Photographic Memories Do Exist

Two Harvard researchers have found that the photographic memory-a mysterious talent usually assigned to the super-intelligent-really exists.

Charles F. Stromeyer. a researcher at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Joseph Psotka, a graduate student in Psychology-both researchers at the Laboratory of Psychophysics-based their findings on a series of short-time experiments on a 23-year-old woman who is a teacher at Harvard and a skilled artist.

Eidetic Ability

Her eidetic ability, or photographic memory, is so great that she can hallucinate at will a beard on a clean-shaven man or repeat a page of poetry written in a foreign language verbatim-backwards and forwards-after simply looking at it.

The researchers used several experiments to test the extent and validity of the woman's eidetic ability.

Initially, two checkerboard patterns of 10.000 black and white dots, called the Julesz random-dot stereograms, were employed to test her stereoscopic vision (the ability to see two images as one).

When viewed together, the two patterns are seen as one, but in this case, the woman was only allowed to see one of the diagrams with each eye.

Stromeyer believed that she would