<p>the forum about math skills made me start pondering about people with photographic memories...</p>
<p>i find these people very interesting, what percentage of people do you think have this "gift?" i would really like to find out more about the science behind this type of memory...</p>
<p>do you have (or know anyone who has) a photographic memory? what cool things can you (they) do? </p>
<p>what are your views on it?</p>
<p>Umm...I don't believe in photographic memories, I've never really believed that people can remember something like a paragraph after just looking at it for a minute. Is that what you're talking about?</p>
<p>Some people can. Or at least have excellent memories.</p>
<p>my sister was telling me about a friend she had in college (princeton graduate school), who was extremely bright. She said that this person could:</p>
<p>1) Remember thousands of albums worth of music so well that my sister and friends would tell him a track number on a certain album, he would then proceed to tell them the name of the track and could sing them the entire song...</p>
<p>2) Remember any sentence that was just spoken to him in a way that he could "read," if you will, the sentence backwards. So if you said "Sam how was your day?" he would say "yad ruoy saw woh maS." yes backwards and everything...at first they did not believe him but they wrote it down so they could see it, and sure enough he was correct...</p>
<p>i think that would be pretty cool</p>
<p>I read a book on Alzheimer's one year, and it mentioned how a doctor had a patient one time whose memory was so perfect, that when chastised for not taking notes during a meeting lasting several hours, he proceeded to recite every thread of dialogue from the beginning of the meeting to the end. He could also recall books from memory after reading them once (meaning, he knew the contents of the book by heart after a single read). Individuals with these skills are often unable to analyze the information stuck in their heads, however.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Individuals with these skills are often unable to analyze the information stuck in their heads, however.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Indeed, memorization is different from internalization, which is why many universities abandon testing students on what they can memorize, but rather on what they understand and whether they can explain it properly.</p>
<p>no such thing i believe or i think.</p>
<p>actually, there is a such thing, but it doesn't pertain to everyone.</p>
<p>wow.. it would be cool to have photographic memory..</p>
<p>i was never really good at memorizing anything...
I just forget right after.</p>
<p>I'm pretty good at analyzing and stuff like that though..</p>
<p>the myth about photographic memory originates either from "eidetic memory" or from having effective mnemonic devices.</p>
<p>I have a "photographic memory."</p>
<p>Meaning, you tell me something, or I read something, and it's here for the rest of my life. Even the most minute detail.</p>
<p>but you use a mnemonic device or some other way to remember it.</p>
<p>it's how i memorize information such as campbell's textbook x]... i associate each word or idea with something else.</p>
<p>photographic memory implies that all you have to do is look at something, and you can say "oh his shoelace was to the left of her hand by .5 inches" or something without any associations. it's like taking a picture.</p>
<p>god father what were your SAT scores?...(just want to see if there is any correlation)</p>
<p>^^^ correct. No one can look a page for a second, look away, and recite what they saw, as if there is a photograph in their mind's eye. That's what photographic memory has come to mean.</p>
<ol>
<li>750r/800m/790w.</li>
</ol>
<p>what does sats have to do with memorization? i mean its not like you can memorize every single piece of writing beforehand (for the C/R) and memorize every single possible combination of words (for the writing portion).</p>
<p>do you mean sat2 bio, chem, physics?</p>
<p>correlation? hm.</p>
<p>i'd think there was a difference between "photographic memory" as in, remembering a room and where all the contents are, than in "comprehensive memory", like memorizing a conversation</p>
<p>i can read a chapter of say, APUSH. then if someone asks me about a bill, i can remember what page it's on, the paragraph it's in, and the shape of the paragraphs on the pages. on tests, i can remember exact words and phrases. in other words, my memory works in pictures.</p>
<p>for people that can memorize whole books - do they read it out loud as if the page in the book is in their heads? or does it become something innate, like recitation?</p>
<p>Some people-like the ones that memorize Confucius' Five Books or the entire Koran usually read it out loud for hours on end.</p>
<p>I'm sorry to bust the nonbelievers' bubbles, but I <em>actually know</em> somebody who had a near photographic memory. He was a normal kid, like the rest of us (I think he went on to Tufts), and he could remember long strings of numbers (think 284234291394621 or 8001709710137421, no joke) that he would then recite forwards OR backwords, up to 10 MINUTES LATER. One time I was there and saw the feat FIRSTHAND, and I'm not lying. I was skeptical until I saw it happen. I bought that kid a slice of pizza I was so impressed.</p>