Psychologists in Canada recall they've identified an entirely new retention syndrome in healthy people characterised by a specific inability to re-alive their by. This may sound similar a course of amnesia, merely the three individuals currently described have no history of brain damage or illness and have experienced no known recent psychological trauma or disturbance.

In light of the recent discovery that some people have an uncanny power to call back their lives in extreme detail, known as hyperthymesia or "highly superior autobiographical retentivity", Daniela Palombo and her team advise their syndrome is at the reverse farthermost and they suggest the characterization "severely deficient autobiographical memory".

The researchers depict three individuals with the postulated syndrome: AA is a 52-year-sometime married adult female; BB is a 40-year-old single man; and CC is a 49-year-quondam man living with his partner. All three are high functioning in their everyday lives, they have jobs, yet they likewise claim a life-long inability to recollect and relive by events from a first-person perspective (a condition they became fully enlightened of in their late teens or early adulthood). Their memory for facts and skills is completely normal. Two of the individuals had experienced depression many years before, but there was no evidence of this persisting.

Through intense neuropsychological testing for intelligence, memory and mental performance, the three individuals mostly scored normally or higher than normal. One key exception was poor performance on the ability to describe a complex effigy from memory. The researchers recall this visual retentiveness deficit could be cardinal to understanding their lack of autobiographical memories.

To test their memories of their lives, the researchers interviewed AA, BB and CC about various incidents from their pasts – a mixture of questions about generic life events and also personal incidents the participants proposed themselves afterwards looking at their calendars or consulting loved ones.

Compared to fifteen comparison participants (matched with the target participants for age and educational groundwork), the impaired participants were able to provide significantly fewer autobiographical, first-person details from their teen and youth years. For more recent events, the impaired participants' call up appeared more normal, simply the researchers think this is due to a combination of bourgeois scoring (when in doubt the researchers scored reminisces as autobiographical in nature), and the participants having learned compensation strategies such as studying diaries and photos and substituting their lack of autobiographical retentivity for retentiveness of facts and semantic particular.

From a subjective perspective, the impaired participants described their own memories of past events from both distant and more recent times every bit almost completely lacking a kickoff-person perspective or involving any sense of "re-experiencing". They also struggled to imagine future events, consistent with the idea that retention and future imagination involve shared mental processes.

Brain scans of the impaired participants uncovered no evidence of brain damage or affliction, but when they attempted to recall autobiographical details from their pasts, there was less activeness in fundamental encephalon regions associated with autobiographical memory, compared with control participants. This included the medial prefrontal cortex and the precuneus and parts of the temporal lobes. The correct-sided hippocampus (an of import encephalon area for memory) was slightly smaller in the impaired participants compared with controls. Whether cause or consequence, this might exist relevant to their deficits just it as well argues against the new syndrome only being an instance of "developmental amnesia", which in contrast is characterised by a desperate lack of brain volume in areas involved in retentiveness.

The researchers urge caution given their pocket-sized sample, and they admit that many questions remain. Yet they state "at that place is no evidence to support a neurological or psychiatric explanation for our findings". If this research generates plenty interest, I wonder if other healthy people will come frontward and describe their own absenteeism of autobiographical memories. This is what'south happened with some other neuropsychological syndromes recently, such every bit "developmental prosopagnosia", which is  the term for otherwise healthy people who have a specific difficulty remembering and recognising faces.

Palombo and her team say "our goal was to describe the 'severely deficient autobiographical memory' cases' cognitive syndrome and associated neuroimaging findings in as much particular every bit possible in order to stimulate further inquiry on the nature of individual differences in episodic autobiographical retention…". A crucial question they notation, is "whether these findings reflect an extreme on a continuum of ability in episodic autobiographical recollection, or, they may exist qualitatively set autonomously from the normal distribution of mnemonic capacities."

UPDATE: The researchers have a website www.deficientautobiographicalmemory.com providing information on this new syndrome; yous tin likewise take part in a survey at that place and join a forum to share your experiences.

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Palombo, D., Alain, C., Söderlund, H., Khuu, West., & Levine, B. (2015). Severely scarce autobiographical memory (SDAM) in healthy adults: A new mnemonic syndrome Neuropsychologia, 72, 105-118 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.04.012

—further reading—
Remembering together – How long-term couples develop interconnected memory systems

Postal service written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.