#B. eidetic memory definition professional#

“I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own. And when a young Helen Keller cribbed from Margaret Canby’s “The Frost Fairies” in her story “The Frost King,” Canby herself said, “Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism it is a wonderful feat of memory.” Keller claimed she was forever after terrified. George Harrison said he never intended to rip off the melody of the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” when he wrote “My Sweet Lord.” He had just forgotten he’d ever heard it. Viswanathan is hardly the first plagiarist to claim unconscious influence from memory’s depths. Rather, he seemed to have implicitly mastered a set of mnemonic techniques that allowed him to memorize certain kinds of information.

#B. eidetic memory definition professional#

Not even S, the Russian journalist and professional mnemonist who was studied for three decades by psychologist A.R. Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth. It’s an impressive feat of single-mindedness, not of memory. If the average person decided he was going to dedicate his entire life to memorizing 5,422 pages of text, he’d probably also be pretty good at it. In fact, the Shass Pollaks probably didn’t possess photographic memory so much as heroic perseverance. They responded by telling him exactly which words the pin passed through on every page. According to a paper published in 1917 in the journal Psychological Review, psychologist George Stratton tested the Shass Pollaks by sticking a pin through various tractates of the Talmud. A group of Talmudic scholars known as the Shass Pollaks supposedly stored mental snapshots of all 5,422 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. In every case except Elizabeth’s where someone has claimed to possess a photographic memory, there has always been another explanation.

Children with eidetic memory never have anything close to perfect recall, and they typically aren’t able to visualize anything as detailed as a body of text. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for up to a few minutes before fading away.

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.