Forgetting is part of the human condition… except for those whose memory lets nothing escape. For the majority of the population, our oldest memories send us back to blurry images, to fragmented sensations, to often uncertain impressions. For people suffering from hypermnesia, however, this relationship with memory is completely different.
Hypermnesia is an extremely rare condition that allows you to remember your entire life with extraordinary precision. People suffering from this pathology keep a precise memory of each day, each emotion and each detail of their life, as if what happened twenty years ago was as clear as the day before.
According to an article from the media The Debrieftwo researchers from the Brain Institute in Paris looked into the unique case of a French teenager nicknamed TL. Suffering from autobiographical hypermnesia or hyperthymesia, her memories do not impose themselves on her in a chaotic or parasitic manner, but are carefully classified in her brain as they would be in files on a hard drive.
TL differentiates between two types of memories: black memory, where she classifies factual information without emotional charge, and her autobiographical memories, which she organizes in a very detailed mental structure that she refers to as her “clean room”.
Like an imaginary library, the young woman classifies her intimate experiences rich in sensory details in this vast room. This allows her to be able to consult and bring out her memories in the smallest details, whenever she wants. She has also developed other symbolic spaces that help her maintain control over her emotions, such as a chest where the death of her grandfather is archived, a “ice room” to appease his anger, or even a “military room” appeared when her father left to join the army.
Back to the future
In order to measure these abilities, Valentina La Corte, professor-researcher at the Memory, Brain and Cognition Laboratory at Paris Cité University, and neurologist Laurent Cohen used two specific tools, the aptly named TEMPau and TEEAM. The first involves measuring a person’s temporal memory, while the other assesses the ability to project into the future and imagine future events.
Result: the adolescent can relive her memories in the first or third person, but that’s not all: she is able to project herself and imagine events in the future with a temporal, spatial and sensory richness well above average – a phenomenon that is still poorly understood.
Researchers believe that the mechanisms for mentally traveling to the future rely on the same brain circuits that are activated when remembering the past. The young patient’s hypermnesia would therefore also allow her to better project herself and imagine future situations.
“It is difficult to generalize from these rare casesunderlines researcher Valentina La Corte. Will aging affect these memories? Can these individuals learn to control the accumulation of memories?
