Did you know? Eidetic is the technical adjective used to describe what we more commonly call a photographic memory.
Most of us don't have a clue. But a small number of people, including a California woman named Jill Price, can remember such events in great detail. They have a condition called hyperthymesia syndrome. This is often referred to as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM).
OTHER WORDS FOR forgetful
1 absent-minded, inattentive, unmindful.
▲ Opposite of tending to not remember. attentive. careful. heedful.
Instead, people with amnesia usually know who they are, but they have trouble with short-term memory; they can't learn new information or form new memories. Amnesia can occur as a result of head trauma, drug toxicity, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, infection or even emotional shock.
Eidetic memory is the ability to vividly recall an image you are exposed to, but only briefly. For example, someone may be able to continue to “see” a picture they have been shown for 30 seconds, even a few minutes after the picture is removed.
This rare condition also known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) causes people to remember just about everything that has occurred in their life. This includes every conversation and emotion ever experienced as well as every person encountered, regardless of how insignificant or minute.
A large body of research has found that the neurotransmitter dopamine affects our ability to recall specific past events, so called “episodic memory.” In people, for example, researchers have found that having a greater density of dopamine receptors in the hippocampus results in better episodic memory.
Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre—but real—perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind's eye for up to a few minutes before fading away.
Is good memory an indicator of intelligence? Essentially, yes, but not in the way you may think. Short-term memory storage is linked to greater signs of intelligence as measured in IQ tests. But having perfect recall isn't necessarily correlated with high intelligence.
Created with Sketch. Highly superior autobiographical memory is thought to be very rare. As of the mid-2010s, according to an expert report, fewer than 100 people with highly superior autobiographical memory ability had been found.
Working memory, in particular, is strongly correlated with intelligence in children and adults. When people perform better on a working memory task, they also tend to perform better on an intelligence task.
In March 2015, Markie Pasternak of Green Bay, Wisconsin was diagnosed as the youngest person to be living with HSAM. Born in 1994, Pasternak remembers every day of her life since February 2005. She was featured on 60 Minutes Australia in August 2016 with Rebecca Sharrock.
According to Miller, whose paper in 1956 popularized the theory of the "magic number seven", short-term memory is limited to a certain number of chunks of information, while long-term memory has a limitless store.
Memories: from birth to adolescence
Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three, and have patchy memories when it comes to things that happened to them between the ages of three and seven. It's a phenomenon known as 'infantile amnesia'.
What is a didactic memory? Didactic memory may simply be another term for eidetic memory. When a person has this type of memory, they can vividly recall memories as if they were a visual image or mental image that is burned into their minds.
It may be described as the ability to briefly look at a page of information and then recite it perfectly from memory. This type of ability has never been proven to exist.
Semantic memory refers to the memory of meaning, understanding, general knowledge about the world, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences.
Alternative Names. Forgetfulness; Amnesia; Impaired memory; Loss of memory; Amnestic syndrome; Dementia - memory loss; Mild cognitive impairment - memory loss.
Severe stress, depression, a vitamin B12 deficiency, too little or too much sleep, some prescription drugs and infections can all play a role. Even if those factors don't explain your memory lapses, you don't need to simply resign yourself to memory loss as you age.
The ability to store more items in short-term memory indicates a higher IQ, psychological research reveals. While there may be no limit to long-term memory, short-term memory is much smaller. The average number of things people can store in short-term memory — whether words, numbers or whatever — is four.