![]() ![]() It's almost like they're seeing an afterimage, except that it appears in the correct colors — rather than in inverse colors, like when a camera flash goes off in your face. They can scan around it and describe all kinds of little details. After people with eidetic imagery, called eidetikers, study an image, they can continue to see the image out in the world. But there is another phenomenon that's similar to what we think of as photographic memory — and it's pretty darn cool in its own right. So the chances that the study's results were biased or flawed, either accidentally or on purpose, seem pretty high. Oh yeah, and she also married the researcher. She only underwent one round of tests, later refusing to do more. And her story is more than a little fishy. He was able to meet with 15 of those people, but found that when they were being observed by a scientist, none of them were able to replicate their feats of photographic memory. He estimated that a million people tried to solve it, but only 30 replied with the correct answer. Like a researcher named John Merritt, who put out a photographic memory test in a magazine in 1979. When they were combined like that, the letter “T†emerged — and Elizabeth was able to see it! Sounds cool, right? The study was a pretty big deal, and other scientists tried to look into it more. Afterward, she called up the two images in her mind and laid one on top of the other. In one study published in 1970 in the journal Nature, she looked at two images made up of black-and-white dots one at a time. A woman known only as “Elizabeth†is the only documented case of something even close to a literally photographic memory. Thing is, nobody actually has this kind of memory. ![]() The snapshot might be so good, in fact, that the person notices something they didn't see before. But when we talk about photographic memory, we usually mean someone who can look at something, take a mental snapshot, and later remember every single detail perfectly. ![]() There are also people with a rare condition called hyperthymesia, where they can recall details of their own day-to-day lives in exact — and sometimes excruciating — detail. And savants can have remarkable abilities in specific domains, like memorizing long symphonies or knowing which day of the week a particular date in history fell on. Chess grandmasters can remember where every piece is on a chessboard after looking at it for just five seconds, because to them, the pieces are arranged in meaningful patterns. Sure, there are definitely people who have really great memories. But in real life? It's not clear that photographic memory is actually a thing. It makes for great TV, especially when you're three-quarters of the way through a police procedural and it would be suuuuuper handy if the roguish private investigator could just happen to remember that license plate he saw as a suspect's car screeched off into the distance. Pop culture is full of characters who claim to have photographic memories. OK, we're mixing metaphors here, but the point is that if photographic memory sounds a little bit like a magician's trick or a Hollywood cliché, well … that's because it kind of is. You'd ace that test and ride off into the sunset. On the day of the test, you'd be able to mentally pull up the page the important stuff was on and, like magic, all the info you needed would be there. Wouldn't it be nice, you think, if you had a photographic memory? Then you could just read through everything once. ![]() You're on your third mug of tea, your eyes are starting to blur, and no matter what you do, you just can't get the stuff you need to know for that test tomorrow morning to stick. It's 2 AM on a Wednesday night — well, technically, it's Thursday morning — and you're still studying. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet? Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: ĭooblydoo thanks go to the following Patreon supporters-Kevin Bealer, Mark Terrio-Cameron, KatieMarie Magnone, Patrick Merrithew, Charles Southerland, Fatima Iqbal, Sultan Alkhulaifi, Tim Curwick, Scott Satovsky Jr, Philippe von Bergen, Bella Nash, Chris Peters, Patrick D. Don't you think it would be nice if you had a photographic memory? But is it actually a thing? ![]()
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