Psychologists in Canada think they've identified an entirely new memory syndrome in healthy people characterised by a specific inability to re-live their past. This may audio like a form of amnesia, but the three individuals currently described take no history of brain damage or illness and have experienced no known recent psychological trauma or disturbance.

In light of the contempo discovery that some people have an uncanny ability to remember their lives in extreme detail, known equally hyperthymesia or "highly superior autobiographical retentiveness", Daniela Palombo and her team suggest their syndrome is at the opposite farthermost and they propose the label "severely deficient autobiographical memory".

The researchers depict 3 individuals with the postulated syndrome: AA is a 52-year-erstwhile married adult female; BB is a 40-twelvemonth-onetime single human; and CC is a 49-twelvemonth-old man living with his partner. All three are high operation in their everyday lives, they have jobs, yet they too claim a life-long inability to recall and relive by events from a first-person perspective (a condition they became fully aware of in their late teens or early adulthood). Their memory for facts and skills is completely normal. Ii of the individuals had experienced low many years earlier, only there was no evidence of this persisting.

Through intense neuropsychological testing for intelligence, memory and mental operation, the three individuals by and large 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 primal to understanding their lack of autobiographical memories.

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

Compared to 15 comparison participants (matched with the target participants for age and educational background), the impaired participants were able to provide significantly fewer autobiographical, starting time-person details from their teen and youth years. For more recent events, the dumb participants' call back appeared more normal, but the researchers think this is due to a combination of conservative scoring (when in incertitude the researchers scored reminisces as autobiographical in nature), and the participants having learned bounty strategies such as studying diaries and photos and substituting their lack of autobiographical retention for memory of facts and semantic item.

From a subjective perspective, the impaired participants described their ain memories of by events from both distant and more recent times every bit well-nigh completely lacking a first-person perspective or involving any sense of "re-experiencing". They also struggled to imagine futurity events, consistent with the thought that memory and futurity imagination involve shared mental processes.

Brain scans of the dumb participants uncovered no bear witness of encephalon damage or illness, merely when they attempted to call up autobiographical details from their pasts, there was less activity in fundamental brain 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 right-sided hippocampus (an important brain expanse for retention) was slightly smaller in the impaired participants compared with controls. Whether cause or consequence, this might be relevant to their deficits simply it also argues confronting the new syndrome merely being an example of "developmental amnesia", which in contrast is characterised by a desperate lack of brain volume in areas involved in memory.

The researchers urge circumspection given their small sample, and they admit that many questions remain. Withal they country "there is no bear witness to back up a neurological or psychiatric explanation for our findings". If this research generates plenty interest, I wonder if other healthy people volition come forrad and describe their own absence of autobiographical memories. This is what's happened with another neuropsychological syndromes recently, such equally "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 scarce autobiographical memory' cases' cerebral syndrome and associated neuroimaging findings in equally much detail as possible in order to stimulate further research on the nature of individual differences in episodic autobiographical memory…". A crucial question they annotation, is "whether these findings reverberate an extreme on a continuum of ability in episodic autobiographical recollection, or, they may be qualitatively set autonomously from the normal distribution of mnemonic capacities."

UPDATE: The researchers take a website www.deficientautobiographicalmemory.com providing information on this new syndrome; you can as well take part in a survey there 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 retentiveness (SDAM) in salubrious adults: A new mnemonic syndrome Neuropsychologia, 72, 105-118 DOI: x.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.04.012

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

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Assimilate.