Kaavya Syndrome.

[survivor999]

The accused Harvard plagiarist doesn't have a photographic memory. No one does.
By Joshua Foer
Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006, at 6:47 PM ET

Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. In this morning's New York Times, the author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life explained how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another young-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan said she has a photographic memory. "I never take notes."

This seems like as good an opportunity as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but nobody actually does. Nobody.

Well, maybe one person.

In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard student named Elizabeth, who could perform an astonishing feat. Stromeyer showed Elizabeth's right eye a pattern of 10,000 random dots, and a day later, he showed her left eye another dot pattern. She mentally fused the two images to form a random-dot stereogram and then saw a three-dimensional image floating above the surface. Elizabeth seemed to offer the first conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. But then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was never tested again.

In 1979, a researcher named John Merritt, skeptical of Stromeyer's claims, published the results of a photographic memory test he had placed in magazines and newspapers around the country. Merritt hoped someone might come forward with abilities similar to Elizabeth's, and he figures that roughly 1 million people tried their hand at the test. Of that number, 30 wrote in with the right answer, and 15 came into the lab to be studied. However, with scientists looking over their shoulders, not one of them could pull off Elizabeth's trick.

Full story at: http://www.slate.com/id/2140685/

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

1. Kaavya Viswanathan: 14 minutes, 58 seconds and counting.

:patriot:

[displacedtexan]

2. Here's how I aced just about every subject in school...

During tests, I could look at the blackboard and "see" the answers
in their original context: spelling lists; fill in the blank history lessons;
math problems (Show your work!); etc.

For a long time, I thought I was cheating by being able to do this.

But anyone with a "memory" like this author's would know where she
had seen the passages that somehow ended up in her novel.

[elehhhhna]

3. Same here. I have (had?) pretty amazing recall and ALWAYS remember

approx. when and where I read whatever.

[tatertop]

4. Can you recall pages from books word for word and things like that?