![]() It’s an impressive feat of single-mindedness, not of memory. If the average person decided he was going to dedicate his entire life to memorizing 5,422 pages of text, he’d probably also be pretty good at it. ![]() In fact, the Shass Pollaks probably didn’t possess photographic memory so much as heroic perseverance. They responded by telling him exactly which words the pin passed through on every page. According to a paper published in 1917 in the journal Psychological Review, psychologist George Stratton tested the Shass Pollaks by sticking a pin through various tractates of the Talmud. A group of Talmudic scholars known as the Shass Pollaks supposedly stored mental snapshots of all 5,422 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. In every case except Elizabeth’s where someone has claimed to possess a photographic memory, there has always been another explanation. Children with eidetic memory never have anything close to perfect recall, and they typically aren’t able to visualize anything as detailed as a body of text. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for up to a few minutes before fading away. We are their evolutionary neighbours.Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre-but real-perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. “We underestimate chimpanzee intelligence,” he says. Matsuzawa emphasises that the chimps in the study are by no means special – all chimps can perform like this, he says. In the wild, this memory skill might be useful for memorising fruit locations at a glance, or making a quick map of all the branches and routes in a tree, he says. He says that chimp intelligence is chronically underestimated, and one reason is that experiments stack the deck against the chimps. The results are “absolutely incredible” says Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, US. “Rather than taking such findings as a rare example or a fluke, we should incorporate this knowledge into a mindset that acknowledges that chimpanzees – and probably other species – share aspects of what we think of as uniquely human intelligence.” “Observing that other species can outperform us on tasks that we assume we excel at is a bit humbling,” she says. The finding challenges human assumptions about our uniqueness, and should make us think harder about ourselves in relation to other animals, says anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, Ames, US. “We had to lose some function to get a new function.” ‘Humbling’ discovery “In the course of evolution we humans lost it, but acquired a new skill of symbolisation – in other words, language,” he says. He suggests that early humans lost the skill as we acquired other memory-related skills such as representation and hierarchical organisation. ![]() (See a video library of chimp cognition.) In rare cases, human children have a kind of photographic memory like that shown by the young chimps, but it disappears with age, says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, at the primate research institute at Kyoto University, Japan, who led the study. This suggests that they use a kind of eidetic or photographic memory. ![]() The youngsters easily remembered the locations, even at the shortest duration, which does not leave enough time for the eye to move and scan the screen. While the adult chimps were able to remember the location of the numbers in the correct order with the same or worse ability as the humans, the three adolescent chimps outperformed the humans. Using an ability akin to photographic memory, the young chimps were able to memorise the location of the numerals with better accuracy than humans performing the same task.ĭuring the test, the numerals appeared on the screen for 650, 430 or 210 milliseconds, and were then replaced by blank white squares. The chimps had previously been taught the ascending order of the numbers.
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