Photographic Memory Test

A photographic memory would let you take a mental snapshot of something and read the details back later, as if you were looking at a photograph. This free test gives you feedback on whether your memory works like a camera. It starts easy and gets harder as the levels progress, until you finish with the classic test of photographic memory.

The test is for fun and learning. It is not a clinical assessment of your memory.

How Do I Know If I Have a Photographic Memory?

Almost certainly you do not. Nobody tested under controlled conditions has shown one. A photographic memory would let you look at a picture in your head and read off details you never tried to learn. The simplest check is whether you can do that. Look at a grid of random digits for a few seconds, then look away and read it back up a column or along a diagonal. If you were reading a picture, any direction would be as easy as the usual one.

Most people who wonder whether they have a photographic memory have a good visual memory, which is common and can be trained. These are the usual reasons people think they have one, and what they usually are:

• You remember where on a page something was. Most readers keep a rough sense of where things sit on a page. It helps you find a fact again, but you cannot read the words from it.
• You can picture a room or a scene clearly. That is vivid mental imagery. Ask yourself something you did not expect to be asked, such as how many books stood on the second shelf, and the picture usually has no answer.
• You learn quickly for exams. That is a good memory working through understanding and review, and it fades in the usual way when you stop.
• You remember the days of your life in detail. A few people have highly superior autobiographical memory, which is real and well studied. It covers their own lives, not pages or pictures, and on ordinary memory tests they mostly do no better than anyone else.

This test runs those checks for you, from easy to impossible. Its digit grids ask for a row, a column or a diagonal in an order you cannot plan for, its word pages ask which word sat in a marked spot, and its last level is the random-dot test described below. Take the test and see how far your snapshot goes.

How the Test Works

Each level shows you something to look at while a timer counts down, and you can stop early when you are ready. Then it asks about what you saw, with no time limit. You clear a level when every answer is right, apart from levels 24 and 25, which need most of them. A miss shows you what was there and gives you the same level again with new content. 2 misses end the run, and the result says which level you reached.

The levels take turns between 6 kinds of challenge, so no single skill ends a run:

• Words. From a row of 3 words up to 8 lines of 4, a page of 32. Then a spot is marked and you pick, from four words, the one that sat there. The others were on the page too, so only remembering where a word was helps. A row of 3 adds one word that was not shown.
• Digits. 4 to 9 digits in one line, typed back in order.
• Scenes. A colourful shelf of 3 objects at first, up to a room of 10 objects with a clock and a numbered door. Then you answer questions about what was there and where it stood. No question is about colour, so the scenes work for colour-blind players too.
• Lit cells. A grid flashes 3 to 12 of its cells, and you tap the same cells.
• Digit grids. A square of digits, up to 5 × 5. Then you read a row, a column or a diagonal back from memory, not always in the usual direction.
• Dot patterns. The last level. You look at a 24 × 24 pattern of random dots for 10 seconds. Then it disappears and a second pattern appears. Each one alone looks like noise, but laid over each other they show a shape. Pick it from 6 shapes. The level does this 2 times with new patterns, and every answer has to be right, so a lucky guess clears it only 1 time in 36.

What Your Level Means

The ladder climbs through four zones:

• Basic, levels 1 to 8: a few items, held for a few seconds. Nearly everyone clears these, so a miss here is usually a slip.
• Great, levels 9 to 16: more than most people can hold at a glance without practice.
• Trained, levels 17 to 25: where people who train with memory techniques pull ahead.
• Eidetic, level 26: the random-dot test. Only a real photograph in your head would make it easy.

Levels 24, 25 and 26 are the three rounds of the classic test, and a real photograph in your head would clear every one of them, because you could look at it again and read off every answer.

Eidetic Memory Test

People use eidetic memory and photographic memory as if they meant the same thing, but researchers keep them apart. Eidetic imagery is a vivid picture that seems to stay in front of the eyes after the thing itself is gone. It lasts from a few seconds to a few minutes, fades on its own, often part by part, and cannot be called back once it has gone. Photographic memory is the popular idea of a lasting, exact copy that you can bring back whenever you like and examine. Our article on eidetic and photographic memory goes through the research in full.

The Random-Dot Test

The classic eidetic memory test uses a random-dot stereogram, which Béla Julesz invented at Bell Labs in 1959. It is two patterns of random dots. Each one alone looks like noise, but one area of the second is shifted slightly, and when each eye sees one pattern at the same time, that area floats out in depth as a shape. To test for eidetic memory, the patterns are shown one at a time, with a gap between them. The shape appears only to someone who kept an exact image of the first pattern and laid it over the second, because there is nothing to remember about the first except its thousands of dots.

In 1970, the Harvard vision scientist Charles Stromeyer reported in Nature that a woman he called Elizabeth could do this, with the patterns shown to different eyes up to a day apart. It looked like the first proof of a photographic memory, but it was never confirmed. Other scientists questioned the method, Stromeyer later married her, and she was never tested again. In the 1970s the researcher John Merritt printed a version of the test in magazines and newspapers. Roughly a million people tried it, about 30 sent in the right answer, and none of the 15 he visited could repeat it with him watching.

What the Science Supports

Eidetic imagery in children is documented. Studies since the 1960s have found it in a small share of children, roughly 2 to 15 percent of the under-twelves tested in the United States, and it is rare in adults. Even then it is not a photograph. Children who have it often get details wrong or add ones that were not there, and once the image fades they remember no more than other children do. Researchers still argue about whether it is a separate ability at all or vivid ordinary imagery.

No adult has a confirmed photographic memory under controlled testing. The dot patterns on this test's last level, level 26, are a much simpler version of Elizabeth's task, with a 24 × 24 grid instead of thousands of dots and a few seconds between the patterns instead of a day. Take the test to see how close you get.

What to Do Instead

The people who win memory competitions don't have photographic memories either. They use memory techniques, such as the memory palace, and some of them can memorize a deck of playing cards in under 20 seconds. Almost anyone can learn the same techniques with some practice. Start with our free ebook, Learn the Art of Memory, and our guide on how to learn memory techniques. Then practice with our free memory games, and compete with other people on Memory League.

Photographic Memory Questions