Oh, about the photographic memory. I'm not sure exactly where I heard it first, but my high school history teacher supported it with a personal anecdote: she once had a student who had what seemed to be a photographic memory, and would frequently answer questions on quizzes with lengthy, direct quotes from the textbook on completely irrelevant subjects.

Anyway, for whatever reason, the brain has a capacity to ignore and forget details it considers unimportant; as one Cesare Mondadori puts it, "maximal memory" and "optimal memory" are not synonymous.