A 17-year-old girl from France with an unusually rich, detailed, and accurate memory can mentally travel both forwards and backwards in time, according to the authors of a new case report.
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Described as a successful high-school student, the youngster exhibits a condition known as hyperthymesia, which refers to a significantly above-average autobiographical memory. This differs from superior memory in general as it relates specifically to the retrieval of past life events rather than the capacity to learn and store new information.
Identified only as TL, the remarkable individual claims to have kept her abilities secret for most of her life after being accused of lying when claiming she could revisit her past at the age of eight. Describing her talent for recollection, TL told the researchers that she visualized her personal memories inside a large, white room, where they were filed and organized into categories such as vacations, family life, and friends.
Cuddly toys were neatly labeled with information regarding whom they were received from, while photographs and documents were stored in a file inside her memory room, from which they could be retrieved and examined in extraordinary detail.
“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 told them.
Putting this claim to the test, the researchers administered a series of tasks designed to analyze the strength of her biographical memories – and her ability to visualize the future. And while these tasks can’t assess the accuracy of her recollection, they did reveal that her recall was unusually vivid and detailed, and had all the hallmarks of genuinely remembering events from her early childhood rather than just knowing that certain things happened.
Regarding TL’s ability to foresee personal events in the future, the researchers explain that her mental projections were exceptionally realistic and demonstrated “a deep sense of pre-experience”, as if they were being remembered rather 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 study authors.
And while the mechanisms behind this unique ability remain unknown, the researchers point out that several of TL’s family members exhibit rare cognitive traits such as synesthesia and perfect pitch, all of which could somehow be related to her remarkable autobiographical memory.
The study is published in the journal Neurocase.
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