What’s it like living with a phenomenal memory and can it be learned?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/15/whats-it-like-living-with-a-phenomenal-memory-and-can-it-be-learned

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

47 24 5 years ago

zzt123• 5 years ago

The day of the week thing about calendar dates is something that triggers me when I see it in the media.

It is absurdly obvious that, within the current calendar system, that feat is a math trick which can be learned and practiced. A quick Googling even reveals how to execute the calculation with alacrity.

Yet, it continues to be upheld in almost every appearance in the media I’ve seen as an indication of photographic memory.

I can pull that trick off and I definitely don’t have photographic memory. I just happened to learn it to demonstrate a point.

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

This is pretty interesting. While I don't have a photographic memory like that, I do have a pretty interesting thing going for me, I can remember my life since I was a baby. Not every day and every detail, but I have memories from before I could walk. But ask me what I got up to go do and I couldn't tell you.

mh0pe• 5 years ago

I have a near-photographic memory that's been tested as I grew up, and personally, it's a mixed bag.

I have a solid and clear recollection of the good, which is useful from a business management and engineering career perspective. Literature retains on the first pass, which is very useful in operations for manual/business requirements/security framework ingestion, and I don't need to keep a TODO list or agenda (but still do for transparency's sake to my reports and superiors). Having an excess of information readily available gives a lot of opportunity to drive impact, and has allowed me to move vertically in my career very quickly. There's a feedback loop of retaining information, which presents me as more qualified to offer support to my peers, which puts more people in my direction soliciting input and building a positive reputation. With that, I made leadership in my early twenties, and it feels like it took less effort than some others to get here, based on what I've heard from other people.

Unfortunately for me and I'm sure others, I've been through a lot, and all of that retains just as well. It's not an active decision to retain. I'm not going into much detail on those events, but I've encountered about a dozen substantially negative events in my life, and having the information for those who've needed it has been helpful when necessary. It's been empowering to revisit those moments from a different angle as I've worked through those challenges.

All in all, not to be too cliche, but it's both a gift and a curse, but one I'm grateful to have.

mordymoop• 5 years ago

I am curious whether you have ever tried applying EMDR therapy, or something related, to your bad memories. I don’t have a photographic memory but I have a reasonably good one, and I found putting in the effort to just sort of … strip away the negative valence of bad memories to be a worthwhile project.

Cd00d• 5 years ago

I had near-photographic memory through my adolescence. I had a bad mountain biking accident with a brain injury that took that and much of my short term memory function away (the short-term part has largely improved in the following decades).

I see the downsides. Before my accident I had a backlog of resentment events that I revisited internally very frequently. It may be the change in memory or my own maturity and change of perspective with age, but I can no longer remember those things that I held on to and resented so deeply, and I'm grateful for that. I think I still remember the real traumas, but a lot of what I forgot was just piddly stuff where I was lacking empathy for the other side's predicament.

I did have a hard time re-learning how to learn. I lost my stellar memory function in the summer between high school and college, and had never learned to study - I just reflected on what had already been presented instead. I had a very hard time figuring out how to study, and had a thing against taking notes (I felt it was better to be engaged with the lecture than trying to re-read it later). I started taking notes in graduate school because I couldn't keep up with many lectures and needed a way to walk through what had happened later.

I now takes notes obsessively. I keep a paper notebook at hand 100% of the time I'm working and every thought or follow up goes into it. I've developed a shorthand that makes this work seamlessly. Funny enough, I now distrust people that aren't taking notes when we're discussing importing things lol.

That said, I do miss the days of massive recall.

curation• 5 years ago

Similar story; was tested in Grade 5. Question: Did anyone else in your family have it? My mother and grandfather did. I had a very weird, one might have said traumatic childhood (kidnapped; lived in truck; orphanage; bizarre family) so I can also so vividly remember these painful times. I thus got really into horror (made a feature film; wrote a book) for catharsis. Each detail in my work - from what I wore, the art in the room, the people I met - writing it out helped soothe? maybe is the word, the images. I also did years of therapy. The hardest part for me has been accepting that others cannot do this. I spent the first half of my life getting enraged at how careless everyone is. Further, raised in the 80s in traditional gender roles aka housekeeper/cleaner, I am tyrannized by disorder/mess/everything where it should be. I now realize that needing lists and forgetting each detail of a special event isn't cruel/selfishness. I am ashamed of how cruel I was to partners due to my solipsism. How has this effected your relationships? I can't say I'm grateful but more I respect what it is and how it can be useful and not detrimental to my relationships and all of our struggle to survive.

calciphus• 5 years ago

I definitely had a similar experience of not realizing my memory and recall was uncommon - and assuming the people in my life didn't care, rather than didn't recall. A number of times in my head the same experience played out:

"Of course I know what you wore on our third date and what you ordered. How couldn't I? It's important! Am I not as important to you as you are to me?"

Only after spending time and putting in the work with a partner who had their own memory issues did I actually bring this up to them and a therapist. I recall a conversation where I told them it was OK that they had forgotten what we ate on our first date or what I was wearing, because I didn't want to be resentful over unimportant things. The therapist asked me if I remembered most of our dates - where we went, what we wore, what we ordered, movies or shows we saw, etc. I remember being confused - of course I did! Who wouldn't?

My therapist explained that this was really uncommon, especially in the scale of years and decades. I had never considered it before that. It changed how I interacted with the world and I wish I had known sooner.

malux852• 5 years ago

I too have a near photographic memory, and although I can feel it slightly decreasing with age, I experience all of the things you mention above.

One other downside I have had is that it can be enormously frustrating when you can remember conversations perfectly - word for word, exact tones, even the time, day, weather, clothing during the conversation, and you deal with people who say “I never said that”

It’s like actually, you bloody well did and I remember it exactly.

Then if I tell them I have perfect recall, and then say the conversation exactly, you said “x” and I said “y” and you said “z” like that - a verbatim reproduction of the conversation - suddenly Im the bad guy - nobody ever says sorry, they just argue more or debate interpretation.

I’ve been reading Cicros books and that has helped me with delivery and better social integration

But I do feel a definite pang of frustration and a burst of anger when people even forget that I have perfect recall!

Ok rant over

One positive of my memory has been remembering source code, I seem to have an easier job reading an entire codebase and keeping all the classes, interfaces and data structures in my working memory, so I seem to have a much faster ability to get started, and also I seem to be able to handle large refractors easier than other programmers - am I am enormously grateful for this gift, and know it’s largely luck that I have it and I try and help other programmers as much as I can - I’ll offer to do the large refractors or hunt down those weird, difficult bugs.

So yeah, like the poster above says, blessing and curse

jozvolskyef• 5 years ago

When people say 'I never said that,' the reason why they're saying it is usually more important than the statement's veracity.

psfourplusone• 5 years ago

What are the titles of the Cicros books you mentioned?

akomtu• 5 years ago

What does near-photographic mean? Can you replicate a page of text after looking at it for one second? Can you do the same with a language you don't know?

renewiltord• 5 years ago

I have a pretty good memory for facts and alphanumeric sequences (I remember my VINs). I’m pretty sure mine was just trained in, though, by hard work for standardized tests.

This has diminished in my 30s, though.

bryan0• 5 years ago

Woolmer was inspired by Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which suggests brain training, rather than naturally gifted people, account for most USA Memory Championship finalists.

This is an incredible book which changed my opinion on how a “photographic memory” works.

jamesash• 5 years ago

Indeed. My friends thought I was exceptionally smart to be able to recite a list of 875 north american bird species from memory, when in fact I'd just put in a lot of work building memory palaces. The book demystified a lot.

sys_64738• 5 years ago

I have a residual memory for subject matter of about 72 hours that I found useful for examinations in college. From no knowledge of a subject to studying it by reading only then I can retain just enough info to pass before it all evaporates. Not the same but it served me well for a few subjects that I needed to pass.

shannifin• 5 years ago

Glowacki is on the autism spectrum and has superlative memory and calendar recall skills.

I've also known several autistic people who have great memories; I don't know if the right word would be "interest", "obsession", or "compulsion", but they have an inclination to go over certain facts in their heads over and over, so of course developing a good memory for those facts is natural.

I've seen similar articles and TV segments about people who particularly remember autobiographical facts, what they were doing everyday for decades. Again, it's not "automatic" memory, as it tends to be sensationalized, but rather the result of an interest or obsession to continually think about it. For instance, this woman talks about being somewhat obsessive-compulsive about her past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoxsMMV538U

Unfortunately, it didn’t translate into academic exam success in his weaker subjects like maths and science: “I only remember things I like.”

When you're interested in something, you will naturally think about it more often. So the memory itself really isn't the phenomenon so much as the relative rarity of someone being interested in such details in the first place.

---

The real magic would be to be able to remember something without effort, interest, or attention. I'd love to be able to read a book while daydreaming and then reread it in my head later for processing. Or remember some detail from another day that I didn't pay attention to at all at first, rewinding it in my head like a video. And though that's sometimes how movies and media like to sensationalize good memory, there's no evidence that it can work that way for anyone at all.

Anyway, the real skill is the ability to make meaningful and novel connections in the data, to be able to do something unique with it. You've gotta have some working memory for that, but being an encyclopedia of vast trivia (that you could just as easily depend on book and the Internet for) doesn't seem to lead to profound and useful insights by itself (as far as I can tell).

dwd3• 5 years ago

“I only remember things I like.” sounds very much like ADHD (inattentive type).

I'd love to be able to read a book while daydreaming and then reread it in my head later for processing.

I always wonder whether audiobooks can facilitate this where you listen to it in the background and your brain processes and assimulates it later (when you're sleeping). Maybe listening to something a few times would work.

jobigoud• 5 years ago

rewinding it in my head

This works for short term audio. Sometimes you hear something without paying attention and you don't understand, but you can somehow replay the sound in your head and parse it again.

Maybe a related phenomenon for vision. When you are in the dark in the middle of the room, not knowing where the obstacles are. You flash a light for a very brief, subliminal instant. Your brain can't process the scene during that flash, but you can somehow mentally study and make a mental map of the obstacles later.

On the other hand I personally can't produce any meaningful memories of odors.

dwd3• 5 years ago

Currently , I find myself trying to place anything about the brain in the context of Jeff Hawkin's 1000 brain theory.

We supposedly have 150,000 computing units that we allocate to modelling things in our world. I believe those on the autism spectrum or ADHD (inattention) choose (possibly subconsciously or with no self-control) to devote theirs to various degrees to only those things that interest them.

CodeGlitch• 5 years ago

I too have been trying this, not finished the book yet but so far it's absolutely fascinating.

dwd3• 5 years ago

You will likely also find Lex Fridman's conversation with Matt Walker "Why we Sleep" last week interesting.

About 65 minutes in (just after a great discussion on coffee and caffeine) they go into how sleep (and dreaming) facilitates memory and learning - basically the creation of new schemas (models) and the updating and rewiring of existing ones.

What made it interesting was how it meshed with Hawkin's ideas from a completely different angle.

He also touched on why we forget things which is closer to the OP (like not remembering where you parked your car two weeks ago, but remembering where you parked it today), and how some people don't/can't forget things. Also the intricacy of things that we remember (like a particular pair of shoes someone was wearing when we first met them).

floatingatoll• 5 years ago

It’s like having PTSD about falling off a bicycle when you were 12, and after decades of therapy you’ve managed to come to terms with it but would never wish it on your worst enemy.

Seriously, forgetting saves you all from horrifying trauma. I can’t imagine why everyone wants to remember more.

smt88• 5 years ago

My brother is the same. His memory is phenomenal and it torments him every hour of every day.

What’s it like living with a phenomenal memory and can it be learned?

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