The accused Harvard plagiarist doesn’t have a photographic memory. Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. In this morning’s New York Occasions, the writer of How Opal Mehta Bought Kissed, Acquired Wild, and Acquired a Life defined how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another young-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan stated she has a photographic Memory Wave System. This looks as if as good a chance as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Tons of people claim to have a photographic memory, however no one truly does. Nicely, perhaps one person. In 1970, Memory Wave a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III printed a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard scholar named Elizabeth, who may carry out an astonishing feat. Stromeyer confirmed Elizabeth’s proper eye a sample of 10,000 random dots, and a day later, he showed her left eye one other dot pattern. She mentally fused the two images to form a random-dot stereogram after which noticed a three-dimensional picture floating above the floor.
Elizabeth appeared to offer the primary conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. But then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was by no means tested once more. In 1979, a researcher named John Merritt revealed the outcomes of a photographic memory check he had placed in magazines and newspapers across the country. Merritt hoped somebody might come forward with abilities just like Elizabeth’s, and he figures that roughly 1 million folks tried their hand at the check. Of that quantity, 30 wrote in with the appropriate reply, and he visited 15 of them at their homes. However, with the scientist trying over their shoulders, not certainly one of them might pull off Elizabeth’s trick. There are such a lot of unlikely circumstances surrounding the Elizabeth case-the wedding between topic and scientist, the lack of further testing, the inability to seek out anyone else together with her talents-that some psychologists have concluded that there’s something fishy about Stromeyer’s findings. He denies it. "We don’t have any doubt about our knowledge," he advised me not too long ago.
That’s to not say there aren’t folks with extraordinarily good reminiscences-there are. They simply can’t take mental snapshots and recall them with excellent fidelity. 53-yr-old savant who was the premise for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, is alleged to have memorized each page of the 9,000-plus books he has learn at eight to 12 seconds per page (every eye reads its personal web page independently), although that declare has by no means been rigorously tested. Another savant, Stephen Wiltshire, has been known as the "human camera" for his skill to create sketches of a scene after looking at it for just some seconds. However even he doesn’t have a actually photographic memory. His mind doesn’t work like a Xerox. Photographic memory is often confused with one other bizarre-but actual-perceptual phenomenon referred to as eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of youngsters and really hardly ever in adults. An eidetic image is basically a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for as much as a few minutes before fading away.
Youngsters with eidetic memory by no means have anything near perfect recall, and so they usually aren’t in a position to visualize something as detailed as a physique of text. In each case except Elizabeth’s the place somebody has claimed to possess a photographic memory, there has at all times been one other rationalization. A bunch of Talmudic students identified because the Shass Pollakssupposedly saved psychological snapshots of all 5,422 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. Based on a paper published in 1917 within the journal Psychological Review, psychologist George Stratton tested the Shass Pollaks by sticking a pin by way of varied tractates of the Talmud. They responded by telling him exactly which phrases the pin passed via on each page. In reality, the Shass Pollaks probably didn’t possess photographic memory a lot as heroic perseverance. If the typical individual decided he was going to dedicate his complete life to memorizing 5,422 pages of textual content, he’d probably also be pretty good at it. It’s a formidable feat of single-mindedness, not of memory.