Milo Blog Week 3 : “How Do You Know All The Words?”

    I have something called a “phonographic memory.” You might be thinking, “Aren’t you thinking of a photographic memory?”, but I’m not! Phonographic memory, (phonographic coming from the root phono, meaning sound) is where a person remembers everything they hear. This can be both a good thing and a bad one. While I remember every single lyric to all my favorite songs, and I can easily memorize lines from movies, I can also remember word-for-word what people say to me when they’re disappointed, frustrated, or angry. Mostly, though, I just like to recite things I remember from musicals or shows I’m in. You might think being able to remember things this way must make school so much easier, but it doesn’t help at all with math, (other than remembering formulas), and it doesn’t help with Hebrew because if I don’t understand it, I can’t remember it. When I have to do reading for school, a lot of times I listen to audiobooks as I read and annotate. It helps me remember what I’m reading and improves my comprehension. After scanning the internet to try and find a good article describing my experience with phonographic memory and failing, I decided to write about my experience instead. 

When I was around the age of eight, I decided I wanted to learn how to play the piano. My cousin came to my house and played a song for me, and I was hooked on learning how to play, how to move my fingers across the keys, and produce music as beautifully as he could. As I experimented with my grandma’s old piano at my house, I found out that if I heard a song, I could most likely figure out how to play it. This discovery baffled my mom and grandma, but I never really thought much of it. 

When a song would come on the radio while my mom and I were driving in the car, she’d always ask me how I knew all the words, to the point that it would get annoying. I’d always have the same answer. “I don’t know, mom, I just remember them.” 

In 6th grade, one of my friends did a presentation on photographic memory and what causes it. After that, I went home and asked my mom if there was “a photographic memory for sounds.” We looked it up together and found out that there was, "phonographic memory", but it wasn’t talked about nearly as much. After that, being able to put a name to what I was experiencing, I felt a lot more confident, and was able to come up with a better answer to the question “How do you know all the words?”