For a rare few individuals, emotional events stick to the memory strongly and are impossible to forget. A new case study describes one of these extraordinary individuals, a teenager referred to as TL to maintain anonymity, who can recall an astonishing number of personal events from her life. It is believed that fewer than 100 people worldwide suffer from her condition, known as hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory.
TL has an incredible ability to mentally time travel, by sensing past events and events that have not yet happened to her. Valentina La Corte, a neuropsychologist and the lead researcher of TL’s case at Paris City University, explained, “In these individuals, known as hyperthymesiacs, memories are meticulously indexed by date.”
Since she was a child, TL has been able to mentally time travel to retrieve her memories in vivid detail, often from different angles, as if she was omnipresent at the scene, according to the scientific journal. TL revealed this ability to her friends when she was 8, but they accused her of lying, unable to imagine what she was talking about. At 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. TL remembered experiences “rich with contextual details and phenomena” and was characterized by a strong feeling of reliving the experience.
TL’s case study does not explore the difficulties of her exceptional memory, but others with hyperthymesia have described the constant and excessive flow of memories as “unstoppable, uncontrollable, and automatic.”
