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I met an amazing young woman at USC, she was 12 and taking the same Physics class I was as a sophmore EE. She could recite any formula in the textbook, call up any worked problem in the handouts or previous exams, she was getting the highest grade in the class. She didn't understand physics.

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.

She didn't understand physics.

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 would agree that we were all a bit clueless when we took high school physics but this was the second year of physics, in a four year degree program either on physics or on electrical engineering. (which I believe were the only two degree tracks at the time that did the full four year core physics curriculum) The time for not understanding was past.

I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago and was in detention on >70% of school days (usually, dress code). Detentions were meant to last an hour and were typically managed by handing out poems that the detainees had to memorize and recite. My detentions lasted ~4 minutes. At one point they started giving me extra poems to memorize, which didn't work for them; no poem could hold me.

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.

I had an amazing memory as a high school kid too. I couldn't do the hobbit word for word, but definitely reproduce long texts of Economics essays, which was my thing. I find it very sad that I grew out of it in college. It feels like a part of me is no more.

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.

> I was really, really good at memorizing books without trying to, and could recall them word-for-word, with essentially random access inside the book if you spotted me two sentences to work off of.

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.

Where the text was on the page, certainly. I'd know that I was "a subjectively short space from the bottom of the page, left hand side of the book, somewhere in the middle." I never had any external associations with books -- probably because a bomb could have gone off when I was reading and I wouldn't have noticed. (Something which my wife reliably reports has not changed.)

> 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.

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_memory

Yeah it isn't fun at all, especially when you seem to have more bad memories than good. It can become a bit of a hindrance; but with a strong will, it can be turned around into something good.

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.

Fascinating read, my memory wasn't as vivid as this person's but I didn't need much effort to recall anything. Like you, it all changed with age.

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 :)

My memory was never like yours. But I remember it came as a shock to me when I realized that I was now able to re-read a book and enjoy it again without being flooded by my memory of what happened next.

I've done a lot of re-reading since. :-)

Yeah, that's interesting; I have a weird memory, and even when I was in high school, I'd often enjoy rereading a book more than reading a new one.

Brains are weird.

My memory these days is terrible. But I have very high recall of certain events from when I was very very young. I remember describing my earliest memory to my family a few years ago, and they commented that it was impossible that I remember that as I wasn't even walking or even out of a crib at that time. It's not a continuous set of memories, just small snips here and there.

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.

Sounds very familiar.

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.

I have.

Yes.

Strangely enough, you can't remember how to spell 'here'. Sorry, couldn't resist.