Johns Hopkins Health Alert
Were You Born With a Good Memory?
A reader from Wyandotte, PA asks: My brother, who is three years older at 66, has a steel trap memory and can remember what we had for dinner at his birthday party five years ago, while I am the type who can't remember where I put my eyeglasses and car keys. Are some people just born with a better memory than others?
Dr. Rabins answers: The short answer is yes. The long answer is that you have raised an interesting and complicated question. People vary widely in their cognitive capabilities and the range of "normal," defined as the performance of 95% of the population (in technical terms, two standard deviations above and below the population mean), is quite broad.
In terms of IQ (itself a controversial topic), the normal range is between 70 and 130. Cognitive ability consists of many different faculties besides memory -- language, abstraction, and perception to name three and memory itself consists of different types, including verbal or word memory; visuo-spatial or perceptual memory; and motor or "physical" memory.
It sounds as if your brother is good at remembering facts or names, but even this ability might be influenced by his ability to pay attention. Interestingly, people tend to be consistent in their cognitive capacities. That is, people who score at the 70th percentile on one capacity are likely to score around the same percentile on other capacities, However, if you administer tests of 15 different capacities, it is likely that an individual will score worse or better than their mean score on at least one test.
Posted in Memory on June 21, 2010
Reviewed January 2011
Medical Disclaimer: This information is not intended to substitute for the advice of a physician. Click here for additional information: Johns Hopkins Health Alerts Disclaimer
Notify Me
Would you like us to inform you when we post new Memory Health Alerts?
Comments
Health Alerts registered users may post comments and share experiences here at their own discretion. We regret that questions on individual health concerns to the Johns Hopkins editors cannot be answered in this space.
The views expressed here do not constitute medical advice, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins Medicine or Remedy Health Media, LLC, which has no responsibility for any comments posted on this site.
Post a Comment
Already a subscriber?
Login
New to Johns Hopkins Health Alerts?
I have always had an extraordinary memory, both visual and aural, and my claims have met with disbelief. I can remember scenes while lying in a bassinette, before my eyes were fully focused. I was describing one such memory to my mother and told her of the blue and pink ribbons that were threaded through the wicker. She said I was wrong, that there were blue ribbons for my brothers, but that mine were pink. This confused me because I saw both colors vividly. She called me later that night to say that I was right. That when I was born she could not bear to remove the blue ribbons and intertwined them with pink ones, that it was my younger sisters that had only pink ribbons.
Memory helped enormously during my school years, especially when it came to taking tests. For answers I could read the page in my mind's eye, or hear my teacher's voice. This ability is often confused with genius, but I learned through life (and I am now very, very old) that it is the ability to reason and put your knowledge to use that demonstrates intelligence. Memory can be nothing more than a parlor trick.
Posted by: allmymarbles | June 26, 2010 11:50 AM