Is There Such A Thing as Photographic Memory?

Whether there is a such a thing as photographic memory or not depends on your definition of photographic memory. If you mean having a memory like a camera where you can see something for an instance and it gets stored in memory in such a way as to never forget it, then the answer is "not really" (with the possible exception of the Elizabeth case mentioned later). However, there are other instances where extra-ordinary memory comes close to being photographic. This article will look at some of these cases.

But first, let's see what others have to say about photographic memory...

• Slate.com says "This seems like as good an opportunity as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but nobody actually does. Nobody. Well, maybe one person."^[4] -- which is referring to the Elizabeth case.
  
• TheStraightDope.com says "photographic memory in the popular sense is probably a myth".^[2]
• Kenneth Higbee, author of Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It writes that "most of what people attribute to a photographic memory is merely the powerful application of learned memory techniques."^[1]
  

There are people with extra-ordinary memory abilities. But Higbee writes that "All these performances have been attributed by researchers, and by the performers themselves, to the use of learned mnemonics, interest, and practice more than to innate abilities."^[1]

Some examples that Higbee gives are ...

• a couple of college students who can repeat a string of 70-plus digits of numbers after hearing it once.
• a waiter that can hold 19 complete diner orders in his head.
• a college student who can square six-digit numbers in his head.
• and a man who has exceptional memory for varied types of information including numbers, prose, names and faces.

Of course, people are born with different levels of memory abilities. And there are some few exceptional individual who do posses exceptional innate memory abilities.

One such person is a Russian newspaper reporter named Shereshevskii. When presented with a sequence of 70 words or numbers, he can recall them forward and backwards. When tested again 15 to 16 years later, he was still able to recall the words.

The case of Shereshevskii comes very close to being a photographic memory. But it is still not photographic because he is not able to take snapshot recording of a picture. He had to study the material that he needed to memorize. It takes him 40 seconds in order to memorize 20 digits. To memorize 50 digits, he needed 2 to 3 minutes.^[1]

Shereshevskii was diagnosed with synaesthesia in which simulation of one sense like hearing would invoke sensation of another sense such as color. The synaesthesia condition aided his ability to remember.^[5]

Yet this inborn ability can have its drawbacks. Shereshevskii would have difficulty erasing un-needed information. Every time he read words, it brings up an image in his mind which clutter his thinking.

Savants and individuals with autism may have extra-ordinary innate abilities and some can perform great memorization feats. Daniel Tammet is a high-functioning autistic savant who can memorize the mathematical constant PI to over 22 thousand digits. He recited the PI digits (without error) over the course of 5 hours for "PI day" on March 14, 2004.

He also has a form of synesthesia that enables him to see numbers visually with texture, shapes, and colors. This may be responsible for his facility to memorize numbers. Nevertheless, it would not be considered a photographic memory in the sense that it did take him many days to study and memorize this long string of numbers.

Another group of people that may have something close to photographic memory are people with eidetic memory. And some people use the term "eidetic memory" as synonymous to "photographic memory". Eidetic memory is defined as "a very strong visual afterimage that enables a person to duplicate a picture mentally and describe it in detail shortly after looking at it."^[1] In terms of the number of people who have this, it is not more than 5% to 10% of children. Eidetic memory occurs less with age. For adults, one investigator guess that maybe as little as one in a thousand have it.^[2]

Of course, it is hard to distinguish true eidetic memory from regular visual memory. HowStuffWorks.com says "Persons said to have photographic memory are much more likely to be relying on ordinary visual memory than on eidetic imagery."^[3]

There are several distinctions that make eidetic memory different from what most people think of as photographic memory.^[1]

• Eidetic memories last only a few seconds and then fades.
• Once image have faded, it can not be retrieved.
• The memory can contain errors such as omission and additions.
• Still requires viewing time of more than a split second to study the scene.

If you define photographic memory as the ability to retain the image accurately over long term, then no one has been able to shown this scientifically -- with the possible exception of Elizabeth.

In 1970, researcher Charels Stromeyer III published a paper about a 23-year old woman with the pseudo-name Elizabeth who can memorize a page of foreign language-poetry and repeat it years later forwards and backwards.

She could also remember a pattern of 10,000 black and white square. She too did not take a mental snapshot. She needed time to scan and memorize the pattern.

This black-and-white pattern was a Julesz random-dot stereograms which you can see examples of linked here. She would look at one half of a the sterogram and after a delay of hours then looked at the other half. Using her eidetic memory, she need to retain the image long enough in her mind so that she can merge the two halves together in order to see the resulting three-dimensional image.

In order to do this, she would need "pixel perfect memory for the exact relative positions of several tens of thousands of dots"^[7]

There is controversy over this case as people question how much weight to place on this one case of long-term eidetic memory.

Articles on stanford.edu website says ...

"Given what is now known about the (relatively low) resolving power of the various components of the human visual system (retina, primary visual cortex, etc.) (Van Hooser & Nelson, 2005; Petersen & Diamond, 2002), and given also that other accounts of eidetic imagery describe the images as fading, and becoming irretrievable, a minute or so after the original stimulus has been removed from view (Haber, 1979), it is hard to understand how such feats could truly be possible."^[7]

and ...

"Blakemore et al. (1970) raise concerns about the methodology of the study, and are clearly skeptical of the claims made for Elizabeth, which, they say, if true, would entail "radical changes in thinking on visual processing." As there is no credible account of anyone else coming anywhere close to duplicating this truly incredible performance in subsequent research, it is probably unwise to give the case too much evidential weight."^[8]

Furthermore, the fact that the researcher later married Elizabeth and that Elizabeth refused all sequent re-test requests did not help the credibility of the case.

Of all the winners (since 1990) of the annual World Memory Championships, no one claimed to have won based on eidetic memory. They all said they used mnemonics and various memory techniques such as the loci method.^[8]

Date of article: July 2010