“Eidetikers' memories are clearly remarkable, but they are rarely perfect,” explain Lilienfeld et al in Psychology: From Enquiry to Understanding. Even then, subjects rarely hang on to the image for very long, and their memories are definitely not infallible. Subjects are often given a good 30 seconds of careful study in lab experiments. Firstly, while the common perception of eidetic or photographic memory is that it’s an automatic, involuntary thing, in reality, eidetic recall requires time. Now, there are a couple of things to note there. “Even after a long time, when recalling something perceived earlier, it is as if the child sees it again and can describe it in all the details.” “After a single perception of the material and very little mental processing, the child continues to ‘see’ the material, and restores it perfectly,” the authors continue. “Eidetic memory images are close to perceptual ones in their brightness and distinctness,” explains a recent paper on memory development, published in the Frontline Social Sciences and History Journal. Is eidetic memory perfect?Įidetic memory is very, very good – but it’s not perfect. Ask an eidetiker about something that happened last Thursday, and they'll likely answer you in the past tense ask them about the photo they were just looking at, and they may well answer in the present tense. What you will be able to do, though, is to see an image, hear a sound, or smell an aroma as if it’s still in front of you, for often just a short while, after it’s gone away.Īnd we really do mean "see," by the way – studies on people who have eidetic memories, sometimes known as eidetikers, have shown that subjects' eyes move about in real-time as if they're still looking at the now-removed image they're describing. If you have an eidetic memory, it probably doesn’t mean you can, say, remember the color of a beetle walking across a table in your neighbor’s garden on April 17, 2008.
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