This post by Andy Manoske has been republished from Quora with his permission.
I have an exceptional memory. I have the ability to recall things like patterns (patterns of numbers, words, etc.), images, and experiences with pretty strong detail.
I've used it in things like memorizing speeches, qiuz bowl, acting as a GPS for my friends and family in places I've driven, and spelling bees: as long as I've read or heard that word before on somewhere like Wikipedia or an encyclopedia I can usually just read you the letters from memory.
I also might have tried charming girls in college at parties by tipsily recalling to them Latin poetry from books I read in high school from memory. Unsurprisingly, this was rarely successful.
Just because I have a strong memory doesn't mean that I have an eidetic memory. True photographic and eidetic memory is extremely uncommon. There's absolutely an exceptional few who have an eidetic memory in the strictest degree in that they literally can recall vivid details about any random day or moment in their life, but this minority is extremely small. Most people sit somewhere in the middle of being Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man and being Guy Pierce's characer in Momento.
With regards to my experiences and creating a hopefully entertaining Quora read, I want to note a few things that you don't get from having an exceptional memory.
- Memory != Intelligence. Just because I have a strong memory doesn't mean I'm a super genius. I'm a pretty decently smart guy and being able to read you passages from science books in my head might be a cool parlor trick. But that doesn't mean that I understand everything I recall.
For me, the combination of letters and words is really just a pattern that I interpret to be text, speech, a math problem, etc. I can remember phrases in a language by recalling the feeling it makes to contort my mouth into saying that phrase or equations from some math textbook because they "feel" like a certain pattern. But my ability to recall them doesn't mean that I speak that language or understand what that equation means.
Learning is about both memory and comprehension. I've got to do a lot of grunt work in learning the semantics and architecture behind what I'm saying, and that's I feel like that process is independent of my ability to remember things. - Memory is an unjournaled, non-optimized file system. This is one of the reasons why I don't have an eidetic memory. Even though I can probably tell you a lot about what went on a certain day with pretty strong detail (particularly if there was anything significant that happened then), I still need to take time to figure out what a day or period of time was - how it correlates to my sensory information of the event.
E.g.: if you were to ask me what I did on on September 12th of this year I'd have to realize that it was a week ago, work back through my memory of the last 7 days, and then I could probably tell you what happened then.
The level of detail I can muster for an day or event really depends on how important it was to me. I can still muster a decently vivid description of what I did random days, but given that I don't have an eidetic-grade memory I wonder how much of it is pure memory and how much of it is curve-fitting that my brain is doing to "fill in the blanks."
This is one of the reasons why it's easier for me to remember things like passages from books and numbers. Usually these are associated with some kind of emotional or physical anchor that help me quickly "source" said passage or number. I can quote from the Things They Carried because I was touched by the book. I can pretty easily recall Aeneid I in Latin because I first read it in full right before I asked out a girl to prom.
In fact, whenever I start going off on my "Arma virumque cano..." that memory usually comes with a little bit of anxiousness and the feel and smell of warm, recently photocopied paper. I was reading/hiding behind my sheaf of copied Virgil right until I mustered the courage to vomit out a "willyougotopromwithme". - You are still human. This is one I learned about in college. I may have a pretty good memory, but I'll still forget details on what goes on during a night of heavy drinking and partying. Alcohol inhibits aspects of the hippocampal function of the brain that govern short term and long term memory. I'll still be asking "what went on last night" alongside everyone else if there was an aggressive consumption of Tequila involved. Also, if I'm really fatigued I find it difficult to capture a lot of the fine details of a scene in memory or to recall vividly events in general.