Why don't people with photographic memory rule the world?

I'd wager I'm in the 99.9th percentile of time spent sitting around being jealous of people with photographic memories. It's not just lighthearted envy either.. it's a mixture of respectful awe and quiet resentment, imagining what I could accomplish if I could actually remember all the things I learn.

I’ve always been unusually curious. When I was six my mum was so overwhelmed with the number of tricky questions I asked that she wrote to popular Australian science communicator Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki¹ begging him to spend a day with me so I could finally get answers to all the questions I had. To everyone’s surprise he said yes, and I found myself at ABC Radio’s studios with a dream opportunity to ask ‘that science man from the radio’ questions until I finally understood everything I needed to know about how the world works.

Dr. Karl is like the Aussie Bill Nye but with jazzier shirts

Today, the only thing I can still remember that I learned that day, is that China is developing a weapon that orbits the earth and can release an electromagnetic pulse to ‘wipe out modern technology and send us back to the stone age’.

This story encapsulates a lifelong frustration of mine: I am constantly learning, but I’m forgetting the vast majority of what I take in. Just a year or two after university, I had forgotten well over 99% of my engineering degree. I know I’m not alone in this, but it doesn’t change how demoralizing it is. And the platitude that formal education isn’t about teaching you information, but about teaching you “how to think” isn’t much comfort. I don’t just want to know “how to think” — I want to understand how the world works. I want to build an increasingly detailed and accurate mental model of reality, partly because I'm just curious, but also because just imagine the sheer power of perfect recall!

This frustration led me to create a personal wiki where I tried to document my latest views in areas like metaethics and the mind-body problem, in a desperate attempt to actually make progress instead of starting from scratch every time I revisited them. This Substack was actually supposed to be a way for me to do this knowledge processing and storing in public, before I got distracted and started writing about shrimp and beans instead… oops..

From where I stand, as a mere mortal, struggling to retain what I learn, the ability to read something once and remember it forever seems like a real world superpower. It’d be like being a human LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude) but without the hallucinations.

So understandably I’ve long been jealous of people with photographic memory. But recently it occurred to me.. if photographic memory works the way I think it does.. the way people with photographic memory claim it does².. why don’t these people rule the world?

Think about it.. If the world were even remotely meritocratic, these people should be able to become the smartest people alive, outcompete their peers and rise to the pinnacles of business, science and politics. Well if Trump has a photographic memory, then he's acting very out of character by never boasting about it!³.

Now I can hear your objections already: “Remembering stuff isn’t enough to rule the world!”. Of course it’s not sufficient. You probably also need a few traits like raw intelligence, good epistemics⁴, charisma, ambition and work-ethic. So not every person with a photographic memory should rule the world. But just about everyone who rules the world should have a photographic memory! Having this trait should give you a big the edge over the merely smart-charismatic-ambitious-hardworking people. If you're still doubtful, consider something you likely believe: Learning helps people improve their socioeconomic outcomes and succeed. Now imagine what it would do if you never forgot a single thing you learned.

And yes, the world isn't all that meritocratic (especially when it comes to who rules us) and being born wealthy is a far greater determinant of success than being born talented. But it’s meritocratic enough that the bright are disproportionately represented among leading scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, and changemakers throughout history. Perfect memory would be such a powerful advantage that we should expect to see it reflected in who rises to the top.

Yet when we look at history's most impressive figures, at contemporary world leaders, Nobel Prize winners and Fortune 500 CEOs, we don’t hear about their photographic memories. We should all be able to name many prominent people with this gift.

So what gives?

The Emperor Has No Memory

I thought this was going to be a complicated and nuanced question to answer. But it turns out it’s disappointingly simple: True photographic memory, as it's commonly understood, doesn't exist. It's never been reliably demonstrated under scientific conditions. Not once⁵.

I found this surprising. After all, I’ve heard of real people having it before. But as far as I can tell, the consensus is that photographic memory, as depicted in pop culture, is a myth.

What's particularly telling is that none of the winners of the World Memory Championship claim to have photographic memory. They can memorize the order of multiple decks of cards or hundreds of random digits, but they don't have a gift of perfect recall. Instead, they use mnemonic techniques that they've practiced for thousands of hours. They're memory athletes, not memory savants.

The closest scientifically verified phenomenon to photographic memory is what psychologists call eidetic memory, which is the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in great detail after a brief exposure. But it differs from the popular conception of photographic memory in a some important ways that make it far less impressive:

1. It's temporary: The memory fades after a short period (usually less than a minute), not stored permanently.

2. It's imperfect: Studies show that people with eidetic memory make errors when recalling the details.

3. It's mostly found in children: Between 2-10% of children aged six to twelve show some eidetic abilities, but it’s almost always lost by adolescence.

4. It applies to stimuli, not information: They may be able to remember exactly what they saw/heard/felt when reading a textbook, but that doesn’t mean they remember the information in it. It’s kind of like they have a JPG of the page, but not a PDF.

What about those people who can instantly tell you what day of the week any past date fell on? This is cool, but it’s not photographic memory. These people are calculating, not remembering. They’re applying (often unconsciously) patterns and formulas, not consulting a photographically stored image of a calendar.

So if true photographic memory doesn't exist, what explains all the people — from Nicola Tesla to Teddy Roosevelt to Mr. T — who claim to have it?

The answer is pretty simple: They're full of shit. At best, they’re exaggerating their above-average natural memory.

On reflection, this should have been obvious. Someone claiming to have a photographic memory but not being wildly successful at whatever their goals are is like people who claim to have found the foolproof way to earn $20k a month while working from home, being your own boss and working 2 hours a week, but for some reason are spending their time selling other people a course on how to do the same.

If you could perfectly recall everything you read, wouldn't you have devoured entire libraries by now? Wouldn't you have mastered multiple languages, scientific disciplines, and professional skills? Wouldn't you be.. I don't know.. doing something more impressive than telling people at parties about your amazing memory while working a middling job?

So where does this leave us?

Learning that photographic memory doesn't really exist brought me both disappointment and relief. Disappointment because I've spent years fantasising about a ‘real life superpower’ that no one actually has. Relief because at least I'm not falling short of a standard that some other people can achieve.

The good news is that we’re not broken or deficient because we can't remember everything we’ve learned. Nobody can. Not Nicola Tesla, not Roosevelt, and definitely not Mr. T.

The bad news is that the best any of us can hope for is to grind our way towards slightly better recall through hard work using boring techniques like spaced repetition. I guess it’s time to finally create some flash cards..

Reflecting on my meeting with Dr. Karl, I now realize it impacted me far more deeply than teaching me one piece of trivia about the Chinese military. For you see, Dr. Karl is famous for (among other things) his research on belly button lint. And over 20 years after meeting him, unconsciously inspired by his work no doubt, I started collecting my own belly button lint.. like the well-adjusted citizen that I am.

I have been at it for 5 years now.. in fact, it’s the poster-child displayed on the Wikipedia entry for navel lint. I may not have walked away with all the answers that day, but years later I salvaged something far more valuable:

My collection circa 2023

1. Today I learned Dr. Karl’s full name is Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki, which is excellent. I wish my middle name was Konkovitch, instead of being stuck with Glen (sorry Glenn)

2. This reddit thread shows people boasting about having photographic memory like how I (and I think most people) understand it to work.

3. Well.. I guess he’s boasted about it a little bit. Okay.. maybe a lot.

4. i.e. You need to be good at deciding what information to trust and aggregating evidence to decide what’s true

5. When digging into this, I came across the alleged cases of Solomon Shereshevsky and "Elizabeth" (who doesn’t get a last name for some reason):

Solomon was studied extensively by neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in the 1920s. He could allegedly recall long lists of numbers, words, and nonsense syllables years after being exposed to them once. His extraordinary memory didn't come from a photographic ability but rather from an unusual form of synesthesia – information triggered multiple sensory experiences for him. Numbers weren't just visual symbols; they had colors, textures, and tastes. Does this count? I’m not sure. Meanwhile, despite his remarkable memory abilities, Shereshevsky struggled in many aspects of life. He had difficulty understanding abstract concepts and metaphors. His memory was almost too detailed, preventing him from seeing the forest for the trees. Far from ruling the world, he worked as a reporter and later as a professional mnemonist performing memory feats.

Elizabeth was a Harvard student who, in 1970, became the subject of research when she claimed to be able to recall poetry written in a foreign language that she didn't understand years after seeing it, and being able to recall random dot patterns with perfect precision. Elizabeth remains the only person documented to have passed such a test. However, there are serious questions about this research. The methods used in the testing procedures have been criticized, particularly given the extraordinary nature of the claims. Adding to the skepticism is the fact that Stromeyer married his subject, and Elizabeth has consistently refused to repeat the tests. No one has ever replicated these results.