In many books of the fiction genre, characters have extraordinary memories,
usually eidetic in nature. For example, Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code
can solve anagrams by only looking at them once, then memorizing the words he has
seen, and `unscrambling` the letters in his head.
Ingrid Third, the partner of the title character in the TV show Fillmore!
has photographic memory.
Spencer Reid, a fictional FBI agent character in the show Criminal Minds
has eidetic memory.
Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, a fictional character in the TV show Prison Break,
claims that he has photographic memory. But Charles "Haywire" Patoshik has eidetic
memory.
The short story Sucker Bait by Isaac Asimov features the character
of Mark Annuncio, who has been trained from a young age to develop an eidetic memory
and find correlations between seemingly unrelated pieces of data by absorbing as
much knowledge as possible. Another Asimov story, "Lest We Remember," features a
man named John Heath who gains perfect memory recollection after having a new, experimental
drug tested on him.
Brutha in the Discworld novel Small Gods has eidetic memory and is
able to memorize a portion of the books of a whole library, without being able to
read.
The narrator in Will Self`s novel My Idea of Fun (1993) has an eidetic
memory.
Severian, the narrator of Gene Wolfe`s Book of the New Sun has an eidetic
memory, though this is often intentionally misleading; for example, he describes
the tower he grew up in without ever realizing it is the remains of an ancient spaceship.
Seven of Nine, a fictional character on Star Trek: Voyager, has eidetic
memory due to being a former Borg drone.
Commander Susan Ivanova, a fictional character on Babylon 5, claimed to have
eidetic memory. She recalled a once-heard Minbari phrase perfectly.
Barbara Gordon, a fictional character in DC Comics, has eidetic memory, which
she puts to use as the information broker Oracle.
Bart Allen, a fictional character in DC Comics and the current Flash, has eidetic
memory. When he became the second kid Flash, he read the entire San Francisco Public
Library.
Lesley and Gordon in the book A Cage of Butterflies by Brian Caswell.
Their eidetic memory allows them to play chess without a chessboard.
Adam Rove, a character from the television show Joan of Arcadia, possesses
eidetic memory.
In one episode, Dr Sam Beckett, the main character of Quantum Leap, stated
to have possessed a photographic (eidetic) memory.
Charlie, a waitress featured in the NBC series "Heroes" suddenly exhibits eidetic
memory as a functional superpower.
In the movie Hackers, "Lord Nikon" claims to have a photographic memory (His
handle Nikon refers to the camera company).