What Is It Like To Have a Photographic Memory?
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This also extended to remembering events/conversations/etc in my own life, and they often became "intrusive thoughts." Was anybody hear ever picked on in 3rd grade? Imagine reliving that incident, in photographic detail, for no darned good reason during an 8th grade field trip.
I was honestly happy/sad when I "grew out of it." Happy for the obvious reason, a little sad that I can no longer recite the entire Hobbit as a party trick. (It took me longer than you would think to figure out that this was not actually as effective as a party trick as I thought it was.)
My understanding is that there's many, many flavors of atypical memories. I have a friend from high school who also has one, also (like myself) in solution with a few other issues which will get you referred to a school counselor. He can still quote my drivers license number, which he saw for five seconds 15 years ago.
God, that sounds awful. Proustian memory [1] forever would drive me insane. Imagine every breakup you have had over the years, vividly reliving them forever. Sometimes being forgetful is nice.
My first few memories are of the fight my parents had the defining night of their separation; then of my grandfather carrying me away from the courthouse as I wondered why I couldn't see my father (he wouldn't pay child support); and then my mother pushing a couch against our apartment door to prevent someone from breaking in, as we couldn't afford to live in a decent neighborhood. These are my first few memories, and while they might sound pretty terrible, they've easily shaped me into the person I am today, for the better. Nearly every one of my actions is driven by my determination to live freely financially and to procreate only when I'm certain I'll be able to provide a good life for my wife and children.
I have a feeling most people here have the same outlook, and may have possibly been led to it by similar events and memories of their own.
Having a photographic memory (to any extent) can have it's drawbacks, sure, but when put to the right use, the drawbacks become incredibly insignificant, as most people would imagine. For example, if I didn't have the memory that I do, I wouldn't be able to instantly know exactly which line of code needs to be changed (and to what) to fix an obscure bug described to me by a user.
And honestly, the same could be said about any situation that isn't completely debilitating. For instance, I'm also fairly OCD with occasional Tourette's (depending on my level of anxiety), and if I wasn't, it's pretty unlikely that I'd have accomplished as many things as I have. I've accepted my obsessive nature and use it to get things done. It's how you look at things that determines their usefulness.
Out of curiousity, since I've never actually met someone with the same type of experience, do you ever have trouble "shutting your brain off"? e.g. sleep issues, etc.
My memory ended up getting very bad through college. I developed a coping mechanism ... I realized instead of having to remember formulas or algorithms, I could just derive them on tests.
While my memory deteriorated, my ability to visualize complex stuff kept at it for quite a bit longer. I can still do that part but it doesn't feel as crisp as it used to. Another weird thing I could do when I was a teenager was step through code with an exactness that my classmates thought was freaky. They joked I was a human compiler. Ahh ... youth.
That's interesting. When you recite a book passage, do you remember where the text was on the page, the dimensions of the book, how the book felt in your hand, where you read the book, and how good the lighting was? When I have strong recall of a text passage, I find that I'm usually able to recall those little extraneous contextual details. For this reason, I find that I remember things I read on physical paper better than things I read on a computer monitor.
It was really wonderful sometimes because I didn't need to read textbooks, take extensive notes or do homework. The down side was, as a kid, it got me into a lot of trouble when people lied and I would re-tell them something they had said before that contradicted what they're saying now.
One day in my last year of high school, toward the end of the first semester, the math teachers was shocked when he opened my exercise book to find that I stopped taking notes on the 3rd week of school and the rest of the book was filled with doodles. I was one of his best students though :)
I wonder if her abilities moderated as she went through puberty and into young adulthood. I felt sad for her, as her life to that point had been nothing but academic achievement brought about by memorization. I've always had a selective memory (for some reasons I can remember a lot of lyrics from songs in the 70's and pretty much every science fiction book I ever read, at least its structure) but I've never been satisfied with rote learning. Did not seem to bother her though so I guess it balances out.
Yeah, her and nearly every other teenage physicist I ever knew, certainly including myself. ;)
My experience of physics is that it takes time on the order of a decade to learn, mostly because you have to approach it from so many different directions before you finally grasp it. I'm not sure it matters which angle of attack you pursue first, provided you can remain interested enough to eventually come back from a different angle.
There were bits of physics that I could handle algebraically but which I didn't intuitively understand, and there were bits that I intuitively understood but where I didn't have the formalism so I would kind of flail around. And the knowledge of the landscape, of how a particular problem fits into the universe of known problems, is yet another level.
I've done a lot of re-reading since. :-)
Brains are weird.
I have no idea if I've grown out of it. For specific, focused things, I still have a freaky weird memory. It's handy for API documentation and suchlike.
Those memories are also rather weird since I have them from a time in my life when I had almost no life to reference them against...hard to explain.
This person is a super hero :)
Having an ultra detailed memory of every 5min event of all your life (which is what TFA basically says) sounds like a super hero, or well, you know, just plain lies and heavy embellishment... whichever.. that's ok if its a genius, too :)
(same thing for persons knowing all words of all the books they read, by earth. And that's also probably not photographic memory, unless you picture the words, anyways)
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A photographic memory simply mean its easier for you to remember images than, say, sounds, text, etc.
The author suggests that photographic memory is about remembering something with the upmost perfection (like a "picture" represents details with the upmost perfection), regardless of this being a sound, image, text, etc...
I generally ask those ego-driven people to tell me what I showed on the screen 5min ago and they've no idea. "oh i was distracted this time" or "it doesn't work like that".
I still have to meet a true memory-genius. I'm sure they exist, but its not a very high % of the population, contrarily to what story tellers seems to say.
I think you're mistaken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
(minor point of spelling - 'utmost', not 'upmost')
All we have for sight is: A few degrees of focus (~3-5) that we quickly jump around to get an idea of a scene, & then we (very importantly) MAP this data to an internal model.
So, when someone says, they can fill in all the details, they are doing that from an internal model, which was only partially supported by earlier sight. Much of their memory can be wrong.
More importantly, it's a huge misrepresentation to think that the human eye works like a CCD array/sensor/camera.
Although a lot of people also have really great memory, which can arguably said to be "somewhat photographic" as the author said. In which case, I do as well. I cannot agree that being able to walk through a previous scene with a bird's eye view is part of being photographic memory though. I think that as just powerful spatial visualization combined with good memory.
The author seems to be discussing more a "very good" memory mixed with a fixation on the past - e.g., feeling hurt that others don't remember what you remember means the past has some special importance for him/her. I recall plenty of things that happen that other people soon forget, but it never bothers me. I realized as a child I had to pretend to forget things, otherwise people would think it was bizarre I remembered so much about them that they'd forgotten ever telling me.
As I've gotten older and had less free time to think / worked crazier hours and ruminated on people and the past less, this tendency to remember lots of small details has receded (though still much stronger than other people's I meet). I'm pretty sure if I started thinking about the past often enough again though, it'd make a quick return to being as proficient at recalling numerous tiny details from the deep past as it was before.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-20026088-10391709.htm...
I would definitely echo the: "Now here's a random very specific memory to take up all your working memory and distract you from your actual task" type of daily interruption such a memory has.
I would trade this "skill" any day for the ability to remember people's names the first time.
> A number of people claim to have eidetic memory, but only two people have been tested and documented as having a memory that is truly photographic. Most people showing amazing memory abilities use mnemonic strategies.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_posse...
> An example of extraordinary memory abilities being ascribed to eidetic memory comes from the popular interpretations of Adriaan de Groot's classic experiments into the ability of chess Grandmasters to memorize complex positions of chess pieces on a chess board. Initially it was found that these experts could recall surprising amounts of information, far more than non-experts, suggesting eidetic skills. However, when the experts were presented with arrangements of chess pieces that could never occur in a game, their recall was no better than the non-experts, suggesting that they had developed an ability to organize certain types of information, rather than possessing innate eidetic ability.
Scientific skepticism about the existence of eidetic memory was fueled around 1970 by Charles Stromeyer who studied his future wife Elizabeth, who claimed that she could recall poetry written in a foreign language that she did not understand years after she had first seen the poem. She also could, apparently, recall random dot patterns with such fidelity as to combine two patterns into a stereoscopic image. She remains the only person documented to have passed such a test. However, the methodology of the testing procedures used is questionable (especially given the extraordinary nature of the claims being made) as is the fact that the researcher married his subject, and that the tests have never been repeated (Elizabeth has consistently refused to repeat them) raises further concerns.
> With the questionable exception of Elizabeth (discussed above), as of 2008, no one claiming to have long-term eidetic memory has been able to prove this in scientific tests. There are a number of individuals with extraordinary memory who have been labeled eidetickers, but many use mnemonics and other, non-eidetic memory enhancing exercises.
>I do not think I fall into the "eidetic memory" category, although I have a superb photographic memory.
> Eidetic memory commonly referred to as photographic memory or total recall, is the ability to recall images, sounds or objects in memory with great precision, and is not acquired through mnemonics.
The same ability could be either a curse or a blessing, depending on how well it was organized and controlled.
There is always a flip side to superpowers like photographic memory.
It may go without saying, but part of the reason why such relatively strict musical forms were popular in the 18th century is that they made the music easier for amateurs to memorize and perform. There was a big boom in middle-class amateur musicianship at the time.
Modern musicians operate at a handicap relative to Mozart because modern music, even if we restrict ourselves to Western concert music, is stylistically and formally all over the place.
It would be tremendous to master the self as well as reality -- then one could control his emotions and visuals, as well as channel it according to their will.
I'm not saying the author doesn't have photographic memory, it's just that it's often simply not the case.