RE: "Too Good" (was: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!)

[MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anameier, Christine A - Eagan, MN
> > No. Having a photographic memory doesn't mean you
> > remember everything you've seen. It means you can
> > capture a ton of value in a recognizable yet small
> > visual trigger.
> 
> Hmm. OK. So if I'm understanding you right, less is more, and maybe an
> outline is better for you than a block o' prose.

A woman at my place of work has eidetic memory. She is one of 
those people who can scan a page and then read it back to you 
years later.

I was jealous that anybody could have such an amazing advantage, 
until she explained.

She could "READ" it back, years later, from memory... because she 
had a picture of the page. That is, she didn't necessarily have 
understanding. She also had all the other pages she'd read, and 
they didn't necessarily stand out from each other. 
So, on an open book exam, she and I were at par.
Actually, I was better off, because -- like most non-eidetic 
people -- I have developed the usual memory/learning strategies 
for getting the *gist* of a lesson or a chapter, and a feel for 
where stuff should be.   Her natural ability is to have the 
reading material handy again. She highlights a page, but then 
the whole page goes into memory, not just the two or three 
pertinent lines with the yellow marks.

So, on that open-book exam, I would have my "place memory" to 
help me quickly flip to that section near the end of chapter 5, 
but she'd be paging through the entire book... either on the 
desk in front of her, or in her head.

She had to build an artificial structure of tactics and workarounds 
to make up for her very different way of aprehending visual input.
As she says, there's so much in there, the problem is the cataloging.
The problem is to later pick the appropriate thing to recall.
Oh, and the other problem is attention. If she just glanced at the 
middle of the page, then her head picture is of a book-page as seen 
by somebody who is looking at the middle. The zone around the middle 
is in focus... the rest is a peripheral blur, just about like it is 
to the rest of us.

One difference is that she could move her eyes over the page in a 
reading pattern, and she'd have a readable picture later on, even 
if she hadn't paid attention to meaning while she "read" the first 
time.

Anyway, her description certainly disabused me of the notion that 
eidetic recall is an unalloyed blessing.


/kevin

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