memory store the info at the same fidelity. Does their perfect recollection of a landscape they looked at for a few minutes fade somewhat after a year or so?

I read somewhere years ago that each subsequent recall of a memory is remembering the last time you recalled it—in a sense, an entropy-like phenomenon called memory reconsolidation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/memory-rec...

Is there any solid evidence that photographic memory exists?

https://youtu.be/JL6NAIVpl54?si=8FiFprdOw51AYS0D

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