Can you imagine reliving your first day of school savoring every detail, remembering the gaze of your mother who leaves you on the gate and the smile of the teacher who welcomes you?
This is what can do those who are suffering from a very rare neurological condition called hypertimia or autobiographical hypermnesia, the extraordinary ability to remember every past event of their lives with vivid details and be able to relive it as in a mental time trip.
Now a study study published on Neurocase He analyzed the case of TL, a 17 -year -old French adolescent affected by Ipertimia.
The rooms of memories. The mental structure of the girl is to say the least organized: her memories are contained in large rectangular white rooms with the low ceiling, where they are divided them theatically into different sections such as family life, holidays, friends, toys.
Each toy, explains the girl, has a label in which she wrote who donated her and when. The interesting aspect is that TL’s mind does not just remember the facts, but enriches them with emotions and vivid perceptual details.
On the contrary, academic knowledge belong to a “black memory”, a separate system not organized in space and without emotional connotations.
The rooms of emotions. In addition to the rooms of memories, TL describes three further spaces, each connected to different emotional functions:
an “ice room”, which helps her to calm down when she gets angry; An empty “problem” room, a place to take refuge to walk and reflect; Finally, a “military room”, associated with the absence of the father in military service and associated with the sense of guilt.
Non -traditional methods. Although a single case study is not enough to give us a general vision of the condition, this example offers several interesting ideas to reflect on and from which to start to deepen the research.
However, it is important to underline that researchers have not used some of the traditional tools to diagnose hypertimics, such as checking the details of a memory of a public event, or testing precision in remembering the dates in several years.
Memory and emotions. Finally, it is interesting to analyze the use that TL makes of imaginary rooms related to the regulation of emotions:
This aspect adds a new dimension to the way in which memory could interface with other cognitive processes, and suggests the possibility that some people develop internal mechanisms to manage the emotional weight of their memories or to structure them in order to facilitate their recovery.
