Haber’s experiment for testing eidetic memory was as follows: He would place the child in front of an easel where he then placed various pictures. But before you conclude that one of your classmates in kindergarten saw the world very differently from yourself, let’s take a closer look at precisely what it was that these 8 % of children could do. That is about one kid in every small school class. In Haber’s study, about 8 % of the tested children seemed to have been given this gift.
They were not very common, but also not particularly rare. Soon thereafter, Haber researched this himself and managed to quickly find dozens of children who seemed to have this so-called “eidetic” ability. This image, which will move when you move your eyes, is the result of certain photoreceptors in your retina getting tired from focusing on the same color for too long and getting less sensitive for a brief period! You should experience seeing a color-inverted version of the picture wherever you are looking. He found some articles on people, especially children, who seemed to have a peculiar ability of still seeing an image in front of them after that image was removed.įigure 1 Stare intensively in the center of this image for 30-60 seconds and then move your gaze to a white surface such as a paper. In his “ghost story”, Haber describes how his interest in eidetic imagery was piqued when he did experiments on so-called afterimages (a phenomenon entirely unrelated for eidetic memory, see the image below). This text was also commented upon by many of that time’s most proficient researchers on human psychology.
The most cited scientist in the field, Ralph Norman Haber, in 1979 summarized all the studies made up until that point on this elusive subject in a fascinating research paper titled “Twenty years of haunting eidetic imagery: where’s the ghost?”. And they are probably not what most people imagine them to be. While the scientists are debating some details of it – such as exactly how it works and what should be included in the definition – the main criteria are agreed upon since several decades back. The ghost and the science of eidetic imagery
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