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The accused Harvard plagiarist doesn’t have a photographic memory. Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. On this morning’s New York Times, the author of How Opal Mehta Obtained Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life explained how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another young-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan stated she has a photographic memory. This seems like nearly as good a chance as any to clear up the greatest enduring fantasy about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, however nobody really does. Properly, possibly one person. In 1970, a Harvard imaginative and prescient scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature a couple of Harvard scholar named Elizabeth, Memory Wave 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 sample. She mentally fused the 2 photos to kind a random-dot stereogram and then saw a 3-dimensional picture floating above the floor.

Elizabeth appeared to supply the primary conclusive proof that photographic memory is feasible. But then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was never tested again. In 1979, a researcher named John Merritt revealed the outcomes of a photographic memory take a look at he had positioned in magazines and newspapers across the nation. Merritt hoped somebody may come forward with talents just like Elizabeth’s, and he figures that roughly 1 million individuals tried their hand on the take a look at. Of that quantity, 30 wrote in with the right reply, and he visited 15 of them at their homes. Nonetheless, with the scientist looking over their shoulders, not one among them may pull off Elizabeth’s trick. There are such a lot of unlikely circumstances surrounding the Elizabeth case-the marriage between topic and scientist, the lack of further testing, the lack to search out anyone else along with her talents-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 informed me recently.

That’s to not say there aren’t people with extraordinarily good recollections-there are. They just can’t take psychological snapshots and recall them with perfect fidelity. 53-12 months-outdated savant who was the premise for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, is alleged to have memorized every page of the 9,000-plus books he has read at 8 to 12 seconds per web page (each eye reads its own page independently), although that declare has by no means been rigorously examined. Another savant, Memory Wave System Stephen Wiltshire, has been called the "human camera" for his capacity to create sketches of a scene after taking a look at it for just some seconds. But even he doesn’t have a truly photographic Memory Wave System. His thoughts doesn’t work like a Xerox. Photographic memory is commonly confused with one other bizarre-but actual-perceptual phenomenon referred to as eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of kids and really rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers within the mind’s eye for up to a couple of minutes before fading away.

Children with eidetic memory never have something near perfect recall, Memory Wave and so they sometimes aren’t able to visualize anything as detailed as a body of textual content. In every case besides Elizabeth’s where somebody has claimed to possess a photographic memory, there has at all times been one other rationalization. A group of Talmudic students recognized because the Shass Pollakssupposedly stored psychological snapshots of all 5,422 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. In accordance with a paper printed in 1917 within the journal Psychological Overview, psychologist George Stratton examined the Shass Pollaks by sticking a pin by means of numerous tractates of the Talmud. They responded by telling him exactly which words the pin handed by means of on every page. In reality, the Shass Pollaks probably didn’t possess photographic memory a lot as heroic perseverance. If the typical individual determined he was going to dedicate his entire life to memorizing 5,422 pages of textual content, he’d in all probability also be pretty good at it. It’s an impressive feat of single-mindedness, not of memory.