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The inability to "mentally travel in time" is the most recent memory disorder among intriguing researchers, and although most people who do suffer do not realize it. , perhaps more common than we think.
Susie McKinnon does not remember her childhood or any other stage of her previous life in which she now lives at age 60. Nor remember special events. He knows that he went to his nephew's wedding. She knows that her husband accompanied her. But he does not remember being there.
In fact, has very few memories of his life, although he does not have amnesia. to badume that our minds work like those of others. In general, we do not discuss the feeling of memory. And McKinnon badumed that when people told stories of their past, they invented the details to entertain others.
This is not until a friend practicing medicine asked her if she could take a memory test as part of her studies. both realized that McKinnon lacked autobiographical memory.
After that, McKinnon investigated amnesia, but the stories of people who lost their memory as a result of illness or brain damage to the brain were not reflected. Your experience She remembered that events had happened, she did not know how had to live them
.
A new syndrome
A little over ten years ago, after being fractured a foot, she searched for activities spends time and begins to read research on mental journeys over time and makes the decision to contact a researcher in this area.
The day he wrote an e-mail to Brian Levine, a scientist in the memory of Rotman Research Institute in Baycrest, Toronto, she was nervous. For Levine, it was one of the most interesting days of his career. And the result of their communication was the identification of a new syndrome: Severe deficit of autobiographical memory .
Humans have the extraordinary ability to travel mentally in [19659009] at the time come and go in our minds at will. Do not forget that when you were in elementary school, or imagine that next week you will be sitting on a towel on the beach watching the dolphins swim to the horizon. Probably not only do you imagine the facts of these scenarios, but also the experience of being there, and that is precisely what McKinnon can not do.
As Brian Levine told me in the BBC radio show, All in the spirit "for her, past events are experienced almost as if they had happened in the third person as if they had been past experiences of another person. "
And to some extent we all do this, forgetting most things that happen to us, but for McKinnon, it's a lot more extreme.
How is it different from amnesia?
This syndrome is very different from amnesia, that usually occurs after a particular event or brain injury and prevents the person from retaining new information to create new memories.
Persons with severe autobiographical memory deficit syndrome (or abbreviated SDAM). English) can learn and keep new information, but this information lacks the richness of real life.
McKinnon remembers details of an event because she saw an image or deliberately learned a story about what happened. He can not visualize having been there nor with what he wore or with whom he was.
"It could have been someone else who attended a family wedding and not I. In my mind, I have no evidence that I was there, it does not give the impression that it's something I've done, "McKinnon said. in All in the spirit .
This means that McKinnon can not feel nostalgia for reliving the best moments of life . The advantage is that can not remember the pain badociated with bad experiences either. Hard times, like the death of a parent, are just as intense right now, but with time, the feeling fades.
This may make her a better person, because she does not hold a grudge because she can not evoke the emotion that made her uncomfortable in the first instance.
With respect to the cause, researchers have so far found no disease or trauma badociated with this problem and concluded that people had just been born this way. Although Levine and his team continue to study possible links with other disorders.
Inability to visualize mentally
McKinnon also . ] afantasía, it means that he can not view the images. It is difficult to know for sure if this prevents you from keeping intense memories from other people. Decades of memory research have shown that we are rebuilding an event in the spirit every time we remember it, but we do not know if we all do it the same way.
Some may see an image or video in their mind, others may think more in terms of abstract ideas or facts.
Catherine Loveday, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster, wonders if there are similarities in our early memories. We can remember events that happened to us before the age of three, because we could have heard about it or see pictures. But we have trouble remembering how the experience was felt.
For the moment, it is unclear what is the prevalence of SDAM, although Levine and his team are trying to find out with the help of an online survey. 5,000 people have already participated and many say they believe they have this problem. Although it's a self-selected sample, the figures suggest that is perhaps more common than we think.
Levine's team studies the idea that autobiographical memory might be part of a spectrum in which SDAM would be at an extreme, while people with very good autobiographical memory, who rarely forgets something as bbad as it is, would end up in the other.
So, does it matter if you have this problem?
If SDAM does not affect your life, probably not.
In McKinnon's case, she has always lived this way. Therefore, to know that she is suffering from troubles that probably have her whole life is only an interesting fact that gives meaning to the differences she has sometimes noticed between her and the others. Now he understands, for example, that others do not invent stories.
"My experience has never been other, so for me, it's not a loss he said.
" As I've never had this ability (to remind me in detail of something of the past or to visualize events), I can not be angry. "
] And McKinnon sees another advantage: not thinking about the past nor dreaming about it future.
"I know a lot of people are fighting this notion of being in the present moment, but for me it's the simplest thing because it's the only way my brain works . So I still live the moment all the time . "
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