A guy I knew in college claimed to be doing his graduate thesis on photographic memory and how one could acquire it. Since I never saw said genius again I want to know if such a thing really exists or if it’s something out of spy novels. –Sharon Penn
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Handy though it might be for your next biology exam, photographic memory in the popular sense is probably a myth. But something close to it can be found in some children. Eidetic memory, to use the clinical term, is the ability to recollect an image so vividly that it appears to be real. Typically the child is told to examine but not stare fixedly at an illustration on an easel for 30 seconds. Then the illustration is removed and the kid is asked to look at the empty easel and describe what he sees. Most offer vague recollections of the image, but perhaps one in twelve can describe it in accurate detail for five minutes or more. It’s not just a retinal afterimage, either. The image has normal coloration, not an afterimage’s complementary colors (blue becomes orange, etc). The descriptions are in present tense–“I see…”–and given without hesitation. Most striking of all, the subject’s eyes move around the nonexistent scene as he describes it, as though it were actually there.
Eidetic ability fades with age–one investigator guessed that fewer than one in a thousand adults had it. Most eidetikers can’t summon the eidetic image once it fades from mind, either. But there are exceptions. In 1970, Psychology Today reported on Elizabeth, a Harvard instructor. Using her right eye, she looked for several minutes at a 100 x 100 grid of apparently random dots–10,000 dots in all. The next day, using her left eye, she looked at a second grid of 100 x 100 dots. She then mentally merged this grid with the remembered one into a 3-D image that most people needed a stereoscopic viewer and both grids to see. Reportedly she could recall eidetic images of a million dots for as much as four hours.
