An Italian team has studied eight
Italians with total recall or 'hypermemory', in the first study
in the world of people able to remember what they were wearing
or what they had for lunch on a given day 10 years ago.
The study was carried out by the Santa Lucia IRCCS Foundation
in Rome and published in the PNAS journal.
It also involved the Italian Higher Health Institute (ISS),
the La Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Perugia,
and the University of Califormia-Irvine.
The study paves the way for treatment to help people with
memory pathologies regain their memory.
Although many people are able to accurately remember events
with a high emotional connotation, such as a wedding or the
birth of a child, normal days are usually forgotten or leave a
vague memory at the very most, the researchers said in the
study.
But individuals equipped with autobiographical hypermemory
remember everything.
And now they are the focus, for the first time in the world,
of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed at
understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this
extraordinary memory capacity, the researchers said in their
study.
"We monitored eight people with hypermemory, identified by
the research group among the Italian population starting from
2015, and 21 control subjects with normo-typical memory," said
the lead author of the study, Valerio Santangelo of Perugia
University and the Santa Lucia Foundation.
"The extraordinary thing is that, as well as remembering a
day in the week on a long-ago date (they remember that the third
of August 2011 was a Wednesday, for instance), they present a
complete absence of hesitation of conscious effort when they
have to bring to mind events they experienced dozens of years
previously".
Patrizia Campolongo, of La Sapienza University and the Santa
Lucia Foundation, added:
"The results of the study appear to show that hypermemory
consists mainly in the capacity to access, via the prefrontal
hippocampus circuit, trace memories that are not accessible to
other subjects, thus explaining the greater capacity of the
hypermemory subjects to revive minute details of their past".
The study will enable researchers to open up new frontiers in
memory research, traditionally studied in terms of
hypo-functioning in pathological conditions.
"Understanding the neurobiological systems underlying memory
hyperfunctioning," concludes ISS researcher Simone Macrì, " "de
facto supplies important indications on how to intervene to
restore adequate functioning of the memory systems in
pathological conditions".
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