Photographic memory, or eidetic memory in proper terms, is when a person can recall events, images and other objects with such accuracy, it's almost like seeing it in a photograph. It became a popular topic in mainstream media, having many characters allegedly having this skill, like; Dr. Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, Professor X from the X-men, and more recently, Mike Ross from Suits.
But how exactly does memory work? Well it surely doesn't work like the famous, tiny filing cabinet image with little memory files all over, nor is it like a super computer with thousands of servers and disk space to put it all into. It is a bit more complicated than that.
In April Holladay's article "How does human memory work?" from USA Today, she said that memory involves three processes; encoding, storage and retrieval.
After seeing hearing, tasting or feeling something, our brain starts encoding it. Encoding is when the brain starts to make sense of all the things you just sensed. Storing, is when we store the sensory information that we just got, and finally retrieving, or when we want to remember something again.
Now some scientists believe that the brain never forgets,and that what really causes us to forget is not in the storing of the memory, but in retrieving it. In Sarah McLeod's article "Forgetting" from Simple Psychology, she talks about Retrieval Failure Theory or when...
" ....the information is in long term memory, but cannot be accessed. Such information is said to be available (i.e. it is still stored) but not accessible (i.e. it cannot be retrieved). It cannot be accessed because the retrieval cues are not present."
Retrieval cues are what people use as hints that can help you retrieve a particular memory. So when we store a memory we also store a retrieval cue that can help you remember that memory when you encounter that same situation. For example, you remember a friend when you passed by his house. But photographic memory doesn't work that way.
Photographic memory works without cues. Photographic memory works on thin air, without any cues whatsoever, nothing physically present in the present that can help us remember and therefore requires more effort in uncovering that specific memory.
Now to retrieve a past event, what people without photographic memory do is to piece together the various sensory information that we stored (sight, sound, touch) to create one giant picture. Kind of like a jigsaw puzzle more than an exact photograph. Now because of this particular process why we are very good at only remembering a very general concept of an event, but not so much in its details.
For example, imagine a picture of a car. You remember its shape, its general position (whether or not it was facing you) and possibly maybe if its headlight was on or off. Now here is when photographic memory comes in. Basically people with a photographic memory can remember everything from that car, from its color, type and plate number.
Now back to photographic memory, does it really exist? Well according to Joshua Foer from the Slate in his article Kaavya Syndrome there is one person that supposedly has this skill, and she was born in the 1970's. Her name is Elizabeth.
"In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard student named Elizabeth, who could perform an astonishing feat. Stromeyer showed Elizabeth's right eye a pattern of 10,000 random dots, and a day later, he showed her left eye another dot pattern. She mentally fused the two images to form a random-dot stereogram and then saw a three-dimensional image floating above the surface."
Elizabeth, supposedly can recall random dot patterns with such accuracy that she can even make a 3D image out of them. However the methods and documentary of this skill is somewhat cloudy. First of all Charles Stromeyer, the guy who administered the test, turned out to be her future-husband, and the fact that the test has never been repeated. So about photographic memory, well I guess it is still an unsolved myth as far as I'm concerned.
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