No it isn't. Almost everyone with a photographic memory has something wrong with them anyway (Ausbergers or Autism usually)

I knew a couple people with what most people would consider eidetic memories (Though technically they aren't) and only one of them didn't have another health problem. And she was pretty weird herself just not medically strange.

It is possible to train yourself to have a great memory though, but not eidetic. Impossible.

according to my old psychology textbooks , 5% of young children tested display enough visual recall to be called eidetic ( which drops sharply with age )
with no correlation to mental disorders

you say it drops with age.
Is that because they dont practice it? Or because they simply just lose it with age.
Its a shame to have such a gift and lose it at such a young age

5% sounds like such a large number. So your telling me in my 1100 person organic chemistry class, about 55 of them have a photographic memory?

I feel like theres genetics/recombination in there too though ;\

a teenager isnt a young child .......

no you cant train to get what is commonly referred to as photographic memory

why would someone lose their photographic memory as they get older?
Wouldnt the proportion of children with photographic memory be the same as the proportion of adults with a photographic memory?

Not agreeing/disagreeing with previous posts, but, hypothetically if a reasonable amount of young children are born with photographic memory and lose it over time this could be contributed to the fact that young children often learn faster and far more in their first ~5-10yrs. Young minds often are racing to absorb information and it could be as the mind gets older that the brain just can't take in information as quickly/efficiently. This could also be done with an analogy to a car engine, works great at first, but eventually it will start to run slower and produce less power.
Just my speculation on the topic

the short term memory isn't important, its mostly what you forget

if you're looking for permanent memory, look up semantic memory and how to "develop" it



the term photographic memory just means someone is way better than the average at memorizing random shit, its irrelevant

the effort you spend encoding something new for the first time correlates with how well you learn it, theres also a bunch of other useful correlations that aren't bad to know if you're taking your studies seriously, but in the end your job interview is all semantics/conceptual/emotional so memorizing pictures won't do you good here, you'll have to know the meaning of the concepts (semantic memory, which is permanent)



lemme put it this way, if I really want to be known as having a photographic memory for some reason or doing good in that particular psyc experiment, I'll try really hard in these psych experiments to learn them as much as possible

someone might have "photographic" memory in real life, but doesn't care for psyc experiments.. it all depends on what you REALLY want to encode and how much effort you put into it, I don't care how gifted they claim to be, if you remember something in full details you literally tried to remember it so have fun thinking you have a photographic memory based on a few random tests that have little to do with your "average" real life memory

This post was edited by Wyrmvater on Dec 30 2011 12:00pm

no there is no way to make your memory photographic. its an inherited trait. its how your brain is hardwired. currently we don't have the technology to do this crazy stuff to the brain yet

I like how everyone posted how it's impossible to train yourself without any evidence or link to any doccumentation