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Re: Photographic Memory by Ronald Simms on Thursday May 20, @01:28PM
People with so-called photographic memories do make mistakes and probably more often than average people. Probably for the same reason more cats are injured from falls than dogs. Dogs know they can't walk across a wire and don't even try. People with this ability can repeat a conversation they had with you weeks before verbatim and with the proper inflection. However they may make some assumptions about the conversation e.g. your truthfulness that us ordinary folks would not. My father was such a person. He served in France and Germany in WWII and seldom slept more than 3 hours a night. He remembered the details of every German soldier he killed up close. He spoke fluent German (Deutsch) forty years after the war. This trait is apparently inheritable and has shown up to some extent in one of my sisters and two of my daughters. My father, now deceased, had limited job opportunities because he was born African-American (I think that's the current term). Anyhow, he wanted to become an engineer but instead became a mailroom clerk at a governmental agency that will remain unnamed. He used his ability to run numbers, illegal at the time, in order to provide more than adequate support for his family. By the way avoid playing poker with people with this trait.
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edithttp://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/fun/phot-mem.htm How to Develop a Photographic Memory Installed 02 August 2003. Latest update 06 September 2003. Sometimes aircrew gunners have to make split-second decisions as to whether to fire or not to fire. (It's important to not shoot at friendly aircraft.)
In World War II, one method used to help gunners speed up their aircraft identification skills was to flash photographs on a screen of the planes they had to recognize. One device used for this purpose was called a tachistoscope (ta kis' tuh scope). Instructors could vary the duration of the images being flashed on the screen. At times the images would be flashed for just a few hundredths of a second. Blink and you miss it.
Aircraft Recognition Tachistoscope Simulation
(Classroom lights will be off.)
Images may load slowly first time around.
Funny things began to happen. When the gunners were in darkened rooms during this training, their eyes became dark adapted. It was found that many of them were holding on to the split-second images after the images were no longer on the screen. With dark adapted eyes, the images could be retained for a few seconds.
A study was set up to see just what could be done with these retained images. The images were positives instead of the more familiar negative images you get if you stare fixedly for a few seconds at a picture or scene, then look away. Some subjects got so good at the process that after seeing a very short duration image of a page in a book, they could then read the page, from somewhere inside their heads.
The above information was supplied to the writer by Mr. Ray Elkin West Lafayette, Indiana in 1962.
The fact that the subjects could acquire a readable image of a whole book page suggests that their peripheral vision happened to be, or became, more acute than that normally found in the general population. This form of retained visual images may not be accomplished with the same process as done by people who have what is called photographic memories. The writer didn't thin to ask Mr. Elkin, but the idea of long term storage of the images did not come up.
The writer did not have access to a tachistoscope but decided to try an alternate technique for seeing the retained images. Dark adaptation seemed to be a prerequisite for the short term image retention. One way to dark adapt you eyes is to close them. Its not the same as being in a dark room but one can get a similar effect. Then comes the tachistoscope emulation. Rapidly open and close your eyes. This is not unlike exposing film in a camera. The first few hundred times you try this, you'll probably get blurred images because your eyeballs aren't yet convinced to hold still during the exposure. The images will be there but doubled, usually vertically. Keep trying! It's also wise to make sure nobody is watching you.
After a month or so of your covert camera work you should find that your eyeballs begin to cooperate (the process might be called the steely eye)and images of big things with good contrast start to hang on. Big letters on billboards and soft drink machines make good targets.
With lots of work, assuming you haven't been put away, you should find that text in books show up in blurry fashion, unreadable, but recognizable as fuzzy text. Large print documents may bring more rewarding results. As time goes on the acuity should improve to the point of readability.
It may be that that tachistoscope simulation near the top of this page, if viewed in a darkened environment, may provide a usable indicator of the process being discussed.
You can cheat, or take a short cut if you please, by using a camera strobe flash in a dark room. Hold the flash unit above or to the side of your head and aim it at an outstretched arm. You'll see a bright image of your arm that does not immediately fade away. The image may last for two or three seconds. If you lower your arm while the image is still active you can have your own spooky show.
More to come.
DEVELOP STRATEGY
editRemember to Develop Your Own "Photographic" Memory In the 1920s, a Russian journalist was being told off by his editor for not taking notes on the assignments he was given. The journalist, SV Shereshevski, repeated back the assignment word-for-word. Unaware that such memory feats were unusual, Shereshevski was found to have a perfect memory by a neurologist called AR Luria.
Luria found that S could remember any length of word lists, even 16 years after originally learning them.
Richard Cytowic's book "The Man Who Tasted Shapes" documents a condition called Synesthesia, a bit like the concept in NLP, except that the condition is involuntary, and the correlating synesthetic representations are consistently the same eg. the taste of mint always feels like glass columns.
Now, compare human and computer storage and retrieval. Computers are obviously a lot better at it than humans and yet they still use redundancy. Memory and data transmission have parity bits. Many programs utilise CRC.
This is so that in the event of potentially incorrect retrieval, the computer has two or more ways of checking.
Human memory works pretty much the same way. We know that a single representation is not that reliable, so we make simultaneous ones, usually in different sensory systems.
So you might know you ate chicken yesterday, not just because you cooked/ordered it, but because you saw/smelt and tasted it as well. You may even remember digesting it.
The same with spelling. I know how to spell extraordinary, not just because I know what it's supposed to look like, but I often over-emphasize the second syllable: exTRAordinary.
Whilst S was supposed to have a perfect memory, Luria found that he naturally used a strategy whereby things he experienced would induce simultaneous vivid, distinctive and consistent associations.
Further proof of the myth of the Photographic Memory.
"Rather, we found that superior memorisers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus which are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular."
An alternative view
http://www.deep-trance.com/skill-model/photographic-memory.html
CHESS
editWhat is the basis behind a photographic memory?
Scientists who study memory phenomena generally believe that eidetic memory (more popularly known as "photographic memory") does not exist. Early experiements on eidetic memory were intriguing, but could not be replicated.
People do show extraordinary memory performance in certain circumstances. For example, expert chess players can typically play blindfolded chess against several opponents at the same time, easily memorizing many chessboard configurations. Others use special tricks to memorize long lists of randomly selected numbers.
Impressive as these feats are, scientists attribute them to specialized ways of thinking about the information, not to any kind of enhanced visual memory. One interesting experiment that makes this point was performed by a cognitive psychologist named DeGroot.
Expert chess players were shown a chess board with pieces on it for a brief period, such as 15 seconds, and then asked to reconstruct what they had seen on a new chess board. That is, they were asked to place chess pieces in the same positions as they had appeared on the board they'd been shown. The expert players were very good at this, much better than novice players. One hypothesis was that the experts had developed an enhanced ability to memorize visual information.
In the next experiment, the expert chess players were asked to do the very same thing; butt this time, they were shown boards whose pieces were arranged in ways that would never actually occur in a game of chess. Not only did their ability to remember the positions go down, but it went down all the way to the level of the novice players. We can conclude that the original, enhanced performance at remembering chess positions came from the experts' ability to mentally organize the information they had observed, not from any ability to "photograph" the visual scene.