Cashier arrested using 'photographic memory' to steal credit card information of 1,300 customers

CNN ^ | 10 Sept 2019 | Jessie Yeung

[fireman15]

My memory is photographic. If I want to remember something I photograph it.

The funny thing to me about your joke is how similar that is to how my wife's memory actually works. As a child she found she could concentrate on a page for a moment of two and then read it back from the image recorded in her mind even days later. Her mother was a teacher with the same “gift” and understood what her daughter was doing. She was concerned that my wife was not actually learning when she did this. And indeed she is very capable of parroting back information that she has little understanding of.

She can still do this, though since she has not practiced this much in recent years she is not as good at it as she was decades ago when I met her. The thing that can often be annoying these days is that she will have an image in her mind of for an example, a room in our house and when we get home she becomes convinced that someone has been moving things around even when the real problem is that the detailed image she is remembering is really from the day before. This makes her feel paranoid. There has been a higher incidence of mental illness in her family and I think that this is likely part of the reason.

I am not sure how common this is, but she has been going to a Vietnamese nail salon for many years. One day the girls were chattering away teasing one of them who was about to be married. They said that if she didn't stop eating so much candy that she would not fit into her wedding dress. My wife blurted out that they were being mean and that the gal didn't appear to have gained any weight. This caused a stir because they had all been speaking in Vietnamese. The one said in Vietnamese, "See I told you! After a while they understand." My wife responded, "Yes, we do."

She has other unusual traits as well... her skeleton stopped developing at an early age leaving her with long arms and legs for her height but narrow hips. Because this is a rare genetic disorder probably caused by inbreeding that was passed down from her relatives in the Romanov family she has been the subject of several physiologic studies including one that was a doctoral thesis.