Others are able to effortlessly recall vast amounts of autobiographical information spanning most of the lifetime. Some people with excellent memory use elaborate techniques to help them remember. Additionally, the extent to which we replay the material in our minds and relate it to what we already know affects our ability to remember. How well we remember things depends largely on how well we pay attention when material is presented. You can take the test online via the University of Iowa. It involves looking at 2 images that are similar, and trying to superimpose them over one another. Of course, people vary in their ability to remember the past. To test whether or not you have an eidetic (photographic) memory, you can take a pretty basic test. This is advantageous because what is important for memory is the meaning of what was presented, not the exact details present at any given time. We are good at remembering the gist of what happened and less good at remembering (photographically) all the elements of a past scene. Passing over details helps us to form general concepts. To recollect a past event, we piece together various remembered elements and typically forget parts of what happened (the color of the wall, the picture in the background, the exact words that were said). Memory is more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle than a photograph. If memory worked like a photograph, these people would be able to rapidly reproduce the text in reverse order by 'reading' the photo. It is easy to demonstrate this by asking people who think they have photographic memory to read two or three lines of text and then report the text in reverse order.

However, photographic memory does not exist in this sense.

Just as a photograph freezes a moment in time, the implication for people thought to have photographic memory is that they can take mental snapshots and then recall these snapshots without error. Photographic memory is a term often used to describe a person who seems able to recall visual information in great detail.

Test if you have photographic memory