Think for a moment of the last time that a friend or relative asked you over to feign enthusiasm while they showed you their holiday snaps. Or the last commercial break you day-dreamt through while waiting for your favourite programme to begin. How much of what you saw can you remember?

You might not recall now whether your cousin went to the Caribbean or the Canaries, or whether your enjoyment of Coronation Street was interrupted by adverts for Tesco or Asda. But that doesn’t mean that your brain has forgotten: you probably remember a lot more than you think.

The mind has a surprising capacity for retaining visual information of the most mundane variety, even when it has been acquired through eyes that have glazed over with boredom. Its remarkable extent was revealed this week, as the ground floor of Waterstone’s bookshop in Piccadilly, Central London, was transformed into a laboratory by the psychologist Richard Wiseman to probe the upper limits of memory.

Two volunteers were joined by The Times in front of a projector screen as Professor Wiseman bombarded us with a succession of randomly selected photographs. We were supposed to remember them.

My own task was dull enough: 800 images in 40 minutes, with a few seconds of rest between each ten-minute block of 200. For Jenny Mirani and Sarah Woods, colleagues of Professor Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire, it was a gruelling experience that brought a new meaning to boredom. The pair sat there for two and a half days, enduring 10,000 pictures each.

“It was like being trapped in a room watching someone’s endless holiday snaps,” Sarah said yesterday, the ordeal over. Jenny added: “I never want to see another photograph again.”

The pictures came thick and fast: dozens of different views of the Golden Gate Bridge; enough panoramas of Sydney and Berlin to fill several guidebooks; snowscapes and seashores; and a particularly mind-numbing sequence of computers and printers. And for some reason, enough bison to make up a good-sized herd.

When you see 20 different shots of bison in the space of a minute, you rapidly learn that they all look a lot alike. You also get very bored, very quickly. It gets harder to concentrate and you lose track of how many images you have seen.

The test was next – 16 pairs of images, in each of which I had to identify the one I’d seen. Chance alone could give me a score of eight. I thought I’d be lucky to get that. My fellow guinea-pigs agreed.

The first comparison, though, was straightforward. I couldn’t remember seeing bales of hay, but the oriental building on the right looked very familiar. Then along came a bison. Yet the pose looked new, and I sussed it as a decoy.

Next up, a ruin and some beads. I wasn’t sure I’d seen the beads, but I was certain I hadn’t seen the ruin. That proved to be something of a pattern: even if it wasn’t always possible to be certain of the right answer, the wrong one usually stood out.

When the test was over, I was astonished to learn that I had 15 out of 16 correct – 94 per cent. A greater surprise came when Professor Wiseman re-examined me two days later: my score remained the same.

Another 9,200 images later, and it was Jenny and Sarah’s turn. Each was given 130 pairs of pictures, and each scored 65 per cent. Although their lower recall reflected the far greater volume of information they had had to take in, it was still impressive.

The results matched those obtained on the only other occasion the experiment has been run – a 1973 study in Canada. After seeing 612 pictures, subjects recognised an average of 98 per cent – much the same as my score for 800. After 10,000, the average success rate was 70 per cent, matching Sarah and Jenny.

We turned out to be typical human beings – it is the human memory that is extraordinary, not the three of us.

“These results are pretty astonishing, but they show how effortlessly we take in visual information, often without realising it,” said Professor Wiseman, who discusses the research in his book, Quirkology.

“Everybody thought they wouldn’t do well, but ended up excelling. In the bigger experiment, Jenny and Sarah often said they had the feeling that they were guessing, but ended up guessing very accurately. It goes to show that you are picking things up all the time.”

The capacity to recall visual information without thinking about it, he said, had probably evolved to help us to cope with our environment. “We have to take in loads of visual information to get around and recognise our surroundings, but you wouldn’t always want it at the front of your mind. It would be information overload.”

The research suggests ways in which we can improve our memories, too. “We don’t process verbal information anything like as efficiently,” Professor Wiseman said. “By associating names and lists with images, we stand a much better chance of remembering them.”

Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives, Macmillan, £14.99

Five tips for improving your memory

1) To remember someone’s name when you first meet them, repeat it as soon as possible in conversation

2) Any information learnt in the hour before you fall asleep is especially well remembered

3) Stress disrupts memory – if you are frantically trying to remember where you left your keys, calm down, think about something else and see if the information comes unbidden

4) Remember a person’s name by associating it with their face – e.g. meet John Plant and imagine a plant on his head – the more bizarre the image, the better

5) Create a memorable PIN by using a four-letter word to see what numbers you would have to type on your mobile phone – so “duck” would be 3825

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