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You can listen and download the New Ghost Stories Podcast from a number of platforms. And if you enjoy this supernatural podcast, please take a moment to leave a review. It really helps the show. Photographic memory is exceptionally rare. In fact, some scientists dispute whether it is actually real at all. Photographic memory actually muddles together a number of different types of unusual memory, the type most associated with photographic memory is eidetic memory, but another is Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory – HSAM. People with eidetic memory are able to remember remarkable visual details about an image they have seen, even if only very briefly. Despite what is commonly believed, eidetic images don’t actually last long, sometimes only for a few minutes. And recall of their details are also far from perfect. Like normal memory, eidetic memories can become distorted as the mind fills in any gaps. Eidetic memory is also almost never found in adults, and nearly exclusively in children. HSAM is more common and involves the incredible recall of details rather than images specifically – the ability to remember what you were doing on a certain date and at a certain time, many years later. People with HSAM don’t typically have anything unsual about their brains. One theory is to how they come to have such astounding recall, is that people with HSAM have a form of OCD. They may be repeatedly replaying their memories, over and over, training their minds to recall details from years past. There is a World Memory Championships, which involves challenges such as memorising the order of an entire deck of cards, and long lists of binary digits. Not a single winner of the contest has ever claimed to have photographic memory. Instead, memory champions usually train their minds using a variety of techniques. The most popular is the method of loci, which dates all the way back to ancient Rome and Greece. It involves memorising the layout of, say, a building, a street, route, etc. Then visualising the items you need to remember as being part of that journey, which you recall as you imagine yourself taking that journey. Alas, I was not able to get any information about the techniques or innate skills of the ‘Man Memoriser’. I tried to contact him during the research for this story, but he declined to respond to any of my attempts to contact him. Perhaps it was simply never meant to be… If you’d like to support this UK horror podcast, please consider becoming a patron at Patreon.com/newghoststories This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newghoststories.substack.com