It is generally believed that patients with epilepsy, who also have in some sense a disorder of excitatory/inhibitory balance (over-excitation of a specific brain focus leading to seizures) have memory impairments rather than memory enhancement. That is to say the novelty of this report requires an understanding of the vagaries around the eidetic term itself, and the focus really is on what could be called enhanced cognitive capabilities in a specific domain or specific domains. Shereshevsky was a trained mnemonist, not an eidetic memorizer, and there are no studies that confirm whether Kim Peek had true eidetic memory. In extreme cases, such as those of Solomon Shereshevsky and Kim Peek, memory skills can reportedly hinder social skills. Ī few adults have had phenomenal memories (not necessarily of images), but their abilities are also unconnected with their intelligence levels and tend to be highly specialized. It has been hypothesized that language acquisition and verbal skills allow older children to think more abstractly and thus rely less on visual memory systems. Eidetic memory has been found in 2 to 10 percent of children aged 6 to 12. One theory is that there is a difference in the excitatory/inhibitory balance of neurons at that developmental stage. It is not thought that children possess the associative context (defined as the ability to learn and remember the relationship between unrelated items such as the name of someone we have just met or the aroma of a particular perfume) but rather there may be an inherent quality in brain makeup which allows more efficacious encoding and recall of engrams.

Scientists believe many people who retain these abilities into adulthood have better associative organization as opposed to true eidetic memory many people displaying improved ability use memory tricks: for example, chess players can remember entire chess boards in game situations but if showed a randomly set board are no better than novices at remembering the layout. It is acknowledged that children possess more capacity for this than adults, suggesting that some developmental change disrupts the ability. Eidetic memory, that being the capability to remember in near perfect detail a piece of information (or otherwise defined as a memory which is very vivid and has great potential for recall), is extremely rare.

Eidetic memory test online