I read a report in the Scientific American a few years ago in which they were doing experiments with rend0m-dot stereograms—the kind of thing where if you just look at one image or the other you just see random dots, but if you look at one with one eye and the other with the other eye you see a square full of random dots floating above a background with random dots.
Some people could be shown one image one week, and the other the next week, each by itself, and suddenly get it. Evidently they had remembered the entire first-week image in memory to scompare with the second a week later.
I was impressed. This seemed eidetic enough for me.
I heard about this study in the book Moonwalking with Einstien: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer. Apparently there was only one test subject who seemed to have eidetic memory, and instead of doing more tests after the one that you described, the experimenter married the subject.
When John Merritt put a similar test in newspapers, nobody who wrote in with the correct answer could do the test “with scientists looking over their shoulders.”
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
other people were near-perfect “eidetic” imagers
I read a report in the Scientific American a few years ago in which they were doing experiments with rend0m-dot stereograms—the kind of thing where if you just look at one image or the other you just see random dots, but if you look at one with one eye and the other with the other eye you see a square full of random dots floating above a background with random dots.
Some people could be shown one image one week, and the other the next week, each by itself, and suddenly get it. Evidently they had remembered the entire first-week image in memory to scompare with the second a week later.
I was impressed. This seemed eidetic enough for me.
I heard about this study in the book Moonwalking with Einstien: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer. Apparently there was only one test subject who seemed to have eidetic memory, and instead of doing more tests after the one that you described, the experimenter married the subject.
When John Merritt put a similar test in newspapers, nobody who wrote in with the correct answer could do the test “with scientists looking over their shoulders.”
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.