![]() During one experiment involving one of Haber’s most gifted test subjects, a 12-year-old girl was asked to imagine that her eidetic picture of an elephant illustration was superimposed on a blank sheet of paper and had to trace its outlines with a pencil. People with eidetic memory are no exception. Many times we see or remember things that were never there in the first place, nothing more than false memories, which are much more common than most people think. When we remember things, we reconstruct bits and pieces to form basic but inaccurate mental pictures. While the human eye can be described, at least functionally speaking, as the lens of a camera, our memory isn’t like that of a computer’s hard drive. The notion that some people of genius are capable of taking mental snapshots of what they see and remembering those things years later is certainly enthralling, but it seems no more than a myth. This is an important point since many people confuse eidetic memory with photographic memory. They also made mistakes, naming things that were never there. Furthermore, although they had the advantage of “seeing” a relatively accurate image, eidetikers didn’t actually describe more objects than their non-eidetic peers who could only provide abstract descriptions of illustrated objects. What this means post-RoeĪlthough about one in ten qualified as eidetikers, the mental image faded in half a minute to a few minutes. In order to qualify as an eidetiker (a person with eidetic memory), Haber came up with only two criteria:ĪLSO READ: One in five American adults don't want children and they'll likely never change their minds. S: I can still see the birds and the Indian. S: I can see the cactus – it’s got three limbs, and I can see the Indian, he’s holding something in his hand, there’s a deer beside him on his right-hand side – it looks like it’s looking toward me and three birds in upper left-hand corner, one in right-hand corner, it’s larger and a rabbit jumping off the little hill.Į: Can you tell me about the Indian – can you tell me about his feathers, how many are there?Į: Can you tell me about the feet of the deer? ![]() ![]() Here’s an excerpt from a conversation between a 10-year-old boy and one of the researchers just after the illustration depicting an indigenous native surrounded by different kinds of animals was taken away. Most said they couldn’t, and the few children who could were immediately asked to describe in all detail what they saw. One of the illustrations used in the eidetic memory test.Įach test subject was first asked if they could still see a mental picture of the image that was earlier in front of their eyes. The picture was placed on an easel in front of the subject for 30 seconds, after which it was taken away. After an initial warmup round in which children were shown pictures of simple geometric figures and had to remember what they looked like after the pictures were removed, the researchers upped the difficulty by showing complex illustrations from a children’s book, packed with many different objects and graphic elements. But what exactly could these children see? Chances are it’s not what you expect. About 8% of the children the researchers tested had this ability, so nearly one in ten. Subsequent research conducted by Haber and colleagues revealed that this eidetic ability is not particularly rare. While performing these experiments, Haber was amazed to hear of scores of children who could keep seeing any image in front of them - not just doctored ones like those used in ‘ghost’ images - even after the image was removed. You should see a color-inverted version of the picture very briefly. To experience the afterimage effect, stare intensely in the center of this specially processed image for 30-60 seconds, then move your gaze to a white surface such as a piece of paper or a nearby wall. This is a harmless mind trick that results from photoreceptors in your retina getting fatigued from focusing on the same color for too long. His interest in the subject was piqued during experiments on afterimages or “ghost” images, a phenomenon in which people, particularly children, can still see certain images in front of them for a brief period of time even after the photo is removed. One of the first prominent scientists who investigated eidetic memory is psychologist Ralph Norman Haber. ![]() For most people, these images are only stored for a few short seconds before being discarded or transferred to short-term memory. Eidetic memory is believed to be controlled primarily by the posterior parietal cortex in the brain, where visual stimuli are processed and fragments of images retained. ![]()
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