Time travelling French teen can return to the past and the future. But not how you think

A high school student in France can time-travel, going back to the past and even the future. She is not taking the trip physically, but mentally. This phenomenon is known as hyperthymesia. The report, published in Neurocase, details how the girl can go back to the past, recalling everything in vivid detail, and also visit the future that was imaginary yet detailed. This happens because of an extremely rare condition that allows the person to piece together every detail from an incident that happened years ago, even packing in the emotional feelings at the time and how one smelled, looked and reacted. Researchers Valentina La Corte, Pascale Piolino, and Laurent Cohen from French institutions, such as the Paris Brain Institute and the Université Paris Cité, studied this young girl to understand how she does it, and its future applications. The 17-year-old has been referred to as TL in the study. She has always known that her memory is different from others. TL could mentally revisit past events, recounting the tiniest things in detail. However, no one believed her.

TL has an autobiographical memory, which is the ability to travel through time and space and recall personal experiences and events. The researchers met TL, and she revealed some astounding things to them. She says her revisiting past memories is not random. Her internal world has boxes for different kinds of incidents, which are all compartmentalised. TL says her memories are "stored in a large, rectangular white room with a low ceiling." There are sections for family life, vacations, friends, school, her toys and more. There are tags with things she received from others, with the date she got it and the name of the person who gave it to her. She can even recall the emotions she and others would have felt at the time. While the events she connected with emotionally were in a white room, those linked to logic and academics were a "black memory" and needed effort to be recalled.

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Time-travelling girl has rooms in internal memory for different things

TL even has three additional rooms in her internal world - a cold “pack ice” room to help her get rid of anger, an empty “problems room” for thinking and an uncomfortable “military room,” which was born out of guilt since her father used to be away for military service. To understand how TL's autobiographical memory functioned, she was given two tasks. She was told to recall events from her childhood and adolescence, and she revealed highly specific details. In the second task, the researchers analysed her ability to recall or imagine scenes from both the past and the future. She did wonderfully again, and her imagined future was also extremely detailed and felt real, and carried a strong feeling of “pre-experience". Scientists say such cases can help provide direction for future research.