• Question: What is the difference between a photographic memory and a normal memory, and how does a photographic memory work?

    Asked by mary98 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by purplegiraffe.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      HI @mary98
      I’m not sure there is actually such a thing as a ‘photographic memory’, I think some people are just better at remembering things than others. But I’m not sure…

      However, some conditions like synaesthesia (see another question about this http://ias.im/58.1713) can help your memory, because the extra connections mean the memory forms more strongly.

      Someone else may be able to answer this better though – anyone?

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I’ve heard that there is such a thing as photographic memory – I don’t have it myself, unfortunately, but I’ve met one person who said he did. He is a priest, and so quite often had to preach sermons in church – and he said that, when he needed to quote something from some book, he would just memorise what the page looked like. Then, when he had to quote it in his sermon, he would just think of the image of the page that he had in his memory, and read the quote from the page, just like reading it from a physical book. He said it was different from remembering the words themselves, as what he was actually remembering was the image of the page and then reading from it.

      That’d be quite useful in exams! Or, come to that, for giving talks about your work …

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