Our memory is not like a video recorder that captures details. Instead of focusing on details, it tries to gather the gist of events and we (sometimes creatively) fill in the gaps with details.
But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
> But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details.
The traditional notion of photographic memory is being able to recall any and every aspect of a scene upon a single viewing. But in countless experiments where a researcher asks the subject about some obscure detail, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate this--i.e. they may have happened to spot a particular detail, but keep iterating the experiment and they regress to the mean.
To memorize something, a person has to focus their attention on the object such that they can draw associations--inside the scene, outside the scene, etc. Perhaps this can indeed be subconscious. "Conscious" and "subconscious" are such nebulous words, and people's experiences of them so varying, that disputing that it could be done subconsciously requires a degree of certitude I don't think anybody (scientist or otherwise) could rightly possess.
There are indeed people with ridiculously amazing memories, including astounding visual fidelity. But it's misleading to say that it's "photographic". These people aren't glancing at a scene, blinking their eyes, and committing the whole thing to memory like a camera. Rather, their brains seem to be adept at scanning and drawing an incredible number of associations between visual elements and objects within the scene, but never the entirety of a sufficiently complex scene unless given a commensurate amount of time. And in fact, it turns out that with sufficient effort and practice many if not most people can begin to exhibit such astounding feats of memory.
> I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
Perhaps you're referring to the fact that people who exhibit extraordinary episodic memory (i.e. like the stereotypical autistic savant who can remember what they ate on any prior date, though most aren't autistic, AFAIU) usually have normal or sometimes deficient semantic memory. Note that episodic memory isn't the same thing as visual memory. Visual memory can be both episodic and semantic--e.g. if you're a visual-spatial thinker.
This is somewhat related to eidetic memory (which the article points out is sometimes used interchangeably), you might find it a curious read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
There are also those with near-perfect memory that use those memories to create elaborate, poetic, and hilariously long YouTube videos about nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw
But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.