You have no idea if I remember with pixel perfect accuracy (whatever that even means). There are plenty of people with photographic memory.

Also, you're a programmer you have no foundation of knowledge on which to make that assessment. You might as well opine on quarks or martian cellular life. My god the arrogance of people in my industry.

▲

adastra22 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Repeated studies have shown that perfect "photographic memory" does not in fact exist. Nobody has it. Some people think that they do though, but when tested under lab conditions those claims don't hold up.

I don't believe these people are lying. They are self-reporting their own experiences, which unfortunately have the annoying property of being generated by the very mind that is living the experience.

What does it mean to have an eidetic memory? It means that when you remember something you vividly remember details, and can examine those details to your heart's content. When you do so, it feels like all those details are correct. (Or so I'm told, I'm the opposite with aphantasia.)

But it turns out if you actually have a photo reference and do a blind comparison test, people who report photographic memories actually don't do statistically any better than others in remembering specific fine details, even though they claim that they clearly remember.

The simpler explanation is that while all of our brains are provide hallucinated detail to fill the gaps of memories, their brains are wired up to present those made up details feel much more real than they do to others. That is all.

▲

HarHarVeryFunny 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Repeated studies have shown that perfect "photographic memory" does not in fact exist.

This may change your mind!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVqRT_kCOLI

▲

adastra22 2 days ago | parent [-]

No, a YouTube video won’t convince me over repeated, verified lab experiments.

▲

HarHarVeryFunny 2 days ago | parent [-]

So what do you make of the video - do you think it's fake, or are you just making the distinction between eidetic memory and photographic memory?

There are so many well documented cases of idiot savants with insane memory skills in various areas (books, music, dates/events, etc), that this type of snapshot visual memory (whatever you want to call it) doesn't seem surprising in that context - it'd really be a bit odd such diverse memory skills excluded one sensory modality (and it seems it doesn't).

▲

adastra22 2 days ago | parent [-]

I do not watch YouTube, sorry.

Hearsay is not reliable. Yes there are stories of savants. When you put them in a lab and actually see how good their memory is, it turns out to be roughly the same as everyone else's. The stories aren't true.

(They may be better at remembering weird facts or something, but when you actually calculate the information entropy of what they are remembering, it ends up being within the ballpark of what a neurotypical person remembers across of general span of life. That's why these people are idiot savants (to use your term). They allocate all their memory points to weird trivia and none to everyday common knowledge.

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> They allocate all their memory points to weird trivia and none to everyday common knowledge. I think it's more complex than that - it's they way they are forming memories (i.e. what they remember) that is different to a normal person. In a normal person surprise/novelty (prediction failure) is the major learning signal that causes us to remember something - we're selective in what gets remembered (this is just mechanically how a normally operating brain works), whereas the savant appears to remember everything in certain modalities. I don't think that "using up all their memory" is why savants are "idiots", but rather just a reflection of something more severe that is wrong.
	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you refuse to look at evidence, then your opinion isn't worth much, is it?

▲

johnisgood 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> There are plenty of people with photographic memory.

I thought it was rare.