1/20/2024 0 Comments Photographic memory quiz![]() ![]() Instead of memorising just a few playing cards, he can recall the order of an entire shuffled deck in seconds. He knows this limit well – he’s also a world champion “memory athlete” or mnemonist. Meanwhile, most people can hold between five and nine new chunks of information in their working memory, says Konrad. “The amygdala in the brain says, in effect, ‘I need to remember this.’” During a high-impact event, from turtles falling from the sky to meeting your future partner, stress and other hormones released by your body tell the brain to encode the memory deep in your long-term recall, explains McGaugh, who spent his career researching how species normally form memories before he discovered the super memories of HSAM. You are more likely to remember the turtle dropped onto your lawn by a hurricane than you are the random fact that turtles navigate using Earth’s magnetic field. That helps explain why episodic and spatial memory are especially powerful. “And so what happened to you was the most important, particularly anything related to emotion and to location.” “Memory evolved, we think, to help us predict what would happen next, to plan,” says German neuroscientist Boris Konrad. ![]() “The amygdala in the brain says, in effect, I need to remember this.” There’s episodic memory, containing your experiences, and semantic memory, holding your knowledge of facts and figures. It has a working memory, holding what you are focused on right now, and it has two main longer-term stores, the hard drives. ![]() In fact, you can think of your brain like a computer, in a way. Much of what we observe is filtered out by the time we get to the remembering, condensed like a JPEG file on a computer. Our memory is more highlights reel than vivid recording – a rush of emotion and sensory impressions, the ghost of the experience. What was the name of your neighbour’s pet turtle again – Sherlock or Sheldon?īut then some memories never really make it in to begin with. Others are lost in the neural jungle of our brains. Some memories can be dug out easily – that electric moment you saw your partner for the first time, perhaps, or where you were when images of the twin towers falling in the 9/11 attack flashed across news bulletins. If you remember even what day of the week it was, well done. So how does superior memory work? What’s it like to have one? And is photographic memory real?Ĭlose your eyes and picture what you wore yesterday, what you ate, who you met, what they said. She can tell you what she did 20 years ago as if it happened yesterday. That includes Australian Rebecca Sharrock. He and colleagues have since found about 60 others deemed to have this particular kind of super memory, which they named highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. “I didn’t think that was possible at first,” says the now-retired McGaugh. After attempts to replicate the study and find others like her failed, talk of photographic memory faded in scientific circles.īut another surprise came 30 years later, when renowned US neurobiologist James McGaugh met a woman who seemed to remember every day of her life. Stromeyer had married her – and she refused to be tested again. But just as excitement broke out in the scientific community over “Elizabeth”, there came a fitting Hollywood twist. This sounded like Hollywood’s idea of a photographic memory – memories stored in crystal-clear detail, like photographs perfect recall. According to scientist Charles Stromeyer, she could stare at a random 10,000-dot pattern with her left eye then mentally fuse it with another she’d seen the day earlier through her right, naming the 3D letter that appeared in her mind – a magic eye puzzle it shouldn’t have been possible to solve. It was 1970 and testing had decided this young Harvard teacher (and talented painter) possessed what had never been truly diagnosed before: A photographic memory.Īlthough savants down the years had displayed remarkable feats of memory, recalling books word for word or recreating accurate portraits from glances, Elizabeth was different. Elizabeth wasn’t her real name, but it would soon become famous in the halls of neuroscience. ![]()
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