In short: a true photographic memory, the ability to recall anything you have seen as precisely as a photograph, has never been reliably shown in an adult. But real memory extremes do exist: eidetic imagery in a few children, hyperthymesia in fewer than 100 known people, and trained memories that anyone can build with the right techniques.
Myth or fact? Six claims about memory
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What people mean by "photographic memory", and how memory really works
In films and everyday talk, a photographic memory means glancing at a page and later "reading" it back from your mind, word for word, as if you had taken a picture. It is a wonderful idea, and it doesn't match how human memory works.
Your senses take in far more than you can keep. A small amount passes into working memory, which can hold only a handful of items at once; the psychologist George Miller famously put it at about seven, give or take two, and later research suggests nearer four meaningful chunks. What reaches long-term memory is stored mostly as meaning and connections, not as a picture. When you remember, your brain rebuilds the scene from those pieces, filling gaps with what usually belongs there.
That rebuilding is why two witnesses can describe the same event differently, and why even vivid memories can be confidently wrong. A camera-like memory would need to skip all of these steps, and no one has been shown to do that.
Eidetic memory vs photographic memory: what's the difference?
The two terms are often used as if they meant the same thing. They don't. Eidetic memory, more precisely called eidetic imagery, is a real and well-studied experience. Photographic memory is the popular idea of perfect, permanent recall, which has never been demonstrated.
People with eidetic imagery, almost all of them children, can look at a picture for half a minute, then look at a blank surface and still "see" the picture there for a short while. They can scan it with their eyes and describe details. But the image fades, usually within a few minutes at most, and it is not accurate: details are missing or changed, and it can't be recalled again days later.
So the honest comparison is this: eidetic imagery is real, rare, short-lived and imperfect. A photographic memory would be permanent and perfect, and remains a myth. Here is how the different kinds of exceptional memory compare.
The famous "Elizabeth" case, and why it doesn't prove photographic memory
The strongest claim of a true photographic memory comes from 1970. In the journal Nature, Charles Stromeyer and John Psotka described a woman known as "Elizabeth" who could look at a pattern of thousands of random dots with one eye, then look at a second pattern with the other eye hours or even a day later, and combine them from memory so that a hidden 3D shape appeared.
If true, it would be the most remarkable memory feat ever recorded. But Elizabeth apparently refused to be tested again, Stromeyer later married her, and no other scientist ever examined her. Later attempts to find anyone with a similar ability, including large public searches, came up empty. Without a repeat, scientists treat the case as unconfirmed. It remains the exception that proves how hard real photographic memory is to find.
Hyperthymesia in brief
The closest thing to a perfect memory that science has confirmed is hyperthymesia, also called highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). People with it can say what they did on almost any date since late childhood, but only for their own lives. On most standard memory tests, such as memorising lists, they do no better than anyone else, and their memories can still be wrong, so it is not a photographic memory either.
Our full guide to hyperthymesia covers how it was discovered, its signs, how researchers test for it and what happens in the brain, with a date challenge you can try yourself.
Real people with extraordinary memories
Photographic memory may be a myth, but some memories are genuinely astonishing. What they have in common is that each is remarkable in a particular way, not perfect at everything.
Studied for about 30 years by the psychologist Alexander Luria, who wrote that he could find no limit to his memory. Shereshevsky had synesthesia: every word and number came with colours, tastes and images. The cost was real: he struggled with faces and abstract ideas.
The savant who inspired the film Rain Man was reported to recall the contents of more than 12,000 books in detail, yet needed help with many everyday tasks. His memory was vast in one direction and limited in others.
The autistic British artist is famous for drawing entire city skylines from memory, including a vast, detailed panorama of New York after a 20-minute helicopter ride. His memory is extraordinary for buildings and views, the things he loves to draw.
In 2018 Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh of Mongolia memorised a shuffled deck of 52 cards in 12.74 seconds. Many memory champions say they started out with ordinary memories, and brain scans agree that their brains look normal. Technique does the work.
Chess offers one more example. World champion Garry Kasparov recalled 117 of 120 pieces after glimpsing real game positions for five seconds each, as we describe in our article on Kasparov's IQ. Yet chess masters lose most of that advantage on randomly scattered pieces. Their memory is for meaning, not for pictures.
How memory champions do it: try the memory palace
The memory palace, or "method of loci", is more than 2,000 years old and is the core technique of almost every memory champion. You picture a route through a place you know well and leave each thing you want to remember at a spot along it, as a vivid, silly image. To recall, you simply walk the route again in your mind.
In 2003 a team led by Eleanor Maguire scanned the brains of top memory competitors in Nature Neuroscience and found no structural differences from ordinary people. Nine of the ten used a memory palace. Try it yourself with a shopping list of eight items.
Your memory palace: a shopping list in eight rooms
Walk through the house, picture each scene, then try to recall what was in each room, in order.
Eight items, eight rooms. Ready for the walk?
It takes about two minutes. There is no time limit, so take a moment at each stop to really picture the scene.
The power of chunking: from 7 digits to 80
In 1980, the psychologists Anders Ericsson, William Chase and Steve Faloon reported in Science on a student known as SF. Like most people, he could repeat about seven random digits. He was also a keen runner, so he began turning digits into running times: 3492 became "3 minutes 49.2 seconds, nearly a world-record mile". After about 20 months of practice, he could repeat around 80 digits.
Remarkably, his memory for letters stayed completely ordinary. He hadn't grown a bigger memory; he had learned to pack more into each chunk. You can feel the same effect in under a minute.
The chunking challenge
Two rounds, 12 digits each, 8 seconds to memorise. The first round is random digits. The second is the same length, grouped into famous years.
Can you train a photographic memory?
You can't train a camera, but you can train a memory that looks very much like one from the outside. These five techniques have the strongest evidence behind them:
- Build memory palaces. In a 2017 study in Neuron, people with ordinary memories practised the method for 30 minutes a day over six weeks and more than doubled the number of words they could recall from a list of 72.
- Chunk everything. Group information into meaningful units, as SF did with running times. Phone numbers, dates and codes all become easier.
- Test yourself instead of rereading. Actively recalling information strengthens it far more than looking at it again.
- Space your practice. Reviewing just before you would forget slows forgetting dramatically, as the chart below shows.
- Sleep on it. The brain strengthens new memories during sleep, so learning before a good night's rest helps them last.
The forgetting curve: see what reviewing does
In the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that we forget most new information within days unless we review it. Tick the days you review and watch the curve change.
An illustrative model of the pattern Ebbinghaus found, not exact data. Real forgetting depends on the material and the person.
Do I have a photographic memory?
If you can recall a page you glanced at once, word for word and days later, you would be the first person science has confirmed. More likely, you have a strong visual memory, which is common and genuinely useful. Signs include remembering where on a page you read something, recognising faces and places easily, and being able to picture a room or route in detail.
The best way to find out is to measure it. Our free photographic memory test checks five different kinds of memory, including a scene, a grid and a chessboard, and gives you a personal memory profile in about five minutes.
Memory is also one of the abilities professional IQ tests measure, through working-memory tasks such as repeating digits. If you'd like to see how your reasoning compares as well, try our free IQ test.
Frequently asked questions
Is photographic memory real?
Not in the way it is usually imagined. No adult has been reliably shown to recall a page or scene with photographic precision. What does exist is eidetic imagery in a small minority of children, hyperthymesia (an extraordinary memory for one's own life) and memories trained with techniques such as the memory palace.
What is the difference between eidetic memory and photographic memory?
Eidetic memory, or eidetic imagery, is a real but rare experience, mostly in children, of still seeing a picture vividly for a little while once it has been removed. Photographic memory is the popular idea of permanent, perfect recall of anything seen. Eidetic images fade quickly and contain errors, so they are not photographic.
Do I have a photographic memory?
Almost certainly not, because no one has been shown to have one. But you may have a strong visual memory. If you want to see how your memory compares across different kinds of material, try our free photographic memory test.
Can you train a photographic memory?
You can't train a camera-like memory, but you can train a memory that looks almost as impressive. Techniques such as the memory palace, chunking and spaced practice let ordinary people remember long lists, numbers and card decks, which is exactly how memory champions do it.
Sources
- Haber, R. N. and Haber, R. B. (1964). Eidetic imagery: I. Frequency. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 19, 131–138.
- Stromeyer, C. F. and Psotka, J. (1970). The detailed texture of eidetic images. Nature, 225, 346–349.
- Parker, E. S., Cahill, L. and McGaugh, J. L. (2006). A case of unusual autobiographical remembering. Neurocase, 12(1), 35–49.
- Patihis, L. et al. (2013). False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. PNAS, 110(52), 20947–20952.
- Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W. G. and Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208, 1181–1182.
- Maguire, E. A. et al. (2003). Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90–95.
- Dresler, M. et al. (2017). Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227–1235.
- Diekelmann, S. and Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 114–126.
- Luria, A. R. (1968). The Mind of a Mnemonist. Basic Books.
- Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
- Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.
- Mental imagery: quasi-perceptual experience, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: the Elizabeth case and why it remains unconfirmed.
- Speed Cards: history of world records, International Association of Memory: 12.74 seconds, Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh, 2nd Korea Open, August 2018.
Put your memory to the test
Find out which kinds of memory are your strongest in our free 5-round photographic memory test, with three difficulty modes and a personal memory profile.
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