The story of the photographic memory is one of our most well-worn cultural tropes. Movies like Rain Man, as well as the story of autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire, who is sometimes called the “Human Camera” and is currently drawing a panorama of New York City from memory, reinforce our notion that it’s possible to have a memory so keen and perceptive that a quick glance at something is all that’s necessary to burn an image into our consciousness forever.
Scores of famous (and not-so-famous) people have claimed to possess this fantastical ability, from Chinese president Hu Jintao and actor Desi Arnaz to celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe. While their feats of memory magic may leave us all amazed, there’s one tiny problem: photographic memory doesn’t actually exist. At least, not in the way in which we usually think of it.
Camera in Absentia
Most people imagine that a photographic memory works something like this: a person sees a picture or a scene and takes a visual “snapshot,” which lasts forever and can be recalled at any time with complete precision. In reality, though, the closest thing to this scenario is an ability called eidetic memory. Although its existence is controversial, too, people with eidetic memory have extraordinary recall of pictures and images. After looking at something for just a few moments, they can recall the image so vividly that it’s almost as if it were real and right in front of them. The overwhelming majority of individuals with eidetic memory are children, along with adults with organic forms of mental retardation, such as autism. Children with the ability seem to always lose it as they get older; tests have never found an average adult who possesses an eidetic memory. But even people who do seem to have eidetic memory have far-from-perfect recall. In describing their eidetic images, they are often unsure or sketchy about some details, they alter elements of the image, and they fabricate features that did not originally exist. Also, contrary to the myth of photographic memory, eidetic images don’t last forever. They fade after a few minutes, and once they’re gone, they usually cannot be recalled.
Sketchy Studies and Dodgy Data
Our cultural notion of a photographic memory comes partly from a report published in the journal Nature in 1970. In the article, a Harvard researcher named Charles Stromeyer III described the case study of a woman named Elizabeth, who he claimed had memorized two different series of ten thousand random dots and had mentally merged her perfect memories of the dots to create a single picture. Stromeyer offered her up as proof that photographic memory exists. However, most researchers have found several serious faults with this one-woman “study,” namely that after the single test, Stromeyer married his test subject and she was never tested again, and that no study has ever been able to replicate the results. Since the “Elizabeth” study, doctors have tested for photographic memory but have never been able to prove that it exists. Most psychologists and researchers don’t believe that it does.
In cases where people have claimed to possess powers of photographic memory, there’s usually another explanation. Scholars have noted that musicians such as Mozart, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Beethoven showed astounding abilities to play music from memory. Author C.S. Lewis claimed to remember everything he ever read. Chess masters can sometimes remember and re-create a midgame chessboard, based solely on their knowledge of chess strategy and how the pieces move. But is it really so surprising that a musical genius would also be able to play thousands of songs from memory, or that a mathematician could recite pi to one thousand places? These memory components aren’t a separate gift—they’re a natural and expected companion to prodigious talent, and they surface only in relation to that talent. Usually, the people who show an amazing capacity for memory in one area, such as music or math, have average memories about unrelated subjects. If photographic memory were real, Mozart would be able to memorize chess boards, and chess masters would be able to write out the score to The Marriage of Figaro.
Remember the Time?
Photographic memory also shouldn’t be confused with other real quirks of the human mind. One woman in Irvine, California, for example, can remember every single day of her life. Her condition, called hyperthymesia, involves a vastly enhanced autobiographical memory. Hyperthymesiacs have very specific and vivid memories of the events in their lives; they’re often able to remember what day of the week an event occurred on, what they were wearing, and what the weather was like. The real Rain Man, Kim Peek, like many megasavants, can also calculate on which day of the week any given date in history fell and recite the major news headlines of that day, although this skill is more about mathematical calculation than about recalling personal experiences.