Does anyone really have a photographic memory?

Almost certainly not in the way the legend says. Eidetic memory, also known as photographic memory or total recall, is the alleged ability to recall an image with high precision after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device. When the two terms are distinguished, eidetic memory is reported in a small number of children and is generally not found in adults, while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.

Where eidetic memory does appear, it is more modest than the name suggests. It has been found in two to ten percent of children aged six to twelve, and the vividness and stability of the image begin to fade within minutes after the picture is taken away. Eidetikers' memories are clearly remarkable but rarely perfect: they often contain minor errors, including information that was not in the original stimulus.

The best-known adult cases tend to dissolve under inspection. Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of Alexander Luria's case study The Mind of a Mnemonist, is the best-known example. Yet he was a trained mnemonist, not an eidetic memoriser. He used the method of loci, imagining Gorky Street in Moscow as a memory palace, and his own diary says he did not, in fact, have perfect recall. His nephew recalled that he could be forgetful and trained hours a day for his evening performances.

Chess shows the same thing. In Adriaan de Groot's experiments, expert players recalled positions far better than nonexperts, which looked like a camera in the head. But shown arrangements of pieces that could never occur in a game, the experts recalled no better than nonexperts. They had developed an ability to organize information, not an innate eidetic ability.