Eidetic Memory

While many people may not be familiar with the term “eidetic memory” (unless they happen to enjoy watching the TV show, Criminal Minds), they probably have heard of “photographic memory”.

This conjures up all sorts of images, but what exactly is a photographic memory, and is it as useful as people think?

There are, of course, two aspects to memory – one is the ability to store the information, and the second is the ability to recall it, when you need it.

Obviously, there is little point in storing stuff if you can’t access it when you need it – it would be a bit like a public library putting all of the books on the shelves at random. While the information would be there, somewhere, finding it could be a mammoth undertaking.

So, an eidetic memory is commonly defined as the ability to store and recall extraordinarily detailed images, as well as, in some caes, sounds and anything else experienced by our senses, usually after only a single exposure to that input.

But here’s one question: if you “read” a book and you have a photographic memory, what are you actually “seeing” and recording?

Because if you are storing a single image of the entire page (or maybe even a double-page spread), how can you access individual pieces of information contained on those pages?

It seems it should be a bit like the way that search engines can’t really make sense of images – they know it’s an image file, and they might even take a good guess, based on the name of the image file, the Alt text and maybe surrounding text on the page, what it’s about, but if that image is actually a photograph of some text, then they currently have no way of being able to access that text and make any sense of it. (This will no doubt change in the future, but for now, it seems the search engines are not that advanced.)

And let’s say that you use your eidetic memory to “read’ an entire book, in just a few seconds or minutes.

Then how does the brain keep track of the sequence of pages, so that you can reassemble all of these images into something meaningful?

When reading the “normal” way (which may not be the most efficient way, of course), then we can see the page numbers, and make sense of them, but if you scan and mentally photograph an entire page at once, then we’re back to the same issue – how does the brain extract information from a composite image?

There’s another question arising from this basic problem: given that the power of the brain largely comes from its ability to make an enormous number of connections between different memories, facts, etc., then how can it make useful connections between these snapshots without first interpreting what those images contain?

So many questions!

There is also, of course, some controversy about whether eidetic memory really even exists at all.

Personally, I’m a firm believer that the brain (including memory) is vastly underused and is probably capable of all sorts of feats we can’t even dream of right now. The oft-quoted statistic that most people only use 10% of their brain may well be a gross exaggeration too.

Where does this leave me?

Well, I try to keep an open mind on most issues, and I fully intend delving into the world of eidetic memory much further, and will probably enrol in a program that claims you can develop a photographic memory (and achieve unbelievable reading speeds with near-perfect retention) in a relatively short time.

For now, then, I have to leave this post with a big question mark at the end, and when I complete the training course, I shall try to write a follow-up article detailing my experiences and, of course, the all-important question – can you, indeed, develop (or, in fact, start using again, your natural mental photography talents that we had as children and which we educated out of us as we were taught the traditional method of reading) photographic memory skills?

BELIEVE IT OR NOT:


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