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

Subject: RE: "Too Good" (was: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!)
From: MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:48:21 -0500




> -----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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