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).

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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?