![]() He needed the lifelong care of his father in order to navigate the complexity of everyday life that most of us with normal memory ability take for granted. Kim however, as is often the case in individuals who exhibit this sort of memory ability, had a below average IQ. Dates, names, number plates and just about any other listable fact could be recalled with near-perfect accuracy and made for someone who was essentially the grand master of trivia. Kim Peek, the man upon whom Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man character was largely based 3, had an incredible capacity for retaining facts, even in the form of seemingly raw data. “Hollywood” photographic memory has no evidentiary basis in real life. People who exhibit eidetic memory can recall visual information with high accuracy after only being exposed to it for a short time. Eidetic memory, where it does occur, is mostly found in children and rarely in adults. The correct name for the related real-world idea is actually eidetic memory and it is a rare phenomenon. This includes making people remember and confess to crimes that they never actually committed.Īlthough we subjectively feel that our memories are highly reliable, the truth is that our perception of our own trustworthiness when it comes to remembering things accurately (or at all) doesn’t come close to matching the actual performance of that memory system. On the flipside of this we’ve seen memory abilities in some people that are far beyond anything we typically observe in humans. You’ve probably heard of the term “photographic” memory, usually in popular culture. 1 Through either conscious or unconscious manipulation (on the part of the manipulator) it is possible to make someone remember a fact or an event that is partly or completely fabricated. ![]() The work of Elizabeth Loftus (among others) has shown that not only is witness testimony a very poor form of evidence by itself, but that it’s possible to actually implant false memories. Not Quite Photographic MemoryĪs wonderful as human memory is, it’s also notable for how unreliable it can be. However, we know quite a lot about how well (or badly) human memory performs and the various things that improve memory in general, but as with most of the brain it remains a black box that scientists are slowly teasing open. The nature of our memory, the precise way in which it works, is still largely a mystery to us. Our intelligence would be wasted without information to digest and, as a species, we would not survive long if we could not learn about the world and how it works. Without it we would be unable to learn or thrive. Human memory is quite a marvellous thing.
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