It is not quite the same skill, but being able to notice/See things as they are (closer to raw visual input) rather than letting your brain auto-label stuff may help you retain images better, and I think it’d also be interesting if you were to take a written scene from a book and try do draw it.
By the way, there is supposedly a fast way (~20h) to go from kindergarten to recognizably realistic in drawing skills using some neat tricks, there was even a series of articles about it here on lw. (the other 10k hours go into those final touches of skill, but to the untrained eyes the difference isn’t as jarring as the no-training—some-training gap, at least in simple scenes)
Drawing may improve visual memory (especially with things like drawing people’s faces to help remember what they looked like), but I don’t know if it will necessarily help someone develop a visual memory.
Have you tried your hand at drawing?
It is not quite the same skill, but being able to notice/See things as they are (closer to raw visual input) rather than letting your brain auto-label stuff may help you retain images better, and I think it’d also be interesting if you were to take a written scene from a book and try do draw it.
By the way, there is supposedly a fast way (~20h) to go from kindergarten to recognizably realistic in drawing skills using some neat tricks, there was even a series of articles about it here on lw. (the other 10k hours go into those final touches of skill, but to the untrained eyes the difference isn’t as jarring as the no-training—some-training gap, at least in simple scenes)
Drawing may improve visual memory (especially with things like drawing people’s faces to help remember what they looked like), but I don’t know if it will necessarily help someone develop a visual memory.