The closest thing to a photographic memory which actually exists is something called a “superior autobiographical memory.” I don’t know if I would believe this existed, except for I had an employee who had this once named Tera. She could remember the color of the shirt and pants I was wearing 3 years ago at a certain meeting, place and time and was always right, and basically exactly what went on, describing something in an absolute vivid detail that was unbelievable. She did not train her mind to do this, she just did it naturally. However, it was not a photographic memory. She wouldn’t have been able to look at a list of 100 items and reproduce it like memory experts, although if she learned the techniques they would come naturally to her.
Basically I asked her a bunch of questions to determine what was going on inside of her mind that allowed her to reproduce memories like this. Very early in life she had just started associating things visually in chunks, without being consciously aware that this is what she was doing. So if you said "what happened on April 23rd, 2015 at approximately 2pm - she would respond with “Oh my God how did you know that date? I was sitting with my ex boyfriend John outside of the Denny’s restaurant drinking a sugarless coffee and wearing my favorite black shirt! I remembered it because that was 3 days after my Grandma died in 1997 when I was playing outside my house I lived in with my family with my brother John, and he slipped and fell into the swimming pool!”
So basically, she had somehow created visual associations for months, numbers, times, etc and somehow remembered remarkable details and then began chunking the associations. If you ask “how did she do that without training?” the only real explanation that might work is perhaps she was a memory expert in a past life and it carried through. However, she had never even heard of memory techniques. It was very funny asking about it. So you could ask about a date, ask about the first thing she ever remembers happening on April 15 on any year, go back to the original memory, then say “when you think of April, what comes up” and she would have a vivid visual representation of it. Basically she was using a very advanced form of symbolic memory automatically her whole life. It was remarkable and this phenomenon is called “superior autobiographical memory” and it does exist. I am convinced you could train a regular person to do this at a very young age, but the amount of training and regimentation required to get the skill to generalize would be fairly high level and I’m not sure that kids could handle it.
Probably, what happens is when some people are young, they just naturally begin repeating images exactly as they see them, and then at night thinking backwards about the day. Then some of them remember their Mom was wearing a red dress, and they start thinking about everything they’ve ever seen which is red, and then they start daydreaming and fall to sleep. If they did this basically all day with everything they encountered, eventually their mind would just start linking together in a way that was automatic. That is my general idea on how it works but it would have to be studied.
The rest of us, we cannot remember anything correctly unless we repeat it hundreds of times or learn a strategy like the memory palace. Hope that helps. That employee’s name is Tera. I would get her in on the discussion but she is quite ticked off at me for something.
