Eidetic vs Specialized Memory in the classroom


My inner speech and my outer speech were at odds with each other. It made 100% sense in my head and after typing it I have totally confused myself. <insert laughing emoji>

Primitive man’s memory was “eidetic” but is inferior to civilized man’s memory brings to the forefront how society continues to evolve with time and knowledge yet many aspects of our classroom and teaching and learning remains the same. To discuss this premise let us think about the following quote:

“It is sufficient for North American Indians to be in a place just once in order to have a perfectly accurate and permanently indelible picture of it. No matter how vast or dense the forest, they move through it with ease once they have become oriented”.

So if primitive man’s knowledge was described as eidetic this brings my thought pattern to the importance of specialized fields in schools as shouldn’t we require our students to lead the simple detailed life of the primitive man yet we still require children to learn all skills (many totally irrelevant to them) as well as removing liberal arts or music and dance from the school curriculum when what if that is what they want to learn or specialize in, but I digress.

A comparison can be made between a child in middle school who is learning all subject areas so that he can be proficient and the primitive man. The middle school child learns everything (though not fully accurate) while primitive man only needs to learn his small part of the forest and he is then labelled as having eidetic memory. If we place the primitive man in Manhattan, then do you think he would still remember the environment exactly as it is seen and does the child not seem to have eidetic memory because of information overload?

I always thought that Eidetic memory is comparable to brilliance and this quotation says
“At the same time, in order to convey a correct impression of the operation of this memory, we should also note that in a great many respects the memory of primitive man is markedly inferior to that of civilized man as schoolchild who has taken just a single geography course will thereby have absorbed more knowledge than primitive man could absorb in a whole lifetime”.

So though classified as Eidetic the primitive man’s memory is inferior to the civilized man’s memory (rarely eidetic) so how can we encourage and implement specialized memory which we encourage further up throughout academia to seem/appear eidetic?

Check out this example - Have you ever just thought about the shades of colours? Well I have. I am always fascinated with persons whose interest or jobs study colours (paint experts, designers etc) and how they are able to differentiate between shades of colours while to us simply saying light yellow and dark yellow is sufficient.


Though this is not classified as eidetic memory but specialized memory, how can we use the concepts of eidetic (as per the primitive man) and specialized memory in the classroom to improve teaching and learning?

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