List of people claimed to possess an eidetic memory

A number of people claim to have eidetic memory, but no one has been tested and documented as having a memory that is truly photographic.^[1] Most people showing amazing memory abilities use mnemonic strategies, mostly the method of loci. This includes all winners of the annual World Memory Championships and most of the known scientific cases of excellent memories, like S. V. Shereshevskii. Regardless, there are a number of individuals with extraordinary memory who have been labeled eidetikers. The following list contains people who have claimed Eidetic memory.^[2]

People claimed to possess an eidetic memory

• Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, is said to possess a photographic memory.^[3]
• Hu Jintao, current President of the People's Republic of China, is said to have a photographic memory that was evident in his high school days.^[4][5] His mentor and former governor Song Ping called him "A walking map of Gansu".^[6]
• Swami Vivekananda, famous Indian philosopher and guru. It was recorded in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda that he had memorized ten volumes of encyclopedia in very few days.^[7] He explains his powers as "simply by the observance of strict Brahmacharya (continence) all learning can be mastered in a very short time -- one has an unfailing memory of what one hears or knows but once".
• Sukarno, the father of Indonesian independence and the first president of The Republic of Indonesia, is said to have had a photographic memory, which helped him in his language learning.^[8]
• Napoleon Bird, a 19th century English barber. According to The Oxford Companion to Music (6th edition, 1945), he showed a massive feat of memory by "...publicly playing for forty-four hours without repeating a composition; from 11 pm to 3 am he played dance music for hundreds of couples, and, during the subsequent forty hours, whenever any vocalist or instrumentalist appeared and asked to be accompanied, the mere statement of the piece and the key required were sufficient."
• Hans von Bülow, a 19th century pianist and conductor with what could be described as a perfect musical memory. He could play both Brahms' and Beethoven's entire piano works from memory, and conducted the first performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde without the score, having never heard it before but studying the score pre-emptively, which was enough for him to memorise a work — he did not need to hear it.
• Stephen Wiltshire, MBE, is a prodigious savant,^[9] capable of drawing the entire skyline of a city after a helicopter ride.^[10]
• Kim Peek, prodigious savant and inspiration for the character Raymond Babbit, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the film Rain Man.^[11]
• Tom Morton, a taxi driver, knew over 16,000 telephone numbers in Lancashire and beat the British Olympia Telephone Exchange computer with his recall while being interviewed by Esther Rantzen and Adrian Mills on the popular BBC magazine programme That's Life! in 1993.^[12]
• Nikola Tesla^[13], the famous Serbian inventor, wrote in his autobiography "My inventions" that at some point of his life he had known entire books by heart, Goethe's "Faust" being one of them.^[14]
• Jimmy Rollins of the Philadelphia Phillies has been described as having a photographic memory of games, at-bats and pitch sequences.^[15]
• Said Nursî, a Turkish Islamic scholar who was able to recite many books from memory. For instance "... So then he [Molla Fethullah] decided to test his memory and handed him a copy of the work by Al-Hariri of Basra (1054-1122) — also famous for his intelligence and power of memory — called Maqamat al-Hariri. Said read one page once, memorized it, then repeated it by heart. Molla Fethullah expressed his amazement." ^[16]
• Abbie Hoffman, leader of the Yippie movement, claimed to have eidetic memory in his 1968 book Revolution for the Hell of It.
• Courtney Love, rock musician, supposedly has an eidetic memory according to her father.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart appeared to have a perfect musical memory (whether this is related to eidetic memory remains to be argued). As a young adolescent, he wrote down Allegri's Miserere entirely from memory after hearing it only once, making only minor corrections later.
• John von Neumann, Hungarian mathematician, was able to memorize a column of the phone book at a single glance^[17] and could recite books verbatim years after reading them.^[18]
• Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise, claims to have a photographic memory.^[19]
• Theodore Roosevelt, the former president of the United States, is said to have had a sharp, photographic memory and excelled in science.
• Jerry Lucas former American professional basketball star has written and lectured extensively about photographic memory. Teammates have claimed he would memorize the New York City phone book for entertainment. An achievement that is more likely to be associated to the method of loci than to an Eidetic memory.
• Ferdinand Marcos, the former Philippine president. He claimed to have memorized complicated texts in one glance. He could recite the Philippine 1935 constitution forward and backward. He also passed the bar examination in 1939 with an almost perfect score at 98.01%. Several people contested his score and a retake was taken albeit an oral bar examination witnessed by several people. His second bar examination resulted in a perfect score.^[20]
• Andriy Slyusarchuk, a Ukrainian professor from L'viv, claims having memorized 5,100 numbers in two minutes on February 28, 2006.^[21][22] This has been verified and accepted as a world record by the official Ukrainian Book of Records, members of the commission included many famous Ukrainian scientists and heads of departments in National Universities. So far this record has not been registered by the Guinness Book of records. By June, 2009 he had claimed to have memorized the first 30 million places of pi, which were printed in 20 volumes of text.^[23][24][25] Although he did not recite the entire 30 million digits (as that would take several months), he was able to recite any randomly selected sequences from the printed text of the 30 million digits.
• Ray Bradbury, famed Science Fiction author and screenwriter. Claims to be able to remember his own birth and every event since.
• Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician. Is said to have memorized the entire twelve books of the Aeneid.
• Henri Poincaré, French mathematician and physicist.
• Derren Brown, English magician and mentalist.

See also

• Exceptional memory - about the scientific background of research on exceptional memory
• Eidetic memory

References