THE ABILITY TO REMEBER EVERYTHING YOU SAW

Wilma Bainbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, recently showed me eight images and asked me to guess: Which ones will I remember? For each pair, she hinted, one image would be more likely to stick in my mind.

It seemed like a trick question. None of the images seemed particularly striking. These were the kinds of mundane photos we may come across every day — two men, two women, a dining room and an empty cubicle in an office, two tropical beaches.

Maybe, I thought, I’d remember the man in the bottom row if I saw him again. He was more classically handsome with swooshy hair, deep-set eyes, and superhero-square jawline, compared to the smirking man in the top row (sorry, dude). I’d choose the dining room with the tree over the sad office cubicle. That’s a place I’d want to eat a big bowl of pasta and laugh with friends. The women seemed to have equally kind smiles, so why would I remember one more than the other? And the beaches, well, they both seemed like boring postcards.