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Some People Can’t Remember Their Own Lives

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It’s an entirely new memory syndrome and it affects healthy people - the inability to re-live the past.
The three individuals currently described in a research have no history of brain damage or illness and have experienced no known recent psychological trauma or disturbance.
A 52-year-old married woman, a 40-year-old single man and a 49-year-old man living with his partner are high functioning in their everyday lives, they have jobs, yet they also claim a life-long inability to recollect and relive past events from a first-person perspective, a condition they became fully aware of in their late teens or early adulthood.
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 draw a complex figure from memory. The researchers think this visual memory deficit could be key to understanding their lack of autobiographical memories.
From a subjective perspective, the impaired participants described their own memories of past events from both distant and more recent times as almost completely lacking a first-person perspective or involving any sense of “re-experiencing”. They also struggled to imagine future events, consistent with the idea that memory and future imagination involve shared mental processes.
Brain scans of the impaired participants uncovered no evidence of brain damage or illness, but when they attempted to recall autobiographical details from their pasts, there was less activity in key brain regions associated with autobiographical memory, compared with control participants.

Photo: memory lane

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Date: 7 August 2020
Credits Publisher: Spiritual News

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