Teen with strange condition can 'mentally time travel' to any memory in her brain's 'white room'
The teenager has the ability to store archive of memories which describes as the 'whote room'.
Human memories are often fleeting, with most of the past moments fading or blurring as time goes by. Most of us can hardly recall the memories from our childhood or even the intricate details of what happened to us yesterday. However, some of us can cling to the past and rewind every detail of the memory, not just in fragments but in detailed recollections. This new ability was discovered in a teenager named TL (name undisclosed for anonymity) who suffers from a rare condition called hyperthymesia. Published in a new study on August 19, the literature around her condition opens up a new horizon for cognitive abilities.
According to a new study conducted by Valentina La Corte from Paris Cité University, TL was one of the few lesser than 100 individuals worldwide who are believed to have highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), which allows them to recall a high volume of personal experiences with vivid details. The study titled, 'Autobiographical hypermnesia as a particular form of mental time travel' reveals that the condition was first discovered in 2006, with TL's case study being one of the first comprehensive analyses on how people with the condition retrieve past information.
In the study, the lead author, Valentina La Corte, outlines that people with hyperthymesia have the "ability to detail what happened on July 6, 2002, and experience the emotions and sensations of that day." TL's experience has helped scientists better understand how the human brain encodes and discards memories from our lives that form our sense of identity.
According to the seventeen-year-old teenager TL, her memory is described as a 'white room', which has a vast archive of memories of her life events neatly arranged in chronological order. Interestingly, she can revisit any part of her memory just like picking a book from a shelf. Beyond the white room, TL also has a frozen “pack ice” zone that cools anger, and a bare “problems” room reserved for undistracted thought. Painful details, such as the death of her grandfather, are sealed away in a locked chest within the white room. According to the study, this rare case comes with a lot of burden. Though she does not detail her struggles in the case, other people with the condition have described their memories as non-stop and uncontrollable. The scientists are, however, yet to find the answers about how ageing can affect people suffering from the condition. “We have many questions, and everything remains to be discovered,” La Corte and her colleagues wrote in the paper.
A similar study, penned by Valerio Santangelo et al. in 2018, explores how individuals with HSAM show richer recollections and faster access to autobiographical memories, which are associated with stronger connectivity in prefrontal and hippocampal regions. The findings suggest that the extraordinary recall ability in HSAM may stem from more efficient and enriched neural pathways supporting memory access.
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