And when a young Helen Keller cribbed from Margaret Canby’s “The Frost Fairies” in her story “The Frost King,” Canby herself said, “Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism it is a wonderful feat of memory.” Keller claimed she was forever after terrified. George Harrison said he never intended to rip off the melody of the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” when he wrote “My Sweet Lord.” He had just forgotten he’d ever heard it. Viswanathan is hardly the first plagiarist to claim unconscious influence from memory’s depths.
Rather, he seemed to have implicitly mastered a set of mnemonic techniques that allowed him to memorize certain kinds of information.
#Get eidetic imagery professional#
Not even S, the Russian journalist and professional mnemonist who was studied for three decades by psychologist A.R. Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth. But even he doesn’t have a truly photographic memory. Another savant, Stephen Wiltshire, has been called the “human camera” for his ability to create sketches of a scene after looking at it for just a few seconds. Kim Peek *, the 53-year-old savant who was the basis for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, is said to have memorized every page of the 9,000-plus books he has read at 8 to 12 seconds per page (each eye reads its own page independently), though that claim has never been rigorously tested. They just can’t take mental snapshots and recall them with perfect fidelity. That’s not to say there aren’t people with extraordinarily good memories-there are. Still, his one-woman study, he says, “is not strong evidence for other people having photographic memory.”
“We don’t have any doubt about our data,” he told me recently. There are so many unlikely circumstances surrounding the Elizabeth case-the marriage between subject and scientist, the lack of further testing, the inability to find anyone else with her abilities-that some psychologists have concluded that there’s something fishy about Stromeyer’s findings.
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