I've read about people having this ability in the past, but it was usually related to either brain damage or idiot savancy. I think scientists have just starting studying "normal" people with the ability.
Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
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Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#12These people's "perfect" memories are purely autobiographical. They cannot memorize large lists of numbers quickly, or recite the entirety of The Bible from memory, or excel at any other task that requires rapid, verifiable memorization. Nothing about this is inconsistent with these people simply spending, for whatever reason, a considerable amount of effort to memorize and catalog the minutiae of their lives, but ot…
I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal. I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things…
When I was in high school, I could recite nearly 1,500 digits of pi from memory. This wasn't because I had number-memorizing superpowers, it was because I was a geek and I spent time memorizing numbers. If you look at interviews with top competitive mnemonists, you find very few who claim to have (let alone actually have) any sort of "photographic memory" or even autistic savantisms. It's just a mundane subject with strategies and tricks. People don't close their eyes and see numbers, they break them up into convenient chunks, look for symmetries and patterns, and memorize them.
You can't underestimate what people can accomplish when they have severe abnormalities in their interests. Calendar-counting to compute days of the week is not hard. Weather patterns are easily mentally compressible, with natural chunking points from the seasons. Most people's work schedules are highly regular, so it's easy to break weeks into patterns and exceptions. And so on. Everything that's demonstrated in this article is well within the realm of feasibility for a sufficiently dedicated person without superpowers.
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal. I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things…
No, It is normal for a person to have superb mastery and recall of an area of study on which they spend considerable time and effort on an ongoing basis. You can find an ornithologist who has a really amazing knowledge of birds too.
I think you're completely misunderstanding the thrust of the article. This ability goes far beyond memorizing knowledge in one specialized area. These people go through hours (up to 8 at a time) of testing about the everyday mundane events that have happened as well as the extraordinary things - there is no way for them to trick their testers. In the 60 minute piece, they could recall amazing detail about days from 20 years ago. This goes far beyond memorizing weather patterns and reconstructing information according to the regularity of a work schedule, etc.
I think what a lot of people are noticing here is that this extraordinary ability has not been commensurate with extraordinary accomplishments and it leads them to downplay the significance...
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal. I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things…
When I was in high school, I could recite nearly 1,500 digits of pi from memory. This wasn't because I had number-memorizing superpowers, it was because I was a geek and I spent time memorizing numbers. If you look at interviews with top competitive mnemonists, you find very few who claim to have (let alone actually have) any sort of "photographic memory" or even autistic savantisms. It's just a mundane subject with…
I'm sorry to inform you, but you in fact do have number-memorizing superpowers (or, alternately, "focusing on task and persevering" superpowers).
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, It is normal for a person to have superb mastery and recall of an area of study on which they spend considerable time and effort on an ongoing basis. You can find an ornithologist who has a really amazing knowledge of birds too.
I think you're completely misunderstanding the thrust of the article. This ability goes far beyond memorizing knowledge in one specialized area. These people go through hours (up to 8 at a time) of testing about the everyday mundane events that have happened as well as the extraordinary things - there is no way for them to trick their testers. In the 60 minute piece, they could recall amazing detail about days from 2…
I'm not saying their abilities aren't "extraordinary" or at least very impressive compared to what one might naively imagine. I am more saying that people who spend endorsement efforts in other areas also tend to gain enormous abilities and so these are "normal" extraordinary abilities.
The point others have raised about these people not having abilities in other areas goes beyond this "unique talent" "not transferring". The point is that the people with these "abilities" spend a fair portion of their waking hours maintaining them. The memories may be accurate but they're "honed", time is spent codifying them.
Most specifically, the memories are clearly very different anything "photographic".
Just consider, if a person actually a video tape of their entire life, using said tape to answer questions about "what happen on day X" would take a few hours of mental processing. These people answer such questions instantly.
They've made themselves "experts" on one subject, themselves, and the ability give instant answers on that subject is a clue to this...
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#16In short: it turns out there are (few) people that have almost perfect memory, even 20 years back. And that this type of memory is totally new to science.
Emphasis on almost. As would be expected, their memory isn't actually perfect. Thermodynamics/information theory put a limit on how much information you can pack into a certain area/mass, and with our knowledge of biology we already know that the vast majority of the grey matter in our skulls isn't used for information storage. In other words, this is interesting from a medical perspective, but not a computer science…
On the other hand, if we could get ahold of a human with a perfect memory, we could easily establish (at least on the basis of orders of magnitude) how much concious-level information can be stored in the brain. This could grant tremendous insight into the functioning of our brains, as it would also give us a good idea of the "size" (in terms of neural connections, for example) of memories, thoughts and so forth as they are stored.
We already have information-theoretic bounds on this sort of thing based on a physical understanding of the number of neurons and synapses in a person's skull, but they're very loose. It's like trying to estimate the storage available in a chip from the number of transistors on the die. What kind of RAM does it contain? How much is support circuitry? Does it contain RAM at all, or is it something more like a dataflow CPU? If we can fit a high-entropy sequence of N distinct digits into a brain composed of M neurons we might presume that storing each digit involves M/N neurons. If N is close to or greater than M, we might instead guess that data must be stored in-flight, which leads us down different avenues of investigation.
But this is all really a thought experiment, anyway...
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#17These people's "perfect" memories are purely autobiographical. They cannot memorize large lists of numbers quickly, or recite the entirety of The Bible from memory, or excel at any other task that requires rapid, verifiable memorization. Nothing about this is inconsistent with these people simply spending, for whatever reason, a considerable amount of effort to memorize and catalog the minutiae of their lives, but ot…
What is the decision procedure for if some memory is "autobiographical"? I don't understand why, if the person read a long list of numbers, they wouldn't be able to remember them, yet they can remember a long list of things they ate, the weather, or what TV shows they watched.
I wish the article went into more detail about how "perfect" these memories are. Of course, other than big events (series premieres, awards ceremonies) and well-recorded things like the weather, it's very difficult to verify their accuracy.
I have other questions. Is there an "alertness level" required for memories to be committed? I've gone several days in a row just sitting around my house lazy and completely unaware of what day of the week or date was. If I had this "perfect memory," would I be able to recall decades later the day of the week or the date?
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#18What surprises me (and makes me most skeptical) is that they can remember days by date. Did these people actually know what the date was every year of their lives? This implies to me that it is not just a camcorder-like memory that these people possess, but an efficient, numerical search ability on those memories. It makes me wonder how much one could duplicate this ability by purposefully associating numbers with days in a hierarchical structure (analogous to building an explicit tree structure on them).
Also fascinating to me is how this links with OCD-like behavior. My memory has always been considered very good (though not like these people), and I had extremely mild OCD during my preteen years, which changed its form when I became a teenager until I stopped manifesting most symptoms.
I also wonder what would happen if these people were asked to gather days by an arbitrary filter. For example, on which days during 1999 did it rain? Would they have to step through day-by-day and check each day, or would they be able to instantly run through the rainy days? The latter seems almost too powerful.
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're completely misunderstanding the thrust of the article. This ability goes far beyond memorizing knowledge in one specialized area. These people go through hours (up to 8 at a time) of testing about the everyday mundane events that have happened as well as the extraordinary things - there is no way for them to trick their testers. In the 60 minute piece, they could recall amazing detail about days from 2…
I'm not saying their abilities aren't "extraordinary" or at least very impressive compared to what one might naively imagine. I am more saying that people who spend endorsement efforts in other areas also tend to gain enormous abilities and so these are "normal" extraordinary abilities. The point others have raised about these people not having abilities in other areas goes beyond this "unique talent" "not transferri…
'Just consider, if a person actually a video tape of their entire life, using said tape to answer questions about "what happen on day X" would take a few hours of mental processing.'
You're making a huge pile of unsupported assertions, but this is the most egregious. You have the outline of an interesting theory, but little more. For one thing I see no evidence that there is any conscious effort made to maintain these memories, in many cases the people express every desire not to have this happen, yet it happens anyhow. At the point where your "making themselves experts" happens at a purely automatic level and against their conscious will you've stretched the words beyond any reasonable meaning, and I'm not sure your theory can even in principle be converted into something that corresponds to the real world.
Re: Fully functional adults with perfect ("endless") memory
#20These people's "perfect" memories are purely autobiographical. They cannot memorize large lists of numbers quickly, or recite the entirety of The Bible from memory, or excel at any other task that requires rapid, verifiable memorization. Nothing about this is inconsistent with these people simply spending, for whatever reason, a considerable amount of effort to memorize and catalog the minutiae of their lives, but ot…
What is the decision procedure for if some memory is "autobiographical"? I don't understand why, if the person read a long list of numbers, they wouldn't be able to remember them, yet they can remember a long list of things they ate, the weather, or what TV shows they watched. I wish the article went into more detail about how "perfect" these memories are. Of course, other than big events (series premieres, awards ce…
In at least one instance, it turned out the woman was able to remember everything she did because she spent a lot of time thinking about and reviewing what she did. She didn't spend nearly as much time memorizing numbers and wasn't as good at it.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-04/ff_perfec...