Scientists have described the unique case of a 17-year-old girl from France, which has a rare phenomenon, hypertemesia or exceptional autobiographical memory. He is able to "travel" with extraordinary accuracy and emotional intensity in the mind, returning to the events of the past and even living with an imaginary future. The work was published in Neurocase magazine.
The teenager who was named in the study was called TL, since childhood, noticed that his memory is different from others. He keeps memories in the form of a figurative "white hall", where events are divided into topics, family, school, trips, friends. Each subject or even soft toy is associated with a certain date and circumstances.
Unlike "White Memory" of personal events, he calls the facts of his studies and general knowledge "black memory", dry and unprofession. Moreover, TL also describes "emotional rooms", inner areas, where he turns in different states, "ice", "war room", which is due to the feeling of the lack of his father, and "problemable room" for reflections.
During the testing, TL showed significantly high results from the norm. He easily reproduced the detailed episodes of childhood and adolescence, transferring them from both first-face and observer. The girl also confidently imagined the future events, surviving them in the same lighter as the past.
Although such cases remain extremely rare and do not allow wide conclusions, researchers consider them valuable to understand the role of emotions and images in the organization of human autobiographical memory and memories.
"This case shows that the memory can be not only unusually detailed, but also by internal structure, subject to special architecture. All this opens new issues on the role of emotions and imagination in the formation of memory, "said the authors of the study.
Translation of: Euromedia24.com
