Notes From "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering", by Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill & James L. McGaugh, NEUROCASE (2006) 12, 35-49

....Beginning to think about writers and memory for my chapter on autobiography.....

Abstract:
This report describes AJ, a woman whose remembering dominates her life. Her memory is “nonstop, uncontrollable, and automatic.” AJ
spends an excessive amount of time recalling her personal past with considerable accuracy and reliability. If given a date, she can tell you
what she was doing and what day of the week it fell on. She differs from other cases of superior memory who use practiced mnemonics to
remember vast amounts of personally irrelevant information. We propose the name hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek word
thymesis meaning remembering, and that AJ is the first reported case.



My notes:

So, just what is "unusual autobiographical remembering"?


At age twelve, this woman "became aware that she was able to vividly recall the details of the year before and exact dates"

"In contrast to the vast literature on impaired memory and
the amnesic syndrome, relatively little is known about
forms of superior memory. Previously reported cases of
superior memory seem to have in common the ability to
perform memory feats with meaningless information such
as learning long displays of words or digits and repeating
them back. None were reported to have superior autobio-
graphical memory or to be bothered by constant remember-
ing of personal experiences." (36)

-Diaries-
"From the age of 10 to the age of 34, AJ kept diaries, nearly
every day. Her diaries were various forms of scheduling cal-
endars with small entry areas, some just one inch by one inch.
Some years, her entries were completely filled with writing
so micrographic that even AJ read them to us with great diffi-
culty. Other years, her entries were less detailed, and more
readable, with 6–7 brief entries per day. She said that she was
“obsessed with writing things down” because things would
stay in her mind if she didn’t write them down in her diary. It
made her feel better to have things written down. She said she
rarely went back to review them. These diaries provided a
resource for our verification of her recollections. " (38)


"She says she can recall her
brother’s birth when she was three years, nine months old.
According to AJ she had always had a richly detailed mem-
ory for episodes but there was a change in her memory when
at age eight her family moved from the east coast to the west.
She reports she had loved their life in the east and did not
want to move. She says she was “traumatized by the move”
and that after the move she started to “organize her memo-
ries,” making lists of friends from back east, looking at pic-
tures of her house and thinking about the past “a lot.” She
states that after the move, her memories became “clearer.”
"She says her personal memories are vivid, like a running
movie and full of emotion." (39)

"One way to conceptualize this phenomenon is to see AJ as
someone who spends a great deal of time remembering her
past and who cannot help but be stimulated by retrieval cues.
Normally people do not dwell on their past but they are ori-
ented to the present, the here and now. Yet AJ is bound by
recollections of her past. As we have described, recollection
of one event from her past links to another and another, with
one memory cueing the retrieval of another in a seemingly
“unstoppable” manner. According to one theory, it takes a
special neurocognitive state to enable present stimuli to be
interpreted as such cues. Such a state is called episodic
retrieval mode and refers to the orientation of the subject as
she focuses on past happenings (Tulving 1983, 1999). " (46)

"She is dominated by her constant, uncontrollable remembering,
finds her remembering both soothing and burdensome, thinks
about the past “all the time,” lives as if she has in her mind “a
running movie that never stops”..." (46)

"Give her an opportunity to recall one event and there is a spreading activation of rec-
ollection from one island of memory to the next. Her retrieval
mode is open, and her recollections are vast and specific.
There has been research on brain regions involved with epi-
sodic retrieval mode, but not on superabundant autobiograph-
ical memory as it has not been identified before." (46)

link to article: http://today.uci.edu/pdf/AJ_2006.pdf