Children's eidetic memory
Eidetic images are usually generated spontaneously in children and by
choice in adults.
The mental abilities required to make compelling nature photographs may
be opposite those that lock in an enduring, photographic memory of a scene. To the best of
my knowledge no child under the age of 10 has produced a genius body of work appreciated
at the highest level by adults unaware of the age of the artist.”
Children have the edge, no doubt, because they lack an adult's
competing mental clutter. A means of organizing data seems to be the key to all superior
memory, eidetic or otherwise. For example, expert chess players can re-create a board
position involving two dozen pieces with great precision due to their knowledge of the
game. But if the pieces are placed randomly on the board, the expert players' recall is no
better than a novice's.
There’s a sound evolutionary reason why young children have such a potentially
dysfunctional memory. Visual input is held wide open because only through life experiences
can a sense of relevance for what should be held in memory is gained. Research professor
Steven Rose further explains in his book, The Making of Memory, that the human race
evolved in situations where “it was a good bet that the environment in which one grew up
would be virtually identical to that in which one spent one’s entire adult life. Hence
the eidetic memory of childhood, enabling rules of perception to be developed, could
smoothly transpose at the approach of puberty into the more linear forms of adult
memory.”
Studies have concluded that up to half of young children have vivid
eidetic memory. Many have it to such a strong degree that, with no prior instruction, they
can count the stripes on the Cheshire cat’s tail well after being shown an illustration
from Alice in Wonderland or spell out words in a foreign language they don’t know
after seeing them a complex photograph. The rare few who retain it as adults generally
live confused, unhappy lives with failed relationships. One eidetic man could clearly
remember every face, but failed to recognize people in social situations because his
precise mind imprinted frontal views, oblique views, and profiles as separate memories.
Great nature photography usually happens with a conscious passion for
how we want a scene to look in the mind of another as we distill the situation before our
eyes down to its essentials. Children tend to see photographs identically, without sensing
any interpretive artistry. An image is merely a substitute for the real thing, assessed as
if the actual scene was being observed.
The remarkable performances of some child protegies in activities that begin with
simplicity and gradually attain complexity, such as music, dance, and painting, do not
transfer over to nature photography, which becomes visually compelling through the reverse
course of previsualizing essential order and simplicity out of the great complexity of the
natural world.
Although Elizabeth is an extreme case, a study done by L. R. Haber and R. N. Haber
(1964) documented similar behavior in children with eidetic imagery. The subjects were
exposed to a detailed picture placed on an easel for thirty seconds. When the picture was
taken away, the children scanned the blank easel in order to describe the image. Their
descriptions were given in the present tense, as if they were still looking at the image.
From various studies, Haber and Haber found that it is vary rare; approximately 2-15% of
elementary school age children are capable of eidetic imagery. There was no connection
between gender and incidences of eidetic memory. The images lasted at least forty seconds
and could persist for up to several minutes. They also had a wide range of accuracy; they
could be highly detailed or fragmentary. Participants could voluntarily terminate these
images by blinking or looking away. If not terminated, the eidetic images involuntarily
faded in a similar manner.
See also
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/apr2001/986860210.Ns.r.html
http://www.slc.edu/~ebj/minds/student_pages/sally-jane/
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web2/Arnaudo.html
Eidetic memory articles
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Eidetic memory (Photographic memory) found in 5% children. These children can
remember an entire page of writing in an unfamiliar language after only seeing
it for a short period of time. Only a few have eidetic memory in adulthood.
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