Saw on 60 MIN years ago
I think Leslie Stahl did the segment.
I'm not sure that qualifies as a photographic memory. Oh wait ...
My wife sometimes comes close.
“Remember Valentine's Day, 1987 - the year before you proposed to me? You gave me a frikken’ fire extinguisher! You said ‘Hey - what's more romantic than thinking of your well-being. And it's red!’”
I have a minor version of this condition, I believe.
My memory is not that complete, but I recall more details of the past than most people would. However, it comes nowhere near recalling every detail of some past day forty or fifty years ago. So I find it hard to visualize that.
This active memory feature got turned on by a chance decision that my parents made to set me up with a weather station in high school. Before that, I couldn’t say that my recall was any greater than the average person’s. After I started, the subject interested me enough to implant a near total recall of both the weather events and the personal events related to family and school. Once I stopped reading the weather instruments and writing down the results, this faded out and there are subsequent years that are almost total blanks to me now.
So I have this condition as a sort of intermediate (ages 15 to 22) not quite total recall, with more normal recall on either side of that, although I think the activation of memory never quite turned off completely, I still probably recall more than the average person would of events of each year.
This might make my brain an interesting study for the Alzheimer research crowd, as I have a sort of higher functioning mirror image of the Alzheimer condition where recent memory goes first. I am not anywhere near that condition at age 70 here, but my rather unusual adolescent memory jog might give some clues, especially if I could correlate it with other aspects.
I would hate to be saddled with that absolute total recall though, can’t imagine how that might impair your daily functioning or perhaps it assists with it? You would likely be wandering around like a zombie trying to shake off all those memories.
A more mundane example of forced total recall might be something like the Kennedy assassination, if you’re my age, you will probably recall a lot of details of that day that you can’t duplicate for any other day back around then. That’s just before I started my weather station so it is also a starting point for the near total recall.