In my mind, it’s better described as “flash memory,” as you can perfectly remember something you are exposed to but only for a brief time, like those after images you keep seeing when something is flashed at you and you close your eyes. When I was a child (and sometimes now as an adult), an image actually stayed burned onto my retina for a longer-than-usual period. It wasn’t so much that my brain remembered said stimuli, it was that I could literally still see the after image. This nonetheless got me labeled an eideticker. My own personal experiences make me wonder if eidetic memory has more to do with the eyes than with the brain. Photographic memory has a more casual definition, and it means different things to different people, although plenty of people use the two terms interchangeably. They nonetheless have one major difference: With photographic memory, the recall part isn’t limited to a brief time after exposure. Someone with a photographic memory would be able to pull up a memory in perfect or nearly perfect detail (even photographs have rounding errors) minutes, days, weeks, or even years after exposure.
#EIDETIC MEMORY DEFINITION SERIES#
The protagonist in the TV series Psych is a perfect example (with an added feature of gleaning meaning from the memories too-something neurologist Barry Gordon calls “intelligent memory”).įrom all I’ve read, there is evidence that photographic memory can exist in humans, but so far no one has come forward with all the ingredients necessary for it to be. #Difference between eidetic memory and photographic memory series Hyperthymesiacs like Solomon Shereshevsky and Marilu Henner and some autistic savants like Stephen Wiltshire and Kim Peek all have pieces of the overall framework. The first two have a photographic memory for their own autobiographies (autobiographical memory, which is one half of what is called our explicit memory ) but not for semantic memories. This is why hyperthymesia is also called “highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM).” Sure, they can tell you what they were wearing 126 days ago, or perhaps their hotel room number from ten Februarys ago, but neither are going to be able to recite a very long passage in a language foreign to them that they briefly glanced at. Wiltshire has a true photographic memory for landscapes but evidently nothing else.
Peek had what would be closest to an overall photographic memory, but it still wasn’t quite that, and it came with major deficits in other areas of his being.
Of the four listed he was the one who was the most handicapped.Įven ordinary humans have what is called flashbulb memories-memories of very specific and emotionally charged events in their lives that are ingrained in sharp detail (ex. #Difference between eidetic memory and photographic memory series.
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