This past Wednesday, our NBB class visited Musée des Arts et Métiers, an industrial design museum in Paris that houses a variety of scientific instruments and inventions. As a huge science nerd, I was excited to see what instruments this museum housed.
In the “Communications” section of the museum, there were a series of display boxes showing different cameras:
In a previous class discussion, Ashley commented about photographic memory and how it might be negative to never be able to forget anything. She insightfully pointed out that it may be harder to move past stressful or traumatic events since the vivid memory would always be there.
Now that we have high-tech cameras that are able to capture moments in such high detail and quality, it made me think about how similar this device is to a photographic memory.
People with photographic memory have the ability to recall images from memory after very little exposure. This ability is also called eidetic memory when referring to recalling memories like photographs. After seeing all the cameras in the museum, I thought about how easy it is for someone to take a photo of a moment that they would like to remember. Would this be equivalent to having a controllable eidetic memory?
After browsing through PubMed and a few gray literature sites, it seems like technology is developing in such a way that our senses are either being enhanced (like the use of deep brain stimulation for cognitive enhancement) or replicated in machine (like the robot cafe in Japan). Currently, there appear to be a few distinct differences between a person with eidetic memory and a camera. Firstly, eidetic memory has been shown to be expressed in children at a higher rate than adults (Hudmon, 2006). Anyone with a camera, on the other hand, can use it to capture the moment. Secondly, eidetic memory captures emotions and sensory details about an event that a camera right now is unable to. Thirdly, eidetic memory is often riddled with minor errors (Lilienfeld et al., 2015) whereas there is no way to fake a photograph (without using some sort of editing software).
This last point really emphasizes the idea that memory, no matter what kind, is reconstructive. One clinical study found that there are specific reconstructive memory differences between males and females when referring to specific processing components of spatial memory (Postma, Izendoorn & Haan, 1998). The brain is constantly rewiring itself and strengthening certain neural pathways as a person interacts with his or her environment, and this lifelong process is fascinating.
References:
- Hudmon, A. (2006). Learning and memory. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
- Lilienfeld, S. O., Cramer, K. M., Namy, L. L., Lynn, S. J., Woolf, N. J., & Schmaltz, R. (2015). Psychology: From inquiry to understanding. Toronto: Pearson.
- Postma, A., Izendoorn, R., & Haan, E. H. (1998). Sex Differences in Object Location Memory. Brain and Cognition, 36(3), 334-345. doi:10.1006/brcg.1997.0974