Most of us forget what we ate for breakfast yesterday, but a teenager known only as TL can relive her life like rewinding a movie reel.
She’s one of fewer than 100 people worldwide believed to have hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), a condition that allows her to recall an astonishing number of personal experiences with vivid detail, according to a new case study published in Neurocase.
Lead author Valentina La Corte, a neuropsychologist at Paris Cité University, explained in the study that people with hyperthymesia “are able to describe in detail what they did on July 6, 2002, and experience again the emotions and sensations of that day.”
TL, now 17, can revisit her memories as if she were physically there, often from multiple perspectives. She describes the sensation as mental time travel—reliving past events and even “pre-living” imagined future ones.
This Teen Can Mentally ‘Time Travel’ Thanks to Rare Condition
Her mind organizes these experiences into what she calls a “white room,” a vast mental library where personal moments are filed away chronologically. Toys from her childhood sit tagged with names and dates, and family photos appear as if framed on the walls.
Positive memories can be retrieved like favorite books, while darker ones, like the death of her grandfather, are locked inside a chest. Other “rooms” serve as coping mechanisms: a frozen “pack ice” space to cool anger, or a stark “problems” room where she can think without distraction.
The study notes that this is the first comprehensive evaluation of how someone with HSAM not only recalls the past but also projects themselves into the future. In lab tests, TL consistently produced richly detailed accounts of events across her life, her performance ranking at the top of normative averages.
Her ability to “pre-experience” possible futures may help researchers understand how memory contributes to identity and decision-making.
The gift comes with weight. While TL’s account didn’t dwell on challenges, other hyperthymesics have described their memories as “non-stop, uncontrollable, and automatic.” The study’s authors also raise questions about how aging affects HSAM, or whether those with it can ever learn to manage the flood of memories.
“We have many questions, and everything remains to be discovered,” La Corte and her colleagues wrote in the paper. For now, TL’s story gives researchers an unprecedented look into how our brains store the past, imagine the future, and build the narratives that make us who we are.
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