AN ADULT EIDETIKER
The vast majority of the research on
eidetic imagery to date has been done on children in the pre-pubescent years
since this is the age when an affinity for eidetic abilities is most
prevalent. The most famous exception to this rule is a woman named
"Elizabeth," who was studied and written about by Charles F. Stromeyer
in 1970. She was an artist and teacher at Harvard who
could mentally project detailed and exact images onto her canvas and was
even able to move her eyes about to inspect the image while the image
stayed still. She could also reproduce poems in a foreign language years
after having seen the original printed page.
In Stromeyer's tests on her abilities,
"Elizabeth" was presented with a 10,000-dot stereogram pattern to one eye
for a specified length of time and then was asked to superimpose her
eidetic image onto another pattern presented to her other eye. She was
able to perform this task with great ease and could see depth and figures in
these patterns. Non-eidetikers need a stereoscope to perform this feat.
"Elizabeth" was also capable of
projecting her eidetic images onto other images, often obscuring the actual
image. Her eidetic images were capable of after-images and movement
after-effects just like that of actual visual stimulus, and she is even
reported to have been able to see a 10-second section of a movie in
complete eidetic detail.
Her only constraint was that she had to
move her eyes to scan an eidetic image and generally would create the
image in sections rather than as a whole. Also, "Elizabeth"'s images did
not just fade, but instead would dim and break apart piece by piece. In
any case, "Elizabeth" is the only one of her kind. Since the publication
of Stromeyer's paper, no other adult eidetiker of her caliber has been
found.