Is it true that there is a photographic memory?

The belief is widespread that there are people with photographic memory. They allegedly with detailed accuracy can remember any image and reproduce it without much effort. We decided to check if science confirms such a phenomenon.

They take off about people with photographic memory TV show And they write articles. The media report that a useful feature possessed Nikola Tesla, Ivan Aivazovsky, Sergey Rakhmaninov, John Pavel II. The owner of Twitter Ilona Mask They also attribute to happy owners of a rare gift. Photographic memory is attributed to artistic heroes, for example Lisbeth Salander From the “Millennium” trilogy of the Swedish writer Stig Larson, Dr. Strange From the cinema sower Marvel and Sherlock Holmes. On the Internet you can find special Testswho promise to identify such a gift from you, and offer various Methods For him development.

Under photographic memory usually understand The opportunity to look at the image and instantly save its copy in the head. In the scientific environment, this type of memorization is called an eidetic memory (from other Greek εἶδος-“image”, “appearance”). Cambridge Dictionary Gives The next definition of eidetic memory: "The ability to remember things in exact details, as if you can see them in your mind."

According to book Outstanding Soviet psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky “Studies on the history of behavior: Monkey. Primitive. Child ”, the phenomenon of eidetic memory was the first to describe the Serbian scientist V. Urbanchich in 1907. Throughout the 20th century, doctors and neurologists studied it. In 1979, Professor Ralph Norman Hayber from Illinois University Published The article “Twenty years of obsessive eidetic images: where is the ghost?”, In which he summed up the results of a long -term study of memorization abilities among primary school children. During this time, Heber found dozens of people with the so -called eidetic gift. According to his data, about 8% of the subjects were endowed with this ability. To determine whether a person has such a memory, Haber conducted an experiment: he put the child in front of the easel, on which he placed different pictures. At first he simply showed something simple, for example, a red square, and then cleaned it, asking the child to try to see the square where he was before. After that, he showed a more complex picture, for example, an illustration from a children's book. The subjects gave 30 seconds to remember the image. When the image was removed, the child was asked if he saw something else where the picture was. Most gave a negative answer, but some of them said that they still see the picture, and could describe it in detail.

Hearing that someone can see a non-existent image, as if it really is still on the easel, we think that a person somehow “photographed” him and retained him in his memory. But the more the eidhetics were studied, the more obvious it became that this was not so. Eidetic children made the same mistakes as everyone else. They incorrectly remembered things, their brain added to the pictures what was not there, and sometimes they changed the opinion of what they saw. The only thing these children differed is the subjective experience of vision of the image in the same place compared to the simple memory of details about it from memory.

In the experiment, it is not just that that small children are mentioned. Majority research It was shown that almost none of adults has the ability to form eidetic images, and among adolescents there are 2-10%. It is not known why this is what happens. Perhaps the main reason is that adults more often children try to verbally and visually encode the picture in memory, which interferes with the formation of eidetic images.

On the Internet, it is easy to find tests that supposedly prove the presence of eidetic memory you have, but they have little in common with reality. However, you can check the presence of superpowers with the help dough The composite image that was developed by Kent Hammerman and Cynthia Gray during their search for an “objective eidhetic”.

Their main idea was as follows: if a person really has an eidetic memory, he should remember not only complex pictures, but also meaningless images, such as a random grid of black and white squares.

The true Eidetic should not only see the picture itself after its artillery, but also be able to visualize it on top of a new, similar image, creating a composite image. As a result, the subject was supposed to see a combined secret symbol that cannot be guessed when just seeing one of the two images separately. 

In total, scientists experienced 270 people (mainly children), and no one passed the test on the composite image. But because of a fairly small sample, the chance of the appearance of a person with an ideal eidetic memory still remained. 

The research continued, and in 1979, John Merritt published results The test for the photographic memory that he had previously placed in magazines and newspapers throughout the country. Merritt hoped that someone could show eidetic abilities, and, according to his calculations, about 1 million people tried their strength in the test. Only 30 people wrote to Merritt the correct answer, and he visited them at home. However, in the end, no one was able to pass the test under supervision.

Nevertheless, one person who has eidetic memory is still known to science. Even before all of these studies in 1970, the scientist Charles Stromerier published the results of his researchIn whom a Harvard student named Elizabeth took part in. She could recall a page with a poem in an unknown foreign language that she saw many years ago, and without problems reproduce the text. Elizabeth claimed that she often used this ability in exams in high school and undergraduate, but for some reason this gift was not so useful during graduate school. 

Stromeier checked her memory already familiar to us. He showed Elizabeth a streamogram of random dots, which was a sheet of black paper with several hundred points. She was given a minute to study her right eye. Then he gave her a second stereogram to look at her with her left eye. As a result, she managed to combine pictures and see the hidden letter T. 

The results of the experiment are impressive, but are not recognized in the scientific community. Stromerier and Elizabeth got married, and she abandoned any further tests of her ability. Until now, no one else has been able to fix the case of possession of eidetic memory. Can assumethat Elizabeth was exceptional, but, most likely, the study was simply not objective.

Indirectly in favor of the fact that photographic memory does not exist, says the following fact: in World Championships, which have been held since 1991, never once won a person with an eidetic way to memorize information.

Thus, there is not a single case of photographic memory documented by the scientific community. Of course, people with an unusually good memory are, but no one has yet been able to restore the photo in detail, and even more so to reproduce abstract drawings, just looking at them. 

Image on the cover: Vox.com

Most likely not true

What do our verdicts mean?

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