Paul GrahamVerified account

I have close to eidetic memory for every HN thread I've ever participated in. (I think Thomas shares this affliction with me.)

Good heavens.

When I was in middle school my party trick was "Here's the Hobbit. Open to any page and read a sentence. I'll read the next until you tell me to stop." It took me a while before I understood that that didn't accomplish my goals in having a party trick.

Astonishing. I always feel that if I had this ability, I could just read the right books and I'd know everything. But apparently it doesn't work that way. Why doesn't it? Do you remember the words rather than the ideas?

It has decayed a bit over time, which I feel sad about re: books but happy about re: other intrusive thoughts. The experience of remembering a book for me was spatial; I could see the sentence on the bottom right of a page and knew when it flipped.

I didn’t have any special comprehension abilities other than the ones you’d expect from an extremely bookish middle schooler, and the nature of the random access wouldn’t let me e.g. query by themes or motifs, sequencing events, etc.

So the problem is that you get page images rather than ideas, and that in turn means you have sequential rather than random access?

Suffice it to say I had no advantage on a question like “What was Mary feeling when X told her Y?” and an absolutely overwhelming advantage on “Justify your answer with evidence from the text.”