If their memories were like photos, they should have been able to easily reproduce the text in reverse order.īetween 2% and 10% of children have an eidetic memory, but this ability gradually fades that virtually no adult retains it.īut, even if eidetikers have phenomenal memories, they still can’t capture all the details. For instance, while they may be able to recite pages upon pages from a book without error, they often fail to do the same in reverse. And Lu Chao from China recited the first 67,890 digits of pi by employing memorization techniques.īut even people who claim to have a true ‘photographic memory’ haven’t stood up to scientific scrutiny. Arturo Toscanini conducted operas from memory after his eyesight became too poor to read the music.
World record digit span memory movie#
Teddy Roosevelt could recite entire newspaper pages-not just articles-as if they were sitting in front of him. Kim Peek - the real person Dustin Hoffman’s character was based on in the Oscar-winning movie Rain Man - memorized every word of every book he had ever read, estimated at around 9,000 books. That’s not to say that there aren’t remarkable people with a gifted memory. However, while there are people in the world with phenomenal memorizing abilities - whether ingrained thanks to genetics or acquired through intense training - their memory doesn’t function like a camera. You’ve read about them in the papers and you’ve seen them in movies.
But, surely there are exceptional people out there who can remember things in such vivid and excruciating detail, one might remark. Later, upon recalling, the mind fills in the blanks.Īlright, that’s the case for most people. This selective attention allows us to focus and record only the important bits. This is why you’re very unlikely to remember what you had for breakfast a month ago, unless it was something particularly eventful.
Instead, the things we’re likely to remember are those things that we pay close attention to. Our eyes might work, to some extent, like a lens, but our memory isn’t like some camera that captures every detail - we’d all probably go mad, if that were the case. Memory is more a jigsaw puzzle than a photograph However, no study has ever been able to prove that true photographic memory exists - at least in this sense. They can then retrieve the snapshot from memory, zooming in and out on different parts. When we think of “photographic memory”, there’s this impression that people who have this ability can record visual snapshots just like a photograph. This impressive memorization ability is often described as “photographic memory.” Some people are able to remember intricate visual details such as the architectural features of a landmark building or entire pages from books, which they can later reproduce from memory without error.
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