Hey, I’ve got a photographic memory!
It’s just that the lens is smeared with soap and I keep losing the photographs. ba-dum-tish!
Metaphors can go lots of ways…
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This trait drives her to advocate for more funding for brain research.
I think she simply wants to learn how to forget.
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Imagine my urge to send this off to a certain (now) engineering manager (at my first employer) who one day told us of his “photogenic” memory. Our attempts to correct him back then proved to be fruitless.
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“Photographic” or eidetic memory is almost certainly not real. Every time someone who claims to have is studied, the evidence collapses. Lots of people think they have it because it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you are remembering things perfectly. Disproving it requires finding external sources for all the things you think you remember, and nobody does that with their own memories.
The evidence on it is poor, and the more it is studied, the worse the evidence gets, which is exactly what one expects for a phenomenon that isn’t real.
The autobiographical style where people remember every time and date in their life is quite real, but extremely rare. There are only a couple of externally verified and confirmed cases of this in the world. By all accounts it’s pretty crippling. The ability to forget and move past trauma is crucial to our mental health. Having a bad memory is an evolutionary advantage, which is probably why we all have pretty crappy memories.
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I recall (check my memory 
) an article wherein an archeologist surmised that prehistoric cave wall artists likely had eidetic memories, given the accuracy of their drawings. There’s a few things to unpack from that one declaration — the mind of the cave wall artist he was basing his assumption on; the minds of other cave wall artists; and the accuracy of the drawings (which, to me, look like very charming stylizations). I wonder if that archeologist can recall what he had surmised then.
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Henner could be the exception. She appears to find it empowering.
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Are you saying it wasn’t pretty?
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It’s never pretty when from the get go an employee boorishly signals that he so, so, so wants to be a manager.
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