The Astonishing Case of The Teen Who Can ‘Mentally Time Journey’ : ScienceAlert

Life recollections for many of us are like grains of sand, slipping by way of our fingers as we attempt to maintain on to as many as we will. But for a uncommon few, emotional occasions stick like cobwebs and are a lot more durable to shake off.

A brand new case research describes one such extraordinary particular person: a feminine teenager, named TL for anonymity, who can recall an astonishing variety of private occasions from her life.

Fewer than 100 individuals worldwide are thought to have her situation, often called hyperthymesia, or extremely superior autobiographical reminiscence (HSAM).

It was solely described for the primary time in 2006, and TL’s case research is the primary complete analysis of how people with the situation retrieve private occasions from the previous and picture private occasions set sooner or later.

Her unbelievable means to mentally ‘time journey’ by way of the times permits TL to really feel as if she is re-experiencing what has come and pre-experiencing what’s but to be.

Her story may assist scientists higher perceive how the human mind encodes, retrieves, or discards recollections from our lives – thereby formulating a way of id and continuity.

Related: People Who Can’t See Things in Their Mind Could Have Memory Trouble Too, Study Finds

“In these individuals, known as hyperthymesics, memories are carefully indexed by date,” explains neuropsychologist and lead creator of the case research Valentina La Corte from Paris Cité University.

“Some will be able to describe in detail what they did on July 6, 2002, and experience again the emotions and sensations of that day.”

Ever since TL was a kid, she’s been able to mentally time travel to relive her memories in vivid detail, often from various angles, as if she were omnipresent at the scene.

TL revealed this ability to her friends when she was 8. Unable to imagine what she was talking about, they accused her of lying.

“She turned conscious that her thoughts functioned in an atypical manner, and by worry of wanting bizarre, she solely talked about it to her household on the age of 16,” write La Corte and her colleagues.

At the age of 17, TL decided to share her story with the wider world.

In a memory test, La Corte and her team asked TL to recall four personally relevant events from five periods in her life. Her recollection for detail performed at the top of the normative average, consistent with today’s accepted diagnosis of hyperthymesia.

TL’s memories are apparently “wealthy in contextual and phenomenological element” and characterized by a “highly effective feeling of re-experience.”

She can also ‘travel’ to the future. Her mental predictions can evoke a strong sense that events she hasn’t previously personally experienced have happened before.

Perhaps most fascinating is TL’s time-traveling ‘machine’. Facts and scholarly knowledge that carry no emotional weight aren’t stored alongside special visual imagery in her mind and require effort to memorize. She calls them “black recollections”.

By contrast, her personal memories, which do carry emotion, are more easily stored in her mind’s eye in a rectangular, very large, white room with a low ceiling.

Like a library, this mental room contains the moments of her life, filed according to an intricate catalogue system. Each toy she’s ever owned is there on display, with a tag dictating its name, and from whom and when it came from.

She can pore over family photos in the white room, as she’s memorized every detail of them. If she wants to, TL can pull a much-loved book off the mental shelf for a comforting read.

Her memories are arranged chronologically, and the details are fuzzier the longer ago they happened.

“Roughly talking,” reads the case report, “TL may discriminate days of the previous month, months of the previous two years, and solely years for older recollections.”

Unable to forget negative memories like the rest of us, TL stores them in a chest within the white room. That’s where she keeps the death of her grandfather.

The white room is also adjoined to other rooms she can escape to when her emotions flare.

She has a cold “pack ice” room where she goes to cool down when she’s angry. If she’s working through a problem, she closes herself off in a small, empty “issues” room without distractions.

When her father left to pursue his military career, another unpleasant room appeared in her mind, inhabited by soldiers. TL finds herself there when she’s feeling guilty.

TL’s case study doesn’t explore the difficulties of her exceptional memory, but others with HSAM have described the incessant and excessive stream of recollections as “continuous, uncontrollable, and automated”.

Very few have shared their experiences in peer-reviewed papers.

“It is troublesome to generalize findings about hyperthymesia, since they depend on only some circumstances. Does getting older have an effect on the recollections of those people? Do their psychological time-travel talents depend upon age? Can they be taught to manage the buildup of recollections?” asks La Corte.

“We have many questions, and every little thing stays to be found. An thrilling avenue of analysis lies forward.”

The research was printed in Neurocase.