Originally published at: What it's really like to have a photographic memory | Boing Boing
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I don’t have HSAM but I do remember this:
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Beat me to it by a minute. Her interviews on this are absolutely fascinating. Here’s another one:
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She only needs to scan the internet once or twice to take and keep anything in.
This sounds like a sentence written in 1996
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I once met a guy who dated her. I think this was back in the late 1980’s when I met him.
He was just smitten with her and mentioned that, among other memorable attributes, she had a photographic memory. I found the guy to be a complete overbearing asshole. But I listened to his stories because at the time, he was the boss.
I can’t recall his name, but unfortunately I’m quite sure Marilu remembers every moment with him.
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Yeah, when Markie Post died recently I intended to post about her photographic memory.
But it wasn’t hers. It was Marilu Henner’s. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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I’m currently conducting a personal experiment inspired by this blog:
The blogger does not have HSAM, but has been able to remember 10 years’ worth of his life, day by day, just by regular reviewing of each day.
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Yeah, but does it help her solve murders on all those Hallmark mysteries she’s in?
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Forget about Celebrity or College Jeopardy…I wanna see 3 HSAMs duke it out.
Then again, recall is different from solving, but it’d still probably be interesting.
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This part - autobiographical memory in HSAM - still confuses me. I’d always considered photographic memory to be about the visual, not related to a person’s life beyond the fact that they saw something once and remembered it in great detail. For example, I could go to a poetry recitation and recall a phrase or two the next day. By the end of the week, they would be forgotten unless I had written them down. OTOH, I’ve read poems in high school that I can recite by seeing the page in my mind and reading them again.
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I recall from the 60 Minutes episode that that’s the main distinguishing difference between Hsam and photographic or eidetic memory. The ability to instantaneously recall (more accurately to reconstruct) specific events and dates about one’s life is a much rarer condition than those who have an eidetic memory who can recall details of images or text after only seeing them briefly.
The headline is inaccurate as these are really two separate conditions.
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I guess Ms. Henner’s co-star Andy Kaufman also had a very good memory, to the point he could read a script once and memorize it. And so he never showed up for rehearsals, which is probably another reason he was never the most popular guy around.
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Not quite on point, this is similar https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-
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I have the ability to store vast amounts of useless information for decades.
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I think if you look into this, it’s pretty well been shown that there is no such thing as a photographic memory. There are people who have good memories certainly, but no scientific study has ever found someone with a photographic memory. John Dean’s Watergate testimony was compared to the White House tapes and while they generally matched, it was found that he had exaggerated both his role and his integrity.
There was a time when I thought my Grandmother had a “Photographic Memory”.
She had an uncanny ability to recall family interactions to the DATE and also was used to settle arguments about when some event occurred (or did not occur).
Years later, when pressed, she revealed her “secret”. She had a small desktop calendar that was on the Phone Table (she had a table specifically dedicated to the phone and the calendar).
On that calendar she would mark the Low and High Temperature for the day and also whoever “called” that day. There was not room for much more. She kept all the calendars in a drawer.
She really did not do anything else so this was the primary focus of much of her adult life after all the kids left. Every Day.
When we asked her how she could recall some Event that was NOT on the calendar, it was usually something like “Well my sister called on Monday and then Bob called on Thursday and I recall that we talked about this “Event” on Thursday but it didn’t happen that day. So it must have been earlier. But I didn’t talk about it with my Sister on Monday so it must have happened Tuesday or Wednesday of that week”.
Which makes sense. But she also seemed to remember all the weather info as well. Which was kind of odd. Still, she was the go-to source for settling “WHEN” something happened that no one could agree on. If anyone doubted her, she would pull out the calendars from the drawer and find the date in question. She was always Spot-On.
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I have (or maybe had when I was in college) a really great memory by training.
My specific area of study required a lot of memorization, and I got really good at it. Even visually, I could see a sign and not read it at the time. Hours later, recall the image and read the text.
Dates, places, names, like nothing. It all went in and stayed.
Memory is pretty normal in middle age now. I can never find my keys or wallet but I recall a lot of details I read in the news.
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I don’t have any form of photographic memory, but my episodic memory seems unusually tightly coupled to my spatial stuff. So just as a smell can take you back to childhood, recalling past events brings up a strong recollection of where I was in space and what was in my field of view at that moment, even if that event is just you having told me your friend’s cat enjoys smooth jazz. I realize that’s generally true for everybody, but in my case it seems to be a lot stronger than what others experience.
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I’ve noticed bbs interface has been auto “correcting” a lot of my posts lately to include a stray apostrophe. It’s annoying, but if I don’t notice it while writing, I’m not likely to go back and edit it. Wonder if others are noticing the same…
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