this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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First off, anyone who doesn't say 2 is wasting this gift. Perfect memory and recall makes most of these other things easy.
Secondly, I'd choose Telekinesis just to fuck with people and win bar bets. Perfect memory would make it easy to make money, which would make perfect health much more attainable.
Nah, 2 is a curse. Everybody else doesn't remember. But they think they do. You have to either repeat everything (since you do remenber the 1st/2nd/...) or you have to argue someone that's wrongly remembering.
2 is a medical condition, there is people that remembers everything they did in their life.
You can ask them what they did in September 25th 2006 and they will tell you exactly what they ate for breakfast, what was the weather like, what they did, what day of the week it was ...
From what I remember it was more a curse then a blessing. One because it's really hard for them to categorize information and then they ever vividly everything including the bad stuff.
I'll add an anecdote from a guy I know.
For one thing, he said the way his worked was that he'd take a mental picture and be able to recall that thing perfectly. So, you could flash (a couple of seconds) him a random page from War and Peace, and he could read it out to you.
However: he didn't automatically know everything on the page. If he wanted to know what out said, he'd still have to take the time to read the page (in his memory).
And there was a downside: if he learned something incorrectly, he couldn't unlearn it. It made things really difficult for him when his friends started getting married and changing their last names... or when people changed their phone numbers, or email addresses. In the latter cases, people he'd known for years who'd had 7 or 8 phone numbers, when he wanted to call them he'd have to mentally work through each number until he got to the last one before he could dial.
He never gave me a strong opinion about whether he was glad to have perfect recall, but he seemed to complain about it more than being grateful for it.
I wouldn't say that I have "perfect recall" or even an "identical memory", but I have an uncannily sharp memory.
I forget a lot, like most people, but what I remember is burnt into my mind. A lot of it are things I don't want to remember. But, oh boy, can I tell you facts about giraffes!
It’s not “identical” memory, it’s eidetic memory.
Clearly I don't have it, but thanks for the edification