Photographic Memory Exposed: Debunking Myths To Empower You

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In the world of memory improvement, the mere mention of photographic memory is usually connected with some kind of scam.

But the problems begin with how so many people confuse the term “photographic memory” with a completely different concept called eidetic memory.

Sometimes they even confuse it with the term “photogenic memory,” which is a mix-up, not anything that exists. To be photogenic means to look great when appearing in photographs.

Another problem with this term is the validity of the available research.

Frankly, most scientific material about people looking at information once, taking a mental snapshot and recalling something perfectly has not been well evidenced.

Not only that, but if you think about it, no sane person would even want to be able to recall everything in such perfect detail.

I’ll explain why with a notorious case study of a woman who wishes she could forget information.

But first, let’s talk about how people define this term.

What Do People Mean When They Use the Term Photographic Memory?

Typically, people are referring to something called eidetic memory. This term describes the contested idea that children have highly visual recall. So visual, that it as if by accessing their memory, they are looking at photographs.

The term may also have seized the popular imagination following the initial popularity of the Hannibal Lecter novels. Throughout the stories, he is said to have an extraordinary memory that has a photo-like quality.

Other ideas that people take influence from include Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory or HSAM. But as this study shows, being able to remember your past is not the same as seeing what you remember visually in the sense of pictures.

As BBC’s Science Focus has discussed, experts simply do not accept the argument that memory is picture-based or even remotely related to cameras.

So with all this in mind, by the end of this article, I hope to convince you of one simple fact:

Photographic Memory Does Not Exist
(And I Can Prove It)

Unless you’re a painter who would benefit from memorizing every single detail of a room or landscape, there are very few benefits to the idea of photographic memory.

Serious artists make study sketches even from photographs because it’s not just about what they see. Artistic representation is what they can reproduce using their mind’s eye and their muscles.

But let’s say you did want to memorize an entire book. Who would listen to you recite each and every word?

Where and when would you perform the recitation?

The answer is that you almost certainly would never use such a skill. And these days we have professional audiobook narrators, and even AI voices to handle such long-form content tasks.

You can watch me question the limited value of memorizing entire books in greater detail in this video:

In reality, you need only memorize the most critical pieces of information in any given book.

That’s why I wrote and recorded an entire podcast episode about how to memorize a textbook the right way. In brief, the method involves identifying the main points of a book and memorizing only the important information.

Doing that releases you from not only memorizing thousands of words like “and, “if,” but, etc. You don’t need to bother reciting or recalling them either.

The question is:

Why do people want to possess so-called “photographic memory” when it won’t actually do anything for them?

I believe the answer boils down to just one word: Fear.

People Seek Fantasy Memory Tricks Because They Want Something Unrealistic…

They want certainty in life.

Since none of us knows what’s going to happen next, the idea of photographic memory is attractive because it creates a sense that some level of security is possible.

They believe that if you can remember “everything,” you’ll be able to pass exams, never look foolish, get the best possible jobs and always be prepared for debates.

In reality, you can study successfully without visually recalling words in books. You can also make mistakes and still avoid embarrassing situations and easily succeed in many areas of life. You can even stop forgetting important things once and for all.

I know because I’ve been researching, practicing and teaching legitimate memory techniques that are proven to help. They are all well-evidenced by memory science and the incredible records produced by memory champions.

But photographic memory is not how any successful learning or memory competitor achieves their results. Let me explain why.

The Strange Research Behind Photographic Memory

The idea of photographic memory may have first appeared in a 1970 Psychology Today article by Charles F. Stromeyer.

Discussing a supposed Harvard student named “Elizabeth,” Stromeyer claimed she could remember detailed images with great clarity. He even claimed she could reproduce a stereogram, and some of his reports even wound up in Nature.

Why is this research questionable?

Two reasons. First, Stromeyer proceeded to marry Elizabeth. Second, he never studied her memory again.

Wouldn’t you think that someone with such extraordinary memory would be the subject of continual analysis for the rest of her life?

Why would such an incredible example disappear from view?

The mega-savant Kim Peek remained public throughout his life, after all. Akira Haraguchi gives interviews about how he has memorized so many digits of pi.

In reality, the answer is simple. There’s no such thing as photographic memory.

The closest thing to it that exists is sometimes called highly superior autobiographical (HSAM) or hyperthymesia. But this condition has little to do with visual memory or even iconic memory.

Her story and how she uses her memory in mostly verbal ways is quite unusual given what science has shown us about our massive storage capacity for images.

As you’ll see, many people displaying superior autobiographical memory recite not images, but historical dates, names and numbers. These facts draw much more on semantic memory than anything visual or even remotely “photographic.”

Far From Photographic Memory

Take the case of Jill Price. She’s the author of The Woman Who Can’t Forget. If you’ve ever had the fantasy that you wanted to remember everything, after hearing her story, you’ll probably think again.

As Price discusses in the book, her inability to forget information about the world and her personal life creates ongoing anguish.

So much so that doctors she worked with invented an entirely new term to describe her condition: “hyperthymestic syndrome.”

What exactly can she remember?

One example is her ability to recite the news of every April 18th for ten years in a row with reasonable accuracy. Certainly, this is an interesting and even amazing feat. But is it useful?

Not really.

Although Price has claimed she would never trade this ability for the world, it’s clear that her ability to recall aspects of her life and historical dates hasn’t made her life easy.

She doesn’t even use the term “photographic memory” herself, except in an excerpted passage from the chatroom where she met her husband.

She also didn’t include the term in the glossary at the end of her book.

Instead, Price uses the term “flashbulb memory.”

This term also doesn’t fit the bill, showing that people who use her as an example of photographic memory are learning from someone who doesn’t have it, nor uses terms from memory science accurately.

Flashbulb memory refers to when we sharply recall dramatic or tragic moments.

For example, remembering where you were on the morning of 9/11 can seem vivid in your mind.

But that doesn’t make it photographic in the sense that you could draw any of the scenes you saw on the news the way Stromeyer’s research suggests Elizabeth might have done.

Price Still Forgets

The news stories like to play up cases of highly superior autobiographical memory. But they hide key facts too.

Although this ability astonished scientists – and it truly is astonishing – Price has shared how she struggles to learn and memorize simple things.

Worse, her constant recall of emotional traumas from the past interfered with her scholastic performance.

No doubt. Anxiety-induced memory loss is a real and serious issue.

Even if you’re interested in techniques to develop photographic memory and still believe that it’s possible and desirable to develop this skill, I recommend that you read The Woman Who Can’t Forget.

But if there’s one plus, it’s that Jill Price doesn’t have aphantasia.

Choose a Better Metaphor & Other Alternatives to Photographic Memory

Now that you know that there is a lack of scientific evidence for photographic memory, let me suggest that memory can be a lot more powerful than a camera.

Take the case of Stephen Wiltshire, for example. He has the ability to draw intensely complicated cityscapes from memory. Watch this video to see what I mean:

Limiting this skill to something that a camera can do borders on insulting this incredible artist, something this Guardian article highlights in the article titled, “This man is not a camera.”

Indeed, what he’s doing is far beyond “photographic.” It’s more like “microscopic,” if not at the same time evocative of the James Webb Telescope.

My point is that memory is mysterious even to the best memory scientists, but appears to be reconstructive in nature.

As I’ve discussed in-depth, to our best understanding of how memory works, the process involves your brain literally piecing together all kinds of information after it has been distributed throughout your brain.

Dr. Gary Small describes the process like an entire family needing to get together for Thanksgiving Dinner. A single memory involves many different parts traveling along the “streets” and “highways” of the brain to gather at one home.

There’s no perfect metaphor for what’s going on, but that one makes what’s going on relatively easy to picture.

The question is, what will give you better memory so you can recall dates and facts as easily as someone with highly superior autobiographical memory?

Here are some suggestions:

One: Learn the Method of Loci

I mentioned the term “Memory Palace” above. This memory technique is based on the ancient method of loci.

To use it, you associate information with specific locations in a familiar place. When you want to recall information, you revisit these memory spaces and this process allows for easier recall.

A reflection process is involved, and some researchers believe that people with highly superior autobiographical memory tend to reflect more than others.

But there’s reason to believe that people like Jill Price also use locations in a way. She talks in her book about having written down more than 50,000 pages of notes.

All of those notes are locations, not unlike how some mnemonists use Zettlekasten and the Leitner System.

Likewise, the so-called “Boy who can’t forget” uses photographs and thinks back to where they are located on his bedroom wall frequently. You can see how this happens clearly in this documentary about him:

Although this is not the Memory Palace method as such, it strongly relates, combined with journaling and reflective thinking.

In other words, there’s likely nothing particularly genetic about what these people are doing to remember more. It’s behavioral, a kind of unconscious optimization of the ancient memory tradition.

Two: Spaced Repetition

People with unusual recall abilities repeat information almost obsessively.

In fact, I’ve often talked about how I trained myself to have “Recall OCD” in order to learn faster and remember more.

Specific techniques exist that can help refine the recall process. The most famous is spaced repetition and it is a fantastic alternative to rote learning.

It is a discipline, however. Make sure to use deliberate practice so it enters your procedural memory. That way, you’ll use this process more-or-less automatically as you study.

Three: Tell Stories

We tend to remember information much better when it is embedded in stories.

The good news is that you can use a mnemonic story method that brings the method of loci together with spaced repetition.

You can start practicing this method now by taking the story of Jill Price and placing it in a Memory Palace.

Watch one of the videos about her or read her book. Then add a few of the details to a familiar location.

Or tell a story about Jack and Jill paying high prices at the store. This simple approach can help you remember the last name “Price.”

Four: Learn the History of Mnemonics & the Multi-sensory Memory Tradition

Long before cameras existed, the greatest memorizers in history knew that encoding information into memory needed more than mere images.

For example, Giordano Bruno taught combinatorial mnemonic systems. He developed these based on the Memory Wheel technique introduced by Ramon Llull and later refined by Jacobus Publicius.

These mnemonic tools engage multiple senses, emotions, mythological associations, and spatial reasoning.

Their experiences, independent accounts of their extraordinary recall and their written teachings provide yet another reason why “photographic memory” isn’t just unproven. It’s a bad aspiration, one that points people in exactly the wrong direction.

Photographic Memory FAQs

I’ve answered many questions over the years about photographic memory.

Here are answers to the ones that come up most often.

Is it “photogenic memory” or “photographic memory”?

The more common term is “photographic memory,” but “eidetic memory” is the one used by scientists. And to this day there’s no consensus that even that kind of memory exists.

The discussion around this term is misleading and as I hope to have suggested above, there are cases that demand better metaphors for what’s actually going on.

Are There Any Jobs That Require Photographic Memory?

No job could technically require a type of memory that doesn’t exist.

But I do understand why people fantasize about what they imagine this metaphor will give them. For example, when I was younger and needed a job to help pay my way through my undergraduate B.A., I applied to work for Customs Canada.

Had I been successful, I would have worked at an airport inspecting bags and scanning people for signs of suspicious behaviour.

One of the exams I took involved looking at faces in disguise and then some moments later, without their disguises. In many cases, it proved very difficult to make a match.

Would having something even remotely like a photographic memory have helped?

Of course.

But the reality is that I did well on this part of the test despite not having trained my memory to be photographic.

The reason is that I paid special attention to easily recognizable parts of the faces, rather than trying to mentally photograph them as a whole.

It’s a trick I picked up in psychology class and later prepared for the how to remember names and faces portion of the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass. I’ll share the details in my answer to the next FAQ.

Is there a way to memorize faces that relates to photographic memory?

Years ago, I read that the brain tends to recognize the shape of the nose and some of the circularity around the eyes.

Everything else either fills in or it doesn’t, but you can increase your chance that these details will fill in by deliberately paying attention to the upside-down seven of the nose and the eight-shaped infinity symbol of the eyes.

Although this idea might sound unlikely, it matches recent research findings in visual chunking and the role of fuzzy memories.

I certainly wouldn’t call focusing on the nose and eyes bulletproof. But in my experience, taking a second to concentrate on these areas makes it much easier to recall faces later.

This particular strategy relates to a technique taught by memory expert Harry Lorayne.

However, in Lorayne’s teaching, the point was not to memorize the look of the face. It was to use an obvious feature, like the shape of a nose in combination with mnemonic linking to recall a person’s name.

For example, if the name is John, you might notice that John’s nose is somewhat hook-shaped and imagine him fishing with John the Baptist to establish stronger name recall.

Can you train yourself to have a photographic memory?

Technically no.

The answer is “no,” for the simple reason that there is no such kind of memory you can train.

What real memory skills can be trained instead?

People who enjoy better memory, from memory athletes to everyday learners use techniques like the method of loci, Memory Palaces, spaced repetition, linking, pegwords, mnemonic number systems and the like.

These skills will help you memorize anything related to words such as speeches, languages, poems, professional terminology and more.

Number systems like the Major System and a PAO System will help you absorb numbers related to personal information, equations and medicine.

Beyond Photographic Memory

Although the scientific community largely agrees that there are people with extraordinary memory abilities, the idea of recalling visual information with perfect accuracy after one glance is not supported by empirical research.

But although the myth has harmed many people who have fallen for memory courses promising this kind of skill, you now know how to avoid them.

You also have proper mnemonic tools to pursue that will help you remember, not every word in a book, but only those that matter.

And if you need more help, grab my free memory improvement course:

It gives you video tutorials and worksheets that help you develop the skills we discussed today.

That way, you’ll be able to rely on your memory and accomplish your goals.

How do you like that picture?