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A winner of the memory Olympics, for instance, still had to keep sticky notes on the refrigerator to remember what she had to do during the day.

While people can improve their recall through tricks and practice, eidetikers are born, not made, says Searleman. The ability isn't linked to other traits, such as high intelligence. Children are more likely to possess eidetic memory than adults, though they begin losing the ability after age six as they learn to process information more abstractly.

Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability, the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the day.

There’s also the problem of verifying someone’s memory in terms of accuracy. If you ask them to remember the dates of major events, then yes, you can easily determine the accuracy of that.

This may seem like needless pedantry; why would anyone lie about such a thing? Except it’s not that they lie, it’s that they could be remembering it wrongly and not realise they’re doing it.

Sadly, what research there is suggests that those people with incredible memories are just as susceptible to forming “false memories” as anyone else.

What good is being able to remember vast amounts of information if you can’t be sure any of it is accurate?

Those with incredible, innate memory prowess describe it as a mixed blessing at best. The increased demand on your thinking capacity, the constant dwelling in the past, the inability to escape painful or damaging experiences? If someone offered you all that, would you accept?

Teddy Roosevelt could recite entire newspaper pages—not just articles—as if they were sitting in front of him.

is reported to have read two or three books a day.

was said to have memorized every word of every book he had ever read, estimated at around 9000. It took him up to just 12 seconds to read one page, and each eye could read a page independently.

"Kim's story tells us that the human brain is far more flexible than we had thought,"

"Like many other savants, he has suffered disability in one area of his brain, but has compensated by acquiring remarkable new abilities in other areas. This shows we all have considerable hidden intellectual potential."

may have had a type of photographic memory that helped him memorize sheet music with astonishing speed.

Russian composer Alexander Siloti would give him complicated and demanding works to learn and Rachmaninov (also spelled Rachmaninoff) would have them completely memorized to perfection a day or two later.