I’ve often wondered how common eidetic memory might be, especially among children. I remember, as a child, being selected for the school’s Nativity play and realising that, after just two readings, I could recall the entire script. Rather than consciously memorising the lines, I would simply picture the pages and read the script from the mental image. What intrigued me most was that another child in the play described doing the exact same thing.
By the time we were 12, we both lamented how we could no longer do it. It was probably due to cognitive changes during development, or maybe we had simply fallen out of practice.
Related Links:
- Stephen Wiltshire’s Official Website – A renowned British artist with extraordinary visual recall.
- Eidetic Memory – Wikipedia – An overview of the phenomenon, especially in children.
“Kaavya Syndrome – The accused Harvard plagiarist doesn’t have a photographic memory. No one does.”
An article by Joshua Foer exploring the myth of photographic memory: Read it on Slate
“Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre, but real, perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for up to a few minutes before fading away. Children with eidetic memory never have anything close to perfect recall, and they typically aren’t able to visualise anything as detailed as a body of text.”
Further Reading:
Another article challenging the existence of photographic memory (archived): Read archived article from The Washington Times
“Experts suggest that children lose the ability to evoke eidetic imagery as they grow older because they learn to store information in better ways,” says psychologist Mr. Searleman. “Because a person doesn’t have to process what is being viewed with eidetic imagery, it is essentially an inefficient way of remembering details.”
“Mentally retarded people tend to have eidetic imagery more often than you’d expect,” Mr. Searleman says. “If you’re mentally retarded, you don’t have access to more sophisticated ways of encoding information.”