Eidetic Memory vs. Photographic Memory: Do They Exist?

Eidetic memory is the controversial idea that some people are able to form special images in their minds that help them remember things “photographically.”

Unfortunately, eidetic memory is a poorly understood concept that might not even exist. If it exists, it’s almost exclusively found in children.

Even if eidetic imagery exists, it doesn’t improve memory performance, so it’s probably a mistake to refer to a concept called “eidetic memory.”

Eidetic imagery is not exactly the same as photographic memory, which also probably doesn’t exist. In the first part of this post, we’ll look at eidetic memory, and in the second part we’ll look at photographic memory.

Scroll down for more details, including information on how to test your “eidetic” or “photographic” memory!

What Are Eidetic Images?

An article in Scientific American describes eidetic images as a kind of mental image that doesn’t move around when you move your eyes.

Eidetic images differ from other forms of visual imagery in several important ways.

First, an eidetic image is not simply a long afterimage, since afterimages move around when you move your eyes and are usually a different color than the original image. (For example, a flash camera can produce afterimages: the flash is bright white, but the afterimage is a black dot, and the dot moves around every time you move your eyes.)

In contrast, a true eidetic image doesn’t move as you move your eyes, and it is in the same color as the original picture.

Second, a common visual image that we can all create from memory (such as an image of a bedroom) does not have the characteristics of most eidetic images, which almost always fade away involuntarily and part by part.

Also, it is not possible to control which parts of an eidetic image fade and which remain visible.

Unlike common visual images created from memory, most eidetic images last between about half a minute to several minutes only, and it is possible to voluntarily destroy an eidetic image forever by the simple act of blinking intentionally. Furthermore, once gone from view, rarely can an eidetic image ever be retrieved.

The article goes on to say that the images in eidetic memory are not the same as what people mean by “photographic memory.” The recalled images aren’t necessarily accurate.

You might expect that an individual who claims to still see a picture after it has been removed would be able to have a perfect memory of the original picture. After all, a perfect memory is what is usually implied by the commonly used phrase “photographic memory.”

As it turns out, however, the accuracy of many eidetic images is far from perfect.

Eidetic Memory Is Poorly Understood

Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

On the other hand, the rare, poorly understood, and controversial phenomenon known as eidetic imagery apparently resembles ordinary mental imagery in intentionality, but is said to be phenomenologically distinct in point of its great vividness, detail, and stability, and because it is “externally projected,” experienced as “out there” rather than “in the head”.

Thus the experience of eidetic imagery is supposedly much more akin to seeing a real, external object or scene, than is ordinary imagery experience. (However, eidetikers, as they are sometimes called, are generally reported as having a fair degree of voluntary control over their eidetic images, and rarely if ever seem to mistake them for objective realities.)

Eidetic Imagery Generally Isn’t Found in Adults

It goes on to say that eidetic images are generally only found in children.

According to Haber (1979), eidetic ability is found almost exclusively amongst young children, and is fairly rare even amongst them, occurring only in about 2% to 15% of American under-twelves.

The Images Are Short-Lived

Eidetic images are temporary, and they quickly disappear.

Furthermore, the eidetic images are said to persist only for a maximum of about four minutes after the visual stimulus of which they are a memory has been removed from sight (Haber & Haber, 1964).

Other investigators, however, claim to have found evidence of eidetic ability in adults, particularly ones from “primitive” cultures (Jaensch, 1930; Doob, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1972; Feldman, 1968),[1] and Ahsen (1965, 1977) apparently holds that most or all of us have at least the potential to recall eidetic images virtually at will. (These differences of opinion may, at least partly, arise from different assumptions about the meaning of the ambiguous and contested term “eidetic”.)

Eidetic Memory Might Not Even Exist

The entire concept of “eidetic memory” (and the related concept of “photographic memory”, see below) might not even exist in children.

In fact, there is no scientific consensus regarding the nature, the proper definition, or even the very existence of eidetic imagery, even in children (see the commentaries published with Haber, 1979).

Some investigators, most notably Haber (1979), hold that it is a real (albeit elusive), distinct, and sui generis psychological phenomenon, whose mechanisms and psychological functions (if any) may well turn out to be quite different from those of ordinary memory or imagination imagery.

Some researchers believe that descriptions of eidetic memory may just be exaggerated descriptions of normal mental imagery.

Others, however, such as Gray & Gummerman (1975) and Bugelski (1979), argue that reports of eidetic imagery are best understood merely as rather hyperbolic descriptions that are sometimes given, by some children (and, perhaps, the occasional uneducated and illiterate adult), of ordinary (though perhaps particularly vivid) visual memory imagery.

If Eidetic Memory Exists, It Isn’t Accurate

Alan Searleman, professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University, provides more evidence that eidetic memory is not “photographic.”

As it turns out, however, the accuracy of many eidetic images is far from perfect.

In fact, besides often being sketchy on some details, it is not unusual for eidetikers to alter visual details and even to invent some that were never in the original.

This suggests that eidetic images are certainly not photographic in nature but instead are reconstructed from memory and can be influenced like other memories (both visual and nonvisual) by cognitive biases and expectations.

…The vast majority of the people who have been identified as possessing eidetic imagery are children…

With a few notable exceptions, however, most research has shown that virtually no adults seem to possess the ability to form eidetic images.

”Eidetic Memory” Isn’t “Photographic Memory”

In Enhanced memory ability: Insights from synaesthesia, the authors write:

In the context of memory performance and imagery, it is also important to consider eidetic memory.

It can be described as the persistence of a visual image after the according stimulus has been removed (Allport, 1924). It is to be differentiated from non-visual memory and afterimages.

In contrast to afterimages, eye movements during stimulus inspection do no prevent eidetic images from occurring, additionally they are positive in colouration and do not shift with eye movements (Girayetal., 1976; Haber, 1979).

Eidetic imagery is predominantly, but rarely, found in children from 6 to 12 years and virtually absent in adult populations (Girayetal., 1976).

And the most important statement of all — “eidetic memory” is not “photographic”:

It is important to mention that eidetic imagery is not photographic and hence does not generally benefit memory performance (cf., Haber, 1979).

Does Photographic Memory Exist?

The popular way that people think about “photographic memory” is different from the concept of eidetic memory that is discussed above.

Photographic memory is the unproven idea that some people can take mental snapshots of any kind of information and recall the information perfectly as if it were a photograph. Photographic memory is not exactly the same thing as eidetic memory, described above.

While some people do have exceptional memory abilities, there is no solid evidence that photographic memory exists, and without more evidence, it should be considered unlikely that true “photographic” memory exists.

Here are several reasons why photographic memory probably does not exist:

1. There is no evidence of photographic memory

There was only one verified case of photographic memory, but the researcher married the subject and she was never tested again. Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein and USA Memory Champion, wrote:

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 seemed to offer the first conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. But then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was never tested again.

The article goes on to describe an attempt to find anyone with a photographic memory, but out of a million applicants, no one had a photographic memory:

In 1979, a researcher named John Merritt published the results of a photographic memory test he had placed in magazines and newspapers around the country. Merritt hoped someone might come forward with abilities similar to Elizabeth’s, and he figures that roughly 1 million people tried their hand at the test. Of that number, 30 wrote in with the right answer, and he visited 15 of them at their homes. However, with the scientist looking over their shoulders, not one of them could pull off Elizabeth’s trick.

Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains the story:

A rather well known case of an alleged adult eidetiker is a woman, known by the pseudonym Elizabeth, studied by Stromeyer & Psotka (1970; Stromeyer, 1970). The abilities ascribed to her, however, are not at all typical of those claimed by or for other eidetikers. The most impressive of her unique and surprising alleged feats was that she was supposedly able to use her eidetic ability to remember one half of a million-dot random dot stereogram with unbelievable accuracy. Then, when the second half of the stereogram was presented some hours later, she is said to have been able to eidetically fuse the two halves, so that she could “see” the three-dimensional shape thus produced (normally such 3-D fusion only takes place when the two halves of the stereogram are presented simultaneously, one to each of a subject’s eyes).[2] However, Blakemore et al. (1970) raise concerns about the methodology of the study, and are clearly skeptical of the claims made for Elizabeth, which, they say, if true, would entail “radical changes in thinking on visual processing.” As there is no credible account of anyone else coming anywhere close to duplicating this truly incredible performance in subsequent research, it is probably unwise to give the case much evidential weight. Despite considerable effort having been put into the search, nobody with even remotely similar abilities has been found (Merritt, 1979). Certainly the child eidetikers studied by Haber (1979) and others do not begin to be capable of any such feat (indeed, after, at most, about four minutes, by which time the eidetic image has supposedly faded, they are no better at recalling visual details of things than are non-eidetikers (Haber & Haber, 1964)), and Elizabeth herself has apparently refused to be re-tested.

Barry Gordon, professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, writes:

The intuitive notion of a “photographic” memory is that it is just like a photograph: you can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail, zooming in on different parts. But a true photographic memory in this sense has never been proved to exist.

Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab, writes in Society of Mind:

…we often hear about people with ‘photographic memories’ that enable them to quickly memorise all the fine details of a complicated picture or a page of text in a few seconds. So far as I can tell, all of these tales are unfounded myths, and only professional magicians or charlatans can produce such demonstrations.

Skeptoid concludes:

What we’re left with is a lack of compelling evidence that eidetic memory exists at all among healthy adults, and no evidence that photographic memory exists. But there’s a common theme running through many of these research papers, and that’s that the difference between ordinary memory and exceptional memory appears to be one of degree.

2. None of the world’s top memorizers has a photographic memory

Out of all the memory championships in the world (including the Memory League World Championships), no one with a photographic memory has ever shown up, even when the prizes are in the tens of thousands of dollars (USD).

World Memory Championships have been running since 1991, and no one with a photographic memory has ever shown up there either.

All of the top memorizers in the world use the same memory techniques that are found on this website. You can learn them by downloading our free ebook, Learn the Art of Memory.

If Eidetic Memory Doesn’t Exist, What Is Going On?

If eidetic memory doesn’t exist, how do people memorize thousands of random numbers at memory competitions or memorize decks of playing cards in less than 20 seconds on Memory League?

The answer is memory techniques. Almost anyone can train their brain to do things like memorize thousands of random digits or decks of cards. It just requires knowledge of the mnemonic techniques (like memory palaces) and some practice.

If you want to learn the techniques, see our how to learn memory techniques page, and join our free community. Memory techniques can work for both short-term and long-term memory.

How to Test Your “Eidetic” or “Photographic” Memory

If you think you have an “eidetic” or “photographic” memory, please test yourself on Memory League. If you can get to level 10 in the numbers game without practicing or using memory techniques, you have a chance at becoming the first person ever verified to have a photographic memory!