Slate.com has a pretty interesting review of the history of photographic memory research. It was written in response to this whole harvard girl author thing.
Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. In this morning's New York Times, the author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life explained how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another young-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan said she has a photographic memory. "I never take notes."This seems like as good an opportunity as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but nobody actually does. Nobody. Well, maybe one person.
The article goes on to look at a number of researchers and their quests to find people who actually have 'photographic' memories.
7 Comments:
I always liked Isaac Asimov's description of his "near photographic" memory: "I can remember things near photographs".
(rimshot)
Sat Apr 29, 02:34:53 PM CDT
Interesting article (and interesting blog--I found you through Mind Hacks).
Did you intentionally leave it out the link to the article? Just in case not, here it is.
I remember learning that what is typically called photographic memory (but is called eidetic memory in the article) exists in almost 50% of children under 8, but is simply the brain's way of keeping information that might be useful until more intelligent filters are put into place and unnecessary information is filtered out. I also like the idea of cryptomnesia--I've had that experience of telling a story that I thought was mine but actually happened to a friend of mine who had related it to me.
Sat Apr 29, 04:45:16 PM CDT
actually the link to the article is the blog post title.
Sat Apr 29, 06:27:33 PM CDT
Oops... I always forget that blogger works that way (I'm used to the title linking to a permalink for the entry). Thanks!
Sat Apr 29, 08:00:46 PM CDT
yeah, human factors doesnt always seem to be programmers #1 priority. I really dont understand why the permalink is the date though - that really doesnt make much sense
Sat Apr 29, 09:13:12 PM CDT
heh, and I thought the link title was a ploy to get those of us using rss readers to have to come to your blog page!
Anyway, I also found your blog through mind hacks and really like it :-)
The marrying your research subject thing is odd. I'd think that the IRB might have something to say about that these days. Although I do know someone who married her thesis advisor...
Sun Apr 30, 11:01:29 AM CDT
so actually.. in the RSS feed the link title brings you to the omni brain homepage - see... bad human factors ;)
Sun Apr 30, 12:05:46 PM CDT
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