So if you said "what happened on April 23rd, 2015 at approximately 2pm - she would respond with “Oh my God how did you know that date? I was sitting with my ex boyfriend John outside of the Denny’s restaurant drinking a sugarless coffee and wearing my favorite black shirt! I remembered it because that was 3 days after my Grandma died in 1997 when I was playing outside my house I lived in with my family with my brother John, and he slipped and fell into the swimming pool!” Very early in life she had just started associating things visually in chunks, without being consciously aware that this is what she was doing. She wouldn’t have been able to look at a list of 100 items and reproduce it like memory experts, although if she learned the techniques they would come naturally to her.īasically I asked her a bunch of questions to determine what was going on inside of her mind that allowed her to reproduce memories like this. However, it was not a photographic memory. She did not train her mind to do this, she just did it naturally. She could remember the color of the shirt and pants I was wearing 3 years ago at a certain meeting, place and time and was always right, and basically exactly what went on, describing something in an absolute vivid detail that was unbelievable. The closest thing to a photographic memory which actually exists is something called a “superior autobiographical memory.” I don’t know if I would believe this existed, except for I had an employee who had this once named Tera. I love seeing memory athletes and mental calculators on shows like this one because none of us claim to be anything special - memory techniques aren’t some sort of secret. I learned the show was back on this summer at all through AlexM’s tweet about being on last week’s episode. But we here know to be skeptical of such claims.ĭoes she know about memory competitions, and if so, why hasn’t she competed in the American one as far as I’m aware? I feel like I’d’ve recognized her name if she’d gotten a top score in a memory competition previously, as I did with fellow contestant Ram Kolli. The term photographic memory is one that the layperson would consider impressive, which is the whole purpose of putting her on the show. Others have competed on the show who excel at finding visual details, but that’s not the same as photographic memory (which is extremely rare, if it exists at all). She ended up being one of the top three finalists this week, but didn’t win. In this week’s episode of Superhuman, the first competitor was a veteran who claimed that “photographic memory” was her superhuman skill. Today I also let my collegue take the tests to prove he has a photographic memory, I explained the tests, he said he could do them easily, he failed badly, he blamed the tests. That doesn’t take away that they don’t amaze me, they do amazing things. Socially, their memory can be labelled photographic, but scientifically I am not convinced. I also don’t know if they memorize it as raw data, or if their brain also uses a sort of “encryption”, like we do with the systems we develop. In social terms they might have a photographic memory, but for as far as I’ve seen their work, their memory still doesn’t cover all kinds of memories. I do believe some people get incredibly close, like Kim Peek or Stephen Wiltshire, but I am not confinced that their memory is detailed enough to be photographic. I must admit I don’t even believe anyone does, as a photographic memory would also include that the stored memories can’t be altered.
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