Hyperthymesia: Teenage Lady With Distinctive “Mental Time Travel” Skills Sees Previous And Future With Uncommon Readability

A 17-year-old woman from France with an unusually wealthy, detailed, and correct reminiscence can mentally journey each forwards and backwards in time, in keeping with the authors of a brand new case report. 

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Described as a profitable high-school scholar, the teen displays a situation often called hyperthymesia, which refers to a considerably above-average autobiographical reminiscence. This differs from superior reminiscence generally because it relates particularly to the retrieval of previous life occasions somewhat than the capability to study and retailer new data.

Identified solely as TL, the exceptional particular person claims to have stored her talents secret for many of her life after being accused of mendacity when claiming she might revisit her previous on the age of eight. Describing her expertise for recollection, TL advised the researchers that she visualized her private reminiscences inside a big, white room, the place they had been filed and arranged into classes equivalent to holidays, household life, and associates.

Cuddly toys had been neatly labeled with data concerning whom they had been obtained from, whereas images and paperwork had been saved in a file inside her reminiscence room, from which they could possibly be retrieved and examined in extraordinary element.

“She could reexperience actual episodes vividly and inspect them in full detail, either from the perspective she actually occupied, or from an external viewpoint,” write the authors. “I can mentally travel back in time to relive the event,” she advised them.

Putting this declare to the check, the researchers administered a collection of duties designed to research the energy of her biographical reminiscences – and her means to visualise the long run. And whereas these duties can’t assess the accuracy of her recollection, they did reveal that her recall was unusually vivid and detailed, and had all of the hallmarks of genuinely remembering occasions from her early childhood somewhat than simply understanding that sure issues occurred.

Regarding TL’s means to foresee private occasions sooner or later, the researchers clarify that her psychological projections had been exceptionally reasonable and demonstrated “a deep sense of pre-experience”, as in the event that they had been being remembered somewhat than invented.

“This is the first observation of hyperthymesia with a full evaluation of mental time travel capacities in different temporal distances, encompassing the individual capacity to retrieve personal events from the personal past as well as to foresee personal events in the future,” write the research authors.

And whereas the mechanisms behind this distinctive means stay unknown, the researchers level out that a number of of TL’s relations exhibit uncommon cognitive traits equivalent to synesthesia and ideal pitch, all of which might by some means be associated to her exceptional autobiographical reminiscence.

The research is printed within the journal Neurocase.