
There is even a memory development technique named after him. Ivan Aivazovsky painted all his 6 thousand paintings solely from memory, reproducing the views he saw with remarkable accuracy. Ronald Reagan had to take only one look at the document to memorize all its content. They could very likely boast of eidetic memory as well.Īmong such people was Nikolay Przhevalsky, who could easily remember for years loads of information he read and reproduced landscapes he saw to make maps.

History knows many outstanding people who had an amazing memory. So what they really tried to remember about the text were the words, but not its visual lines. Because you can easily do this with a photo at hand, but all of them failed. He showed several gifted people some text, gave them time to remember it, and asked them to reproduce the text. In fact, researchers from Germany studied this phenomenon seriously early in the 1920s.Ī professor from California carried out an experiment to check if people really remember what they saw the same way as taking a photo. Mozart, who lived in the 18th century, had a musical eidetic memory. Often people who easily reproduce music after hearing it once fail to remember faces or their household chores. But you can always redevelop it with the help of numerous techniques. But in most cases, we lose this ability over time as something useless. People are Born with Eidetic MemoryĮidetic memory is more typical for children who often surprise parents with such unusual skills. The quality and accuracy of memories depend on a particular person, but a "photo" with all the details is something that no one is able to "recall"-separate details tend to slip away or get distorted. The key difference is that eidetic memory is the ability to remember the last image with high accuracy for a short period of time, while photographic memory is long-term. The former most likely stuck simply because it was unusual and catchy.

It is also often called “eidetic memory,” but these are two completely different things. Short facts and answers Is Photographic Memory Real?īut although the idea is tempting and the myth is widely spread, photographic memory does not occur in nature.
