An FDA-approved asthma drug has shown the ability to restore memories in mice
I doubt the claim in the title, but I&#x27;ll add something probably more useful. I only personally know one person with an eidetic memory (what people think is &quot;photographic&quot;). That &quot;superpower&quot; affects them in a pretty negative way. People think of this power through very rose colored glasses, but there is also a dark side to it. You don&#x27;t just have a high recall for good times, your tool&#x27;s documentation, etc but you also have a high recall for any trauma and bad things that have happened to you. Since you have such high recall with high precision it is much closer to reliving the experience than a typical person&#x27;s memory would be. (there&#x27;s that popular image floating around of how well you can visualize an apple in your head. Eidetic people  are on the extreme end while Aphantasia people are on the other) People with eidetic memories often over think things because they can recall a large swath of historical information to make judgements upon (and this leads to overload). It also freaks people out when you can recall what they had for breakfast several years ago on a specific day.<p>There are definitely advantages to this level of memory, but there are often disadvantages that come along with it. There was a reason evolution selected for brains that could forget and fuzz information. Fuzzing helps with abstraction. We even see some of this usefulness of forgetting when training neural networks (DNNs are __NOT__ akin to brains. Neither in respect to {hard,wet}ware nor algorithmically. But there are a weak similarities and similar abstractions).<p>It&#x27;s probably also worth adding that our memories are terrible in a different way. Not just in recall, but in that sometimes we just make shit up. This can be hard to distinguish and be problematic too. If you know any vivid or lucid dreamers ask them about their experiences (if someone is keeping a dream journal they&#x27;re likely to be a vivid dreamer. I stopped keeping a dream journal for this reason).<p>I&#x27;m sure someone that is way more knowledgeable about this could say more, fill in many gaps, and correct misunderstandings I have. I am not an expert (I study NNs, not brains). So if you are an _expert_ in this area, I&#x27;d love to learn more. Domain knowledge is often hard to come by and nuances matter.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eidetic_memory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eidetic_memory</a>