i know i should be in the students section, but maybe you guys have more experience and can answer me this question,,,,, i am in NS and i asked a girl in my class her study technique (because she has the best grades in the class) and the only thing she told me was that she used her photographic memory... i didnt want to question her any longer because she is kind of mean..... but what does photographic memory means? how can i use it??? can i really use it??? does it really work??? ,,,,
Some people have a mild version of it some have a stronger version where it really is as if you took a picture and stored the information. Mind you some people like myself actually have great memories for certain things better than others . I am great with nonfiction books. I can remember everything I have ever read that is fiction and pop culture, and that is a ton of stuff. I read constantly. as a kid i could quote back word for word every movie I ever watched and every book I ever read. I can not do that anymore though. Weird I don't know why. I blame the fact I had a lot of surgery over a short period of time and the drugs did something to my skills.
I want to tell you about a very good friend of mine who had this ability. His name was Ron. We worked together as short order cooks in a restaurant. This was long before I went into nursing. He had a photographic memory. He could look at an order for about two seconds and take a picture of it. He would then read it to you verbatim from his head. There seemed to be no limit to the amout of orders he could keep in his head. We tested him several times, because we didn't believe it at first. I brought in magazines and had him look at an article for about 5 seconds and then read it back to me. It was amazing. Someone in an earlier thread talked about people with increased brain capacity sometimes being strange. Ron was VERY strange, indeed.
He was a functioning drug addict. He believed strongly in the legalization of marijuanna and subscribed to high times magazine. He was trying to come up with a way to brew tea from pot. He would keep all the old orders that came into the kitchen in shoe boxes in the trunk of his car. He would into work and start an arguement with a waitress over an order she put in a week ago. They'd tell him he was full of crap, and he'd go out to the car and get the order. One time we were busy as hell during a dinner rush. A new manager came in the kitchen to help us cook. There were about 20 tags hanging up. The manager says come on we've got to get these orders out. Ron took a toothpick lit it on the stove and lit all the tags on fire. The manager's freaking out, saying what are we going to do. Ron then took over and called all the orders to us from memory. What a fun time it was to work with him. Sadly, he lost his battle with the drugs at the age of 39. I really miss that guy.
I think maybe there are different degrees and types of photographic memory, I too can "see the page", I can also remember every single word of conversations, picture exactly where everyone was standing and who said what which my husband HATES (you stood in that corner and said HFUFUFYU and I answered back KJIGIVUFUfgy, then you said IGUIGGGY, etc.)
LOL ... I am the same way. It is very annoying to some people!!
I have had similar issues in the past. People do not like discussing past conversations with someone who can quote verbatim the entire conversation. They usually get angry and storm off. It seems to me that most people subtlely tweak their memory of what they believe they said in a conversation to make themselves seem more intelligent after the fact. They then get really angry when you stumble across some article a month or week later that completely disproves what they said. The hard part is to remember that most folks just won't remember the conversation at all. Sad. I spend as much time reminding folks about a conversation a year ago that I just found something interesting to add to it, than relating the exciting new information.
It makes it hard to relate to most people as well. Any reference I make to anything I have seen or heard is sure to not be caught by others so everyone misses my jokes entirely. It feels like I spend my whole life explaining things to people who were there when they happened. It can be enough to drive you mad sometimes. I have tons of childhood memories of significant events that my parents don't even remember and sometimes deny ever happened, until I produce proof or an obscure picture of some type. AAAArrrrgggg.... stupidity is truly a blessing.
I do not have full recall, but rather have uncontrolled recall of random conversations, specific incidents, and the written word for some strange reason. I used to read a 500 page novel in one night before being able to fall asleep. I had no choice as reading and getting absorbed into a story was the only way to quiet the tumbling thoughts enough so that I could sleep at all. The real problem was that even years later a random page turns up in my head from a novel I read as a child and I can read nearly every word, sometimes even page number, and instantly recall the entire story/side events/details of the book, even if I can not recall the entire thing word for word. Re-reading a book I have read as a kid is also difficult because even if I am certain I didn't read that one yet, after one page into it, frequently it all comes back in a wild flood of memory.
It is not useful in my personal experience. Some things stick and I cannot get rid of them, while at the same time I can study some things for hours and just cant force them to stick at all... Not to mention remembering in stark detail every bad thing that has ever happened in your life. Every mistake, every embarrassment, every injustice, every single stupid hurtful thing you said as a child to someone else...or was said to you.
You do not want it. Not if you understand it as something you cannot control. There is no off button.
Just my experience anyway. Do not worry I am not as depressed or manic as this post makes me sound, but it is frustration at an epic level that leads me to strange behavior at times, which results in people thinking I am strange. Such is my life.
We had an autistic kid with a photographic memory that joined our school in middle school. They wanted to mainstream him as much as possible (awesome since this was quite a while ago and the only autistic person any of us had heard of). On the first day they gave him a copy of the yearbook and he memorized it right there. He knew every person in the school by their picture, what they did, their class, etc. It was amazing! Sometimes I still run into him and he still knows it all! For him it was a gift as it made him quite popular despite his condition.
AZMOMO2
1,194 Posts
Some people have a mild version of it some have a stronger version where it really is as if you took a picture and stored the information. Mind you some people like myself actually have great memories for certain things better than others . I am great with nonfiction books. I can remember everything I have ever read that is fiction and pop culture, and that is a ton of stuff. I read constantly. as a kid i could quote back word for word every movie I ever watched and every book I ever read. I can not do that anymore though. Weird I don't know why. I blame the fact I had a lot of surgery over a short period of time and the drugs did something to my skills.