#Hyperthymesia vs eidetic professional#

In one study, researchers had subjects play Boggle against a computer and then afterward try to recreate a list of the words they themselves found. Psychologists label this kind of inadvertent appropriation cryptomnesia, and have captured the phenomenon in the laboratory. “It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read become the very substance and texture of my mind.”

For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book,” she wrote. “I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own. And when a young Helen Keller cribbed from Margaret Canby’s “The Frost Fairies” in her story “The Frost King,” Canby herself said, “Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism it is a wonderful feat of memory.” Keller claimed she was forever after terrified. George Harrison said he never intended to rip off the melody of the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” when he wrote “My Sweet Lord.” He had just forgotten he’d ever heard it. Viswanathan is hardly the first plagiarist to claim unconscious influence from memory’s depths. Rather, he seemed to have implicitly mastered a set of mnemonic techniques that allowed him to memorize certain kinds of information.

#Hyperthymesia vs eidetic professional#

Not even S, the Russian journalist and professional mnemonist who was studied for three decades by psychologist A.R. Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth. But even he doesn’t have a truly photographic memory. Another savant, Stephen Wiltshire, has been called the “human camera” for his ability to create sketches of a scene after looking at it for just a few seconds. Kim Peek *, the 53-year-old savant who was the basis for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, is said to have memorized every page of the 9,000-plus books he has read at 8 to 12 seconds per page (each eye reads its own page independently), though that claim has never been rigorously tested. They just can’t take mental snapshots and recall them with perfect fidelity. That’s not to say there aren’t people with extraordinarily good memories-there are. Still, his one-woman study, he says, “is not strong evidence for other people having photographic memory.” “We don’t have any doubt about our data,” he told me recently. AJ became aware of her detailed memory in 1978, when she was 12, and from 1980 on she can apparently recall every day.There are so many unlikely circumstances surrounding the Elizabeth case-the marriage between subject and scientist, the lack of further testing, the inability to find anyone else with her abilities-that some psychologists have concluded that there’s something fishy about Stromeyer’s findings. Researchers Elizabeth Parker, Larry Cahill, and James McGaugh have studied the condition in a woman called 'AJ,' whose memory they characterize as 'nonstop, uncontrollable, and automatic'. So far only one case of hyperthymesia has been confirmed. Unlike some other individuals with superior memory, hyperthymestic individuals do not rely on practiced mnemonic strategies. The mental calendar association occurs automatically and obsessively.

They can often recall what day of the week the date fell on, but are not calendrical calculators as people with autism sometimes are the recall is limited to days on a personal 'mental calendar'. A hyperthymestic person can be asked a date, and describe the events that occurred that day, what the weather was like, and many seemingly trivial details that most people would not be able to recall. Individuals with hyperthymesia can recall the most trivial of events.