Photographic memory, also called eidetic memory or hypermnesia, is very rare in adults but between 2% and 10% of children experience it at a very young age ; however, this ability tends to disappear after six years of age, at which point the youngest learn new ways of processing information and photographic memory is no longer crucial in learning.
This ability to remember information with an extremely precise level of detail is not hereditary and if it is not diagnosed in time and, therefore, it is not trained or cultivated, the ability ends up being diluted and finally disappearing.
As a curiosity, people with photographic memory when they strive to remember a scene to the millimeter, move their eyes as if they were scanning the image or scene that they are retrieving from their brain directly from their visual perspective (as if it were still there). On the other hand, if they say a word or short phrase in the seconds of recall of memories, the quality of the eidetic image is weakened, according to the Scientific American magazine.
At the moment there are no studies that clarify with sufficient scientific evidence that photographic memory can be trained or learned. And, despite everything, the mechanisms underlying photographic memory and how to develop it are still a mystery .
If you want to find out if you have a photographic memory -like Joker (Batman), Fox Mulder (X-Files), Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow) or Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) in fiction-, we encourage you to take this 10-minute test duration developed by a team of researchers from the University of Iowa (USA) and the Open University . The test includes 10 questions with increasing difficulty.
