Eidetic memory

Eidetic memory, photographic memory, or total recall, is the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme accuracy and in seemingly abundant volume. The word eidetic (pronounced: /aɪˈdɛtɪk/) comes from the Greek word είδος (eidos), which means "image" or "form". Eidetic memory can have a very different meaning for memory experts who use the Picture Elicitation Method to detect it. Eidetic memory as observed in children is typified by the ability of an individual to study an image for approximately 30 seconds, and maintain a nearly perfect photographic memory of that image for a short time once it has been removed--indeed such eidetikers claim to "see" the image on the blank canvas as vividly and in as perfect detail as if it were still there.

While many people demonstrate extraordinary memory abilities, it is unlikely that true eidetic memory exists in adults (if at all). While many famous artists and composers (Claude Monet and Mozart) are commonly thought to have had eidetic memory, it is possible that their memories simply became highly trained in their respective fields of art, as they each devoted large portions of their waking hours towards the improvement of their abilities. Such a focus on their individual arts most likely improved the relevant parts of their memory, which may account for their surprising abilities.

People with eidetic memory

A number of people claim to have eidetic memory, but nearly no one has been tested and documented as having a memory that is truly photographic in a literal sense. Regardless, here are a number of individuals with extraordinary memory that have been labeled by some as eidetikers.

• Derren Brown, British television star, renowned for his abilities to appear to be psychic while insisting he has no psychic abilities, accomplishes some of his tricks using eidetic memory.
• Dr. James William Monroe had the ability then known as Epidetectorial Memory, only present in one person in every 500. Here, the brain is able to retain and recall images it has captured for the duration of its functional ability. When exposed to an arbitrary trigger, the brain can then recall such images with an astonishing accuracy and presence, albeit stripped of any extraneous context. A similar phenomenon is known in modern parlance as déja vu.
• According to his autobiography "Exposed", Geraldo Rivera claims to have eidetic memory. He says that in high school, students would pay him to take tests for them.
• Henri Poincaré had eidetic memory.
• Péter Lékó, professional Hungarian chess player (ranked among the best six players of the world in 2007 by FIDE), is known to have an eidetic memory, helping him memorize chess games and tactics. Also, during his childhood, he could always surprise his friends by learning pages of sport statistics, simply by reading them once or twice.
• Stephen Wiltshire, MBE, is a prodigious savant, capable of drawing the entire skyline of a city after a single glance.
• In 1993, taxi driver Tom Morton, who knew over 16,000 telephone numbers in Lancashire, beat the British Olympia Telephone Exchange computer with his recall while being interviewed by Esther Rantzen and Adrian Mills on the popular BBC magazine programme That's Life!.[1]
• Mozart was a possible possessor of eidetic memory, which is especially suited for composers, as demonstrated at the age of 14. At the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week in Rome, Gregorio Allegri's Miserere would be performed. The notes to the Miserere were kept secret under pain of excommunication. On Holy Tuesday, Mozart and his father attended the Papal Mass at the Sistine Chapel. Upon returning to their room, Mozart transcribed the music which had been kept secret for a century. (This is the popular version of that incident. Other sources have him at the Vatican not once but twice (see also Allegri). That would make the event much less a miracle since Mozart was already familiar with difficult composing techniques at that age. He would have recognized and memorized the quite simple harmonic and formal patterns of the Miserere at the first performance and would have used the second one to correct the details.)
• Kim Peek is an autistic savant with eidetic memory and developmental disabilities, resulting from congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the character of Raymond Babbit, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the movie Rain Man. He can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye.
• Nikola Tesla had eidetic memory.
• Mathematician John von Neumann could take a glance at a page of a book and recite it later, without errors, from the beginning to the end.
• Marilu Henner, American actress from the 80s TV comedy series Taxi, supposedly has eidetic memory.
• Professional gin rummy and poker player Stu Ungar was said to have had eidetic memory. He was able to keep track of every card in a six-deck blackjack shoe.
• Saint-Saëns was also said to have an eidetic memory. His memory allowed him not only to master music but also the subjects of mathematics, archeology, astronomy, and the natural sciences.
• Orlando Serrell has had photographic memory since age 10 after he was hit on the head with a baseball.
• Many famous symphony conductors also have eidetic memory where they can "visualize" the conducting score when conducting from memory rather than straight memorization of musical patterns. Among those with this ability are Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor and Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and Seiji Ozawa, now retired Conductor and Music Director of the Boston Symphony.
• Jacques Bergier: his friend and co-author Louis Pauwels called him a "living computer"; in addition, he was a speed reader and could read up to ten books per day.
• Robert Underwood, a boy residing in South Florida, recently was proven by analysts to have eidetic memory. He read a Harry Potter book, and is able to recite it word for word to a crowd.
• Bobby Ray Inman, politician, former NSA director has eidectic memory.
• Cher is said to have eidetic memory, needing only to read a script once or twice to memorize her lines.

Controversy

Dr. Marvin Minsky, in his book The Society of Mind, was unable to verify claims of eidetic memory (see sections 15.3 & 15.6) and considered reports of eidetic memory to be an "unfounded myth".

Support for the belief that eidetic memory could be a myth was supplied by the psychologist Adriaan de Groot, who conducted an experiment into the ability of chess Grandmasters to memorize complex positions of chess pieces on a chess board. Initially it was found that these experts could recall surprising amounts of information, far more than non-experts, suggesting eidetic skills. However, when the experts were presented with arrangements of chess pieces that could never occur in a game, their recall was no better than the non-experts, implying that they had developed an ability to organise certain types of information, rather than possessing innate eidetic ability.

Some people attribute exceptional powers of memory to enhanced memory techniques as opposed to any kind of innate difference in the brain. However, support for the belief that eidetic memory is a real phenomenon has been supplied by some studies. Charles Stromeyer studied his future wife Elizabeth who could recall poetry written in a foreign language that she did not understand years after she had first seen the poem. She also could recall random dot patterns with such fidelity as to combine two patterns into a stereoscopic image. She remains the only person to have passed such a test. You can test yourself by examining the bottom pair of the exemplar Julesz random-dot stereograms in this Wiki without a stereoscope or without crossing your eyes to view them stereoscopically. There are more complex figures in

A.R. Luria wrote a famous account, Mind of a Mnemonist, of a subject with a remarkable memory, S.V. Shereshevskii; among various extraordinary feats, he could memorize lengthy lists of random words and recall them perfectly decades later. Luria believed the man had effectively unlimited recall; Shereshevskii is believed by some to be a prodigious savant like Peek. However, it is possible that he used memory techniques as well. See his article for further information about his methods.

Memory records

Guinness World Records lists people with extraordinary memories. For example, on July 2 2005, Akira Haraguchi managed to recite pi's first 83,431 decimal places from memory and more recently to 100,000 decimal places in 16 hours (October 4, 2006). The 2004 World Memory Champion Ben Pridmore memorized the order of cards in a randomly shuffled 52-card deck in 31.03 seconds. The authors of the Guinness Book of Records, Norris and Ross McWhirter, had extraordinary memory, in that they could recall any entry in the book on demand, and did so weekly in response to audience questions on the long-running television show Record Breakers. However, such results can be duplicated using mental images and the "method of loci".

Some autistic individuals display extraordinary memory, including those with related conditions such as Asperger's syndrome. Autistic savants are a rarity but they, in particular, show signs of spectacular memory. However, many autistic individuals do not possess eidetic memory.

Synesthesia has also been credited as an enhancement of auditory memory, but only for information that triggers a synesthetic reaction. However, some synesthetes have been found to have a more acute than normal "perfect color" sense with which they are able to match color shades nearly perfectly after extended periods of time, without the accompanying synesthetic reaction.

Many people who generally have a good memory claim to have eidetic memory. However, there are distinct differences in the manner in which information is processed. People who have a generally capable memory often use mnemonic devices to retain information while those with eidetic memory remember very specific details, such as where a person was standing, etc. They may recall an event with great detail while those with a normal memory remember daily routines rather than specific details that may have interrupted a routine.

Eidetic memory in fiction

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• In Lois McMaster Bujold's the Vorkosigan Saga, Simon Illyan, a prominent character, has an artificial eidetic memory chip implanted in his brain for most of the saga.
• In the Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott-Card, Julian Delphiki has an eidetic memory.
• FBI investigator Will Graham, protagonist of Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon and the man who first captured Hannibal Lecter, is explicitly identified as having eidetic memory in both the novel and the second film adaption of the novel. Lecter himself was capable of photographic memory: he could not only recall the Duomo but also possessed a seemingly limitless capacity to memorize literature.
• In Digital Fortress, by Dan Brown, the character David Becker has an eidetic memory geared toward his linguistic abilities. Robert Langdon, the lead character in The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, also claimed to near perfect eidetic memory. He only mentions it in The Da Vinci Code.
• The short story Sucker Bait by Isaac Asimov features the character of Mark Annuncio, who has been trained from a young age to develop an eidetic memory and find correlations between seemingly unrelated pieces of data by absorbing as much knowledge as possible. Another Asimov story, "Lest We Remember," features a man named John Heath who gains perfect memory recollection after having a new, experimental drug tested on him.
• Cotton Malone, the main character of "The Templar Legacy" and "The Alexandria Link" by Steve Berry has an eidetic memory.
• In Alpha Force, by Chris Ryan, Hex is explicitly identified as being capable of photographic memory.
• Max Jones, the title character of Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starman Jones, uses his eidetic memory to navigate his ship home following the loss of the ship's astrogation tables.
• The narrator in Will Self's novel My Idea of Fun (1993) has an eidetic memory.
• Severian, the narrator of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun has an eidetic memory, though this is often intentionally misleading; for example, he describes the tower he grew up in without ever realizing it is the remains of an ancient spaceship.
• Catseye, a fictional character in Marvel Comics, had an eidetic memory, and was capable of extremely quick learning.
• Barbara Gordon, a fictional character in DC Comics, has eidetic memory, which she puts to use as the information broker Oracle.
• Bart Allen, a fictional character in DC Comics and the current Flash, has eidetic memory. When he became the second Kid Flash, he read the entire contents of the San Francisco Public Library.
• Betty Brant, supporting character in the Spider-Man comics, has photographic memory, which she reveals while under oath in She-Hulk #4 (vol 1., August 2004)
• Lesley and Gordon in the book A Cage of Butterflies by Brian Caswell possess eidetic memory which allows them to play chess without a chessboard. In the Deucalion series, also by Brian Caswell, some of the main characters have eidetic memory, making them able to recall every memory they ever had.
• The 15 year old Christopher Boone from the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, written by Mark Haddon, has eidetic memory, but suffers from Asperger Syndrome.
• Null-ARC Trooper Ordo, from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, had eidetic memory from infancy, a trait of all Null Series Advance Recon Commandos, as revealed in Star Wars Republic Commando: Triple Zero.
• Riane, the prophesied redeemer known as the Dar Sala-at in the Pearl Saga written by Eric Van Lustbader, possesses an immersive eidetic memory. This is revealed slowly as the character recovers from amnesia. The memory is progressively revealed, as a literary device for both character and plot development.
• Sage, a member of the X-men, has an eidetic memory as well as other powers.
• Ivan Efremov in his novel Razor's Edge used the word eidetica as an ability to deliberately have vicarious experiences in dreams (see lucid dreaming), when man dreams in full detail about something that is known to him only as told by friends, read in books or seen in pictures. In this novel, the capability to see panoramic color images appears in one of the novel's characters after he was injured in the time of the Great Patriotic War. Later on he arrives in Moscow, USSR to ask the doctors to explain this symptom. While healing, he has an even more detailed dream, but he loses his unique ability upon recovery.
• Jennifer "Cam" Jansen , the female protagonist of David A. Adler's Cam Jansen children mystery novels, uses her photographic memory to her advantage when solving crimes. Cam, short for Camera, was appropriately nicknamed due to her idiosyncrasy of saying "click" every time she takes a "picture" of a scene in her head (using her photographic memory).
• In Terry Pratchett's novel Small Gods, the main character Brutha has photographic memory, enabling him to recall every page of every scroll in the Ephebian Library, though he does not understand what they say, being illiterate.
• In Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen, the character Daniel Saunders has a photographic memory, which he uses to memorize the Talmud, novels and his school work.
• In Richard K. Morgan's novel Altered Carbon and its sequels, it is stated numerous times that Takeshi Kovacs has total recall as a part of the mental conditioning that all U.N. Envoys go through.
• The eidetic memory of Paul Sweetbread, the protagonist of Tony Eprile's The Persistence of Memory, is one of the novel's major themes.
• Winter, a minor supporting character appearing in several Star Wars novels, can recall anything she has ever seen or heard perfectly.
• In Matt Amerling's novel The Midknight, the main protagonist Jesse Sands is drugged with a liquid that enhances his abilities and gives him eidetic memory, helping him to execute any fighting moves he reads about or sees.
• Ireneo Funes, fictional character in Borges's short story Funes the Memorious, is able to perceive everything in full detail and remembers it all.
• In Fahrenheit 451, the men who escaped civilization use photographic memory to memorize books, so that they may not be forever lost.
• In the Shopaholic book series by Sophie Kinsella, protagonist Becky Bloomwood's husband Luke Brandon is said to have a photographic memory.

Film

• In The Da Vinci Code, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) questions Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) as to whether he possesses eidetic memory, while he breaks the code near Jacques Sauniere's body.
• In the movie Hackers, "Lord Nikon" claims to have a photographic memory (his handle Nikon refers to the camera company).
• In the movie The Bourne Identity, the main character Jason Bourne glances at a map before wildly taking off through the streets, seemingly knowledgeable of exactly where he's going. Later, in a restaurant, he discusses his instant awareness of all the license plate numbers on cars parked outside.
• In the movie Good Will Hunting, the main character has eidetic memory and is able to remember large, exact quotes from academic books, as well as their corresponding page(s).
• In the movie Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, James T. Kirk's love interest in the movie, Dr. Gillian Taylor, claims to have a photographic memory, saying she could "see words."
• In Carry on Spying (1964) Barbara Windsor's character Daphne Honeybutt can recall large amounts of information, including once when hit on the head. She doesn't understand it, but can recall scientific formula and the like.
• In the movie Space Camp, Tish Ambrose, one of the teenagers stranded in the space shuttle, claims to have photographic memory.

Television

• Adrian Monk (from the USA Network series Monk) has an eidetic memory. In "Mr Monk and the Wrong Man" (Season 6, Episode 15), the woman who testifies against Max Barton is eidetic. She recalls the murder scene in great detail.
• Shawn Spencer (from Psych, also on the USA Network) irregularly shows features of an eidetic memory. His bio on the Psych website identifies that he has "extraordinary powers of observation," and he has regularly demonstrated only average recall ability, particularly in relation to technical or medical details. However he has also shown signs of having photographic recall, such as his counting hats trick and being able to recreate an exact mental picture of the room in "Game, Set...Muuurder?" hours after the fact. In the episode "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, He Loves Me, Oops He's Dead", Shawn himself refers to the fact that he possesses "heightened observational skills", and his extraordinary recall may be due to trained advanced mnemonics devices.
• Spencer Reid, a fictional FBI agent character in the show Criminal Minds, has eidetic memory.
• Ziva David, a fictional Mossad agent in NCIS, has been said to have an eidetic memory
• Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, a fictional character in the TV show Prison Break, claims that he has photographic memory. Charles "Haywire" Patoshik does, in fact, possess eidetic memory.
• Rico from Hannah Montana has a photographic memory stated in the episode "(Get Down Study-udy-udy)".
• Seven of Nine, a fictional character on Star Trek: Voyager and former Borg drone is revealed to have an eidetic memory in season four of the show in the episode Vis a Vis. The Doctor also suspected that Kes had an eidetic memory as well when she remembered details about her medical studies easily.
• Max Guevara, from Dark Angel, was able to translate the dial tone on speed dial into numbers.
• Commander Susan Ivanova, a fictional character on Babylon 5, claimed to have eidetic memory. She recalled a once-heard Minbari phrase perfectly.
• Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel possesses photographic memory.
• Kyle from Kyle XY demonstrates an extraordinary memory which could be photographic memory. We learn this as in an episode, he is in school in the library and he reads large amounts of books and can recite them for a test further on into the episode. Additionally in the Pilot episode he mentions he 'draws what he sees' meaning he can recite images he had seen and have enough time to draw them. Jessi has the same ability
• Adam Rove, a character from the television show Joan of Arcadia, possesses eidetic memory.
• Dr. Sam Beckett, the main character of Quantum Leap, is stated to have possessed a photographic (eidetic) memory in the episode "Catch A Falling Star". In addition, in the episode "Trilogy part 3", season 5 episode 10, he says he has a photographic memory.
• Charlie Andrews, a waitress featured in the NBC series "Heroes," has an advanced photographic memory as her superhuman power. This is mentioned in the SFX Heroes Special Edition magazine. She first demonstrated this ability when she was able to speak Japanese fluently after reading a Japanese book Hiro had just given her. Sylar, the series villain, later demonstrates mastery of her ability, which he stole from her.
• Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle indicates that he has photographic memory when he recalls every single item stolen from a home robbery after inadvertently abetting the thief in the episode "Block Party."
• Jimmy Neutron (from Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) has photographic memory.
• TJ Henderson from the Smart Guy TV show has photographic memory.
• Gibson Kafka, a bartender on the show Birds of Prey has eidetic memory as his metahuman ability.
• Minami Megumi from Tantei Gakuen Q uses her photographic memory to aid her in solving mysteries.
• Edgar Stiles, from the television series 24, has a photographic memory.
• Fox Mulder, from The X-Files, has a self-proclaimed photographic memory (Episode 1-12 "Fire").
• Both Zoe Heriot and Melanie Bush from the original series of Doctor Who had eidetic memories.
• Luke Smith from The Sarah Jane Adventures displays the ability to remember incredibly long number sequences.
• Scieszka from Fullmetal Alchemist has an eidetic memory when it comes to printed material, able to transcribe any text after reading it only once.
• Marshall Flinkman from the TV series Alias has eidetic memory.
• Lex Luthor on Justice League Unlimited episode Panic in the Sky was revealed to have eidetic memory.
• Ingrid Third from the show Fillmore! demonstrates her photographic memory.
• Agents of Section 31 in the Star Trek universe are implied to have some sort of eidetic memory, since they do not have official documents or reports stored on a computer, as revealed in Extreme Measures (DS9 episode); although it is never reveal whether the agent who revealed it was telling the truth or not.
• Tru Davies from Tru Calling often memorized details of objects she had only seen for a moment.
• All Immortals on the tv series Highlander were shown as possessing eidetic memory of the events they had lived through.
• Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls remembers everything she reads. She can recall details of an obituary months after reading it, down to the last family member listed.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode, "Vis à Vis", Seven of Nine tells an alien believed to be Tom Paris that she possesses an eidetic memory. She then offers to quote a passage he was reading from a PADD. Later, Captain Janeway says that during Seven's report regarding "Tom's" odd behavior, Seven did actually quote the passage to the captain.
• Natalie Davis (The Miniature Killer in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) had an eidetic memory which allowed her to be able to memorize crime scenes.

Games

• In EVE Online, "Eidetic Memory" is a skill that can be trained to gain a higher memory attribute.
• In White Wolf's World of Darkness core rulebook, "Eidetic Memory" is a Merit (character advantage) that may be selected at character creation.
• In Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds core rulebook, "Eidetic Memory" is a Feat that may be selected that allows a character to make any Knowledge skill check untrained.
• In GURPS, "Eidetic Memory" is an advantage which grants characters a bonus to learning checks, and entitles the player to be reminded by the GM and other players of anything he may have forgotten but which his character would remember.

See also

• Synaptic plasticity
• Autistic savant
• Hyperthymesia - a condition where the affected individual has a superior autobiographical memory
• Mnemonic
• Absolute pitch, also known as perfect pitch - the ability to differentiate pitches, recall tones in the exact note without aid, and name a certain note played in an instant