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I’ve noticed a strong tendency toward eidetic memory in people that started in their professions without going to college. Very common in enlisted military, for

by jl2718 8y ago

I’ve noticed a strong tendency toward eidetic memory in people that started in their professions without going to college. Very common in enlisted military, for instance. I think it might actually be quite natural. Education, I think, overloads a person with all of this useless stuff to make them ‘well-rounded’ and they lose their ability to focus on the details.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Learning makes people stupid is a very strange thesis with zero support. It seems more likely that you have no idea what the instance of eidetic memory in either population, that memory doesn't work like that at all, and that small handful of anecdotes is leading to a spurious connection.
- pitt1980 8y ago
  this seems overly hostile to what appears to be a hypothesis the idea that what we're trained to notice changes what we perceive, doesn't strike me as strange thesis at all I'm reminded of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Our brains are trained to find patterns. Prove it is a perfectly valid response to what appears to be a spurious one.
throwawaymath 8y ago
The other commenter's reply is a tad aggressively stated but I agree with it. I think your conclusion is probably skewed by survivorship bias. When I began my career I didn't have any college experience and I have a fairly exceptional working and long term memory (as measured by an IQ test and other peoples' remarks on my work). As an example, I can typically recite most lines of dialogue from a TV show verbatim in order after watching the episode once. That does come in handy for professional work. However, I happen to know many people without any college education, and most do not have a particularly good memory; they don't have a particularly bad memory either, just sort of middling. So trading one set of anecdotes for another: I don't see support for your hypothesis. I think it's plausible that professionally successful people without college education tend to have a better memory, perhaps because they need to in order to compensate for lack of formal education. But even that is unsubstantiated. We probably can't draw any meaningful inferences from the n = 1 example of one of the most successful basketball players of all time. Many of Lebron James' qualities - both mental and physical - are likely several sigma from the mean.
- pitt1980 8y ago
  supposedly Eidetic memory is somewhat common in childhood "Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults.[5][6] Hudmon stated, "Children possess far more capacity for eidetic imagery than adults, suggesting that a developmental change (such as acquiring language skills) may disrupt the potential for eidetic imagery."[6] Eidetic memory has been found in 2 to 10 percent of children aged 6 to 12. It has been hypothesized that language acquisition and verbal skills allow older children to think more abstractly and thus rely less on visual memory systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory one way to think about what education is, is that its a process for taking your perceptual inputs, and putting them on an abstract lattices this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things ------- (there a sort of similar thing going on when you're looking at something to draw it, you have to sort of un-abstract it, instead of putting the lightwaves hitting your eye onto the lattice 'apple', you have to get it back to lightwaves in certain pattern)
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    > one way to think about what education is, is process for taking your perceptual inputs, and putting them on an abstract lattice this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things The problem with this is you're inducing a hypothesis via intuition and analogy. I don't see any reason to think education has the deleterious effect you're proposing. I guess it could, but I don't think there's any compelling evidence for it. It doesn't strike me as the simplest explanation. From my perspective, I don't think there is any inverse correlation between memory capability and educational achievement. I could just as reasonably say eidetic memory decreases as language skills develop because we no longer have as much need for episodic recollection versus semantic recollection. But neither of these proposals is grounded in anything empirical, it's intuitive speculation based on limited anecdata. The simpler explanation, by Occam's Razor, is that educational achievement trains memory faculties.
    - 8y ago

by jl2718 8y ago

michaelmrose 8y ago

Learning makes people stupid is a very strange thesis with zero support. It seems more likely that you have no idea what the instance of eidetic memory in either population, that memory doesn't work like that at all, and that small handful of anecdotes is leading to a spurious connection.

pitt1980 8y ago
this seems overly hostile to what appears to be a hypothesis the idea that what we're trained to notice changes what we perceive, doesn't strike me as strange thesis at all I'm reminded of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Our brains are trained to find patterns. Prove it is a perfectly valid response to what appears to be a spurious one.

throwawaymath 8y ago

The other commenter's reply is a tad aggressively stated but I agree with it. I think your conclusion is probably skewed by survivorship bias. When I began my career I didn't have any college experience and I have a fairly exceptional working and long term memory (as measured by an IQ test and other peoples' remarks on my work). As an example, I can typically recite most lines of dialogue from a TV show verbatim in order after watching the episode once. That does come in handy for professional work. However, I happen to know many people without any college education, and most do not have a particularly good memory; they don't have a particularly bad memory either, just sort of middling. So trading one set of anecdotes for another: I don't see support for your hypothesis. I think it's plausible that professionally successful people without college education tend to have a better memory, perhaps because they need to in order to compensate for lack of formal education. But even that is unsubstantiated. We probably can't draw any meaningful inferences from the n = 1 example of one of the most successful basketball players of all time. Many of Lebron James' qualities - both mental and physical - are likely several sigma from the mean.

pitt1980 8y ago
supposedly Eidetic memory is somewhat common in childhood "Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults.[5][6] Hudmon stated, "Children possess far more capacity for eidetic imagery than adults, suggesting that a developmental change (such as acquiring language skills) may disrupt the potential for eidetic imagery."[6] Eidetic memory has been found in 2 to 10 percent of children aged 6 to 12. It has been hypothesized that language acquisition and verbal skills allow older children to think more abstractly and thus rely less on visual memory systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory one way to think about what education is, is that its a process for taking your perceptual inputs, and putting them on an abstract lattices this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things ------- (there a sort of similar thing going on when you're looking at something to draw it, you have to sort of un-abstract it, instead of putting the lightwaves hitting your eye onto the lattice 'apple', you have to get it back to lightwaves in certain pattern)
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  > one way to think about what education is, is process for taking your perceptual inputs, and putting them on an abstract lattice this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things The problem with this is you're inducing a hypothesis via intuition and analogy. I don't see any reason to think education has the deleterious effect you're proposing. I guess it could, but I don't think there's any compelling evidence for it. It doesn't strike me as the simplest explanation. From my perspective, I don't think there is any inverse correlation between memory capability and educational achievement. I could just as reasonably say eidetic memory decreases as language skills develop because we no longer have as much need for episodic recollection versus semantic recollection. But neither of these proposals is grounded in anything empirical, it's intuitive speculation based on limited anecdata. The simpler explanation, by Occam's Razor, is that educational achievement trains memory faculties.
  - 8y ago