The accused Harvard plagiarist doesn’t have a photographic memory. Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. In this morning’s New York Times, the author of How Opal Mehta Obtained Kissed, Obtained Wild, and Got a Life defined how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another younger-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan stated she has a photographic memory. This looks as if pretty much as good a possibility as any to clear up the best enduring fable about human memory. Lots of individuals declare to have a photographic memory, however no person truly does. Properly, possibly one individual. In 1970, a Harvard imaginative and prescient scientist named Charles Stromeyer III revealed a landmark paper in Nature a couple of 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 confirmed her left eye one other dot pattern. She mentally fused the 2 images to form a random-dot stereogram and then noticed a 3-dimensional image floating above the floor.

Elizabeth seemed to supply the first conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. However then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, MemoryWave Official and she was by no means examined once more. In 1979, a researcher named John Merritt printed the outcomes of a photographic memory take a look at he had positioned in magazines and newspapers across the country. Merritt hoped somebody may come ahead with talents similar to Elizabeth’s, and he figures that roughly 1 million people tried their hand at the test. Of that quantity, 30 wrote in with the proper answer, and he visited 15 of them at their properties. However, with the scientist wanting over their shoulders, not one among them could pull off Elizabeth’s trick. There are so many unlikely circumstances surrounding the Elizabeth case-the marriage between topic and scientist, the lack of further testing, the lack to find anyone else together with her skills-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 told me not too long ago.

That’s not to say there aren’t folks with extraordinarily good recollections-there are. They only can’t take psychological snapshots and recall them with perfect fidelity. 53-yr-outdated savant who was the basis for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, is alleged to have memorized every page of the 9,000-plus books he has learn at eight to 12 seconds per page (each eye reads its personal page independently), although that claim has by no means been rigorously tested. One other savant, Stephen Wiltshire, has been referred to as the "human camera" for his capability to create sketches of a scene after taking a look at it for only a few seconds. But even he doesn’t have a actually photographic memory. His mind doesn’t work like a Xerox. Photographic memory is commonly confused with another bizarre-but actual-perceptual phenomenon known as eidetic memory, which happens in between 2 and 15 percent of kids and very rarely in adults. An eidetic picture is basically a vivid afterimage that lingers within the mind’s eye for as much as a couple of minutes earlier than fading away.

Youngsters with eidetic memory by no means have anything close to excellent recall, they usually usually aren’t able to visualize anything as detailed as a physique of textual content. In each case except Elizabeth’s where somebody has claimed to possess a photographic memory, there has always been another explanation. A group of Talmudic students recognized as the Shass Pollakssupposedly stored mental snapshots of all 5,422 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. According to a paper printed in 1917 in the journal Psychological Assessment, psychologist George Stratton examined the Shass Pollaks by sticking a pin via various tractates of the Talmud. They responded by telling him exactly which words the pin handed by way of on every web page. In reality, the Shass Pollaks in all probability didn’t possess photographic memory so much as heroic perseverance. If the average person decided he was going to dedicate his whole life to memorizing 5,422 pages of textual content, he’d most likely even be pretty good at it. It’s a formidable feat of single-mindedness, not of memory.