Why This 17-Year-Old Girl Can’t Forget

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MY Memory reigned my life, “said a 34 -year -old singular woman to some researchers a few decades ago by discussing their University in California in Irvine, in the laboratory. Known as the human calendar of her friends, but nicknamed AJ in subsequent research reports, the woman had written them in distress. She was looking for help. asked his attention, like talking to a friend.

Previous cases of superior memory had generally involved an individual’s ability to remember and shake up long lists of information devoid of meaning, such as words or figures, as opposed to personal memories. The team of scientists has therefore crossed a battery of tests. They found that she was in fact capable of unless the details of clear and verifiable memories are effortless for many dates and that her scores were outside the graphics on standardized and informal autobiographical memory tasks.

Scientists reported the state of AJ and invented the term “hyperthymeie” to describe it, in Neurocase In 2006. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymized in the literature. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find memories – which tend to be carefully indexed by date – intrusive, uncontrollable and painful.

This is why the recently published case study of a 17 -year -old girl nicknamed TL attracts attention. Like other people with hyperthymia, TL has an exceptionally intense and lively memory for events that occurred during its short life. It can provide a particularly rich quantity of perceptual, spatial and temporal information, and even recall events from several points of view. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories in a sort of “memory palace” and can access them every time she likes it. Most memories, she says, are deposited in “binders”, depending on the theme and the date and stored in a place where it calls “the white room”.

The other rooms in her palate include a “Pack ICE” room, which she uses to cope with anger; A “problem” room, where it can think about difficult situations; And a “military” room, which appeared when his father joined the army. For the most part, she does not find a reminder of her personal past in this overwhelming way. Scientists from Paris Brain Institute and the University of Paris Cité recently published an account of the Single State of TL in the journal Neurocase.

French scientists have tested not only TL’s ability to remember the past, but also its ability to imagine the future and found that it excels in both. They hypothesized that his ability to control his memories on the past and to face how these memories are easily available, can be at least partially linked to his ability to imagine the future so strongly – on time travel. Even for average people, autobiographical memory is generally associated with a type of consciousness called “autonatic”, which allows us not only to relive past events but to project ourselves into imaginary situations.

Some studies suggest that hyperthymenism can involve overractivation of the brain networks involved in autobiographical memory and in certain visual tasks. But so far, scientists have not identified any neuroanatomical difference between hyperthymetic and individuals with normal memory. Hyperthymia can also be linked to synesthesia, said Laurent Cohen, neurologist and co-head of the Picnic Lab at Paris Brain Institute who co-wrote the case study, in a press release. TL has no synesthesia, a neurological condition in which sensory treatment often implies at least two senses at the same time – people hear colors or sounds of taste, but many members of his family do it.

Cohen and his colleague Valentina La Corte, professor of research at the memory, brain and cognition laboratory of the University of Paris Cité, which assessed TL together, have many remaining questions: does aging affect the memories of hyperthymesic? Can people like AJ or TL learn to control their accumulations of memories? “Everything remains to be discovered“” said the corte.

Image of lead: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

• French Kristen

  Published on September 2, 2025

  Kristen French is an assistant editor -in -chief in Nautilus.