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Rare & Remarkable Human Traits

Photographic Memory: Real or Myth?

Is photographic memory real? Learn what science says about eidetic imagery, the famous Elizabeth case, and people with extraordinary memories.

By Written Facts StaffOctober 17, 20267 min read

Someone at a party, in a meeting or at the next desk in school says, "Oh, I have a photographic memory." It sounds like a superpower: look at a page once, and you can read it back later. Is it real? Probably not. Nobody has shown that anyone has camera-like memory. There is something close to it in some children, and there are real people with remarkable memories. None of them can call up a perfect snapshot of the past, though.

The short answer

"Photographic memory" means memory that works like a camera. In the words of memory researcher Gabrielle Principe of the College of Charleston, the idea is that experience is "captured objectively, stored completely and retrieved perfectly." Her conclusion is short: "There's no scientific evidence it exists."

Two terms tend to get mixed up:

Photographic memory is the popular idea of complete, perfect recall that you can call up at will and that lasts.
Eidetic memory (or eidetic imagery) is the scientific term for a smaller, real experience: briefly seeing an image in the mind after the picture itself is gone.

The two are often treated as the same thing, but the evidence for each is very different. Skeptic Brian Dunning reviewed the research in 2016. He found "a lack of compelling evidence that eidetic memory exists at all among healthy adults," and no evidence for photographic memory.

The underlying reason is how memory works. The brain doesn't save a file and play it back later. Each time you remember something, your brain builds the memory again from pieces. Forgetting and distortion are normal parts of that process. As Principe puts it, "The brain is not a roll of film, it's a storyteller."

Eidetic imagery: the closest real thing

If anything deserves the name "photographic," it's eidetic imagery. A person looks at a picture, the picture is taken away, and for a short time they still "see" it. They can scan the image and describe details as though it were still in front of them.

The image doesn't last. It fades quickly, usually within seconds to a few minutes, and it isn't fully accurate even while it's there.

Eidetic imagery mostly shows up in children. Estimates put it at about 2–10% of children aged six to twelve. Most of them lose it by adolescence, and it is considered very rare in adults. Researchers don't agree on why it fades. Nobody knows of any reliable way to keep it or train it.

Even the best cases fall short of a photograph. Psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and his co-authors sum up the research this way: "Eidetikers' memories are clearly remarkable, but they are rarely perfect." A child with eidetic imagery may describe a picture in striking detail but still leave things out or add things that weren't there. That's what you'd expect from a brain that rebuilds memories instead of recording them.

So the closest real thing to photographic memory is short-lived, imperfect and mostly limited to childhood. One study did claim to find much more than that in an adult.

The famous "Elizabeth" case and why it doesn't settle it

In 1970, Charles Stromeyer III and J. Psotka published a paper in Nature called "The Detailed Texture of Eidetic Images." It described an adult Harvard student, known as "Elizabeth," who seemed to do something astonishing.

The test used random-dot patterns. Each pattern looks like meaningless static, but when two of them are combined (for example, one shown to each eye), a hidden shape appears. Elizabeth was reported to combine the patterns from memory. She looked at one pattern, then later at the second, and overlaid them in her mind well enough to see the hidden image. If that were true, it would be close to real photographic memory.

The case has been criticized ever since:

The methods: critics questioned how the testing was done.
The relationship: Stromeyer later married his subject, which raised questions about how independent the study was.
No repeat: Elizabeth was never retested, so the result was never confirmed.

In 1979, John Merritt tried to find more people like her. He published random-dot memory tests in newspapers across the United States. By one account, about 1 million people took the test and wrote in, and only 30 answered correctly. That figure comes from a single secondhand source, so treat it as approximate. Even so, a large public search didn't turn up a crowd of people with camera-like memory.

Real super-memories

Photographic memory doesn't hold up, but some people really do have extraordinary memories. Each of them shows what memory can do, and also where it stops.

HSAM and Jill Price. Researchers at UC Irvine described a condition called highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). The first known case was reported in 2006 by James McGaugh and colleagues. The subject, called "AJ," was later identified as Jill Price. She could name the day of the week for any date since she was 11. She correctly matched dates to news events, and she recalled what she did on each of the previous 23 Easters with only one mistake. UC Irvine says more than 50 people have now been identified with HSAM.

Price's memory still isn't photographic. She has trouble remembering which key opens which lock, and she isn't good at memorizing things by rote. In lab testing, 11 people with HSAM scored 85% on verified events from their own lives, compared with 8% for controls. On standard memory tests, though, they beat controls on only 2 of 8. Their gift covers their own past, not everything they see.

Memory champions. Some competitors memorize thousands of digits or a shuffled deck of cards in minutes. They aren't using photographic memory. They use learned strategies built up through deliberate practice, such as turning numbers into vivid images and placing them along a familiar mental route. Their skill comes from training.

Stephen Wiltshire. Wiltshire is an autistic savant artist known for drawing detailed cityscapes from memory. After a twenty-minute helicopter ride over New York City, he produced a panorama about six metres (roughly 19 feet) long, which he finished over several days. It is an amazing feat. However, his abilities haven't been thoroughly tested, and calling them "photographic memory" claims more than the evidence shows.

Why memory isn't a camera

People with HSAM have some of the best memories ever recorded, so you might expect them to resist false memories. They don't. In a 2013 study in PNAS, led by Lawrence Patihis at UC Irvine with McGaugh and Elizabeth Loftus among the authors, 20 people with HSAM were compared with 38 controls. The HSAM group did no better at avoiding false memories. When asked about footage of the Flight 93 crash on 9/11, which doesn't exist, about 29% of controls and 20% of HSAM participants said they had seen it.

This is what reconstructive memory predicts. Even an exceptional memory rebuilds the past each time, and something you heard later can get mixed into what you think you saw.

That should be encouraging. You can't train yourself into perfect, camera-like recall, because nobody has it. You can get much better at remembering, though. The methods memory champions use, like linking facts to vivid images, placing them along a familiar route and practicing on purpose, work for ordinary people too. They're worth trying before Thanksgiving, whether you're memorizing a recipe or the grocery list.

Sources (9)

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