Photographic memory

The photographic memory is also called eidetic or iconic memory designated.

People with a photographic memory have the gift of recalling certain details, numbers, letters, images or names from memory as precisely as if they were looking at a photograph.

While some people only remember individual objects, pictures or situations, others are able to reproduce entire pages from books or newspapers from memory.

What is photographic memory?

People with a photographic memory have the gift of recalling certain details, numbers or images from memory as precisely as if they were looking at a photograph.

The term photographic memory in colloquial language describes the special ability of people to consciously or unconsciously memorize situations, images, numbers, letters or objects over a longer period of time.

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People who are ascribed this gift immerse themselves in their memory as if in a photo, with which they create an exact copy of the previously sensory information.

The consciously trained memory skills, which help chess players, for example, to memorize hundreds of games in order to play their game successfully, is not one of them. In this case, researchers tend to assume that they have a gift for combining, remembering certain game arrangements and using them to button the meaningful figure constellations.

Psychology speaks of an eidetic or iconic memory or phenomenon.

Function & task

Iconic memory stores precise visual information in the sensory part of the brain over a period of several seconds. Few people are able to store this visual information for a longer period of time beyond the iconic memory and later reproduce it exactly. This part of the memory capacity is called eidetic memory in technical terms.

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Eidetikers can answer questions and details about a picture or a scenery and name objects. A popular example is the person who flips through a book and can then remember exactly which line or passage is on which page. The fact that he is then able to remember individual lines or passages of the reading exactly to the page does not mean that he has understood the content.

Although people only use around a quarter of their brain capacity sensibly, they usually do not have a photographic memory because the brain's capacity for absorption is limited. In addition, the process of forgetting rather unimportant information is an essential part of memory.

Eidetikers immerse themselves in their memories like in a photo. However, this memory is not completely reproducible. From a certain age children are often superior to adults with the memory game "Memory". They have a special gift for remembering the pictures of the face down cards and their positions. Studies show that around five to ten percent of children have an eidetic memory, which they later lose, presumably due to the later reconstruction and reduction of the neuronal connections responsible for the ability to remember.

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Series of experiments with great apes are even more positive. Great apes are better able to memorize the arrangement of pictures and numbers than humans (as shown, for example, by the experiments by Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007, Matsuzawa, 2009).

Adults take account of everyday life, which is burdened with high demands and information impressions, and fall into an information economy with which they only memorize the information and impressions that are important to them and forget most of the others from their memory.

The disappearance of eidetic memory after puberty is associated with the phenomenon of acceleration, the acceleration of development that increased rapidly in the second half of the last century and led to profound changes in our daily life.

The ability to accurately recall words, pictures, numbers and names depends on the neuroplasticity of the brain and its ability to repeatedly rearrange itself and delete connections. Scientists believe that it is impossible to memorize every detail as if in an “inner photo” and recall it later.

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Illnesses & ailments

Medical research suggests that eidetic memory is linked to damage to the temporal lobe in the brain. This damage occurs very early in the embryonic development phase. Most of the people affected are men, many of them autistic. These are known to have an exceptional capacity to memorize precise information and details and to recall that memory at any time.

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The limited capacity of the human brain makes it necessary to select important and unconscious information. This mechanism is important because otherwise the brain would be flooded with information that it cannot process. This situation represents an increased stress level which, if it lasts longer, can manifest itself in negative effects such as emotional overreactions and psychological illnesses.

The term “photographic memory” is not used uniformly in everyday life. For decades, many people can remember almost all the details of their life and their accompanying circumstances, whereby many impressions are only of an accompanying or unimportant nature.

The same goes for the American Jill Price, who can remember every day of her life since 1980. In March 2006, brain researchers at the University of California examined the apparently phenomenal memory of the Californian woman and devoted a study to her in the specialist journal “Neurocase”. Jill Price not only remembers every day of her life for the past 35 years, but also of the circumstances that happened during that time. In this way, she can precisely name the question of what happened on a certain date, such as a plane crash on July 19, 1989, which she had been following on the news. However, she admitted that she was particularly interested in this matter and said that she did not remember things that were unimportant to her, such as memorized poems or historical data in childhood. Therefore, Jill Price is more likely to be an autobiographical memory with which the subconscious has stored impressions of her life that were particularly important to her.

Research into human memory is still generally not based on valid scientific foundations, as no uniform knowledge has yet existed.