Overview

• Researchers describe TL, a 17-year-old in France, who can voluntarily re-experience personal events and generate richly detailed, plausible future episodes with a strong sense of pre-experience.
• TL portrays her autobiographical memories as organized within a mental “white room” divided into thematic areas such as family, vacations, friends, and toys, each with specific tags.
• She distinguishes this vivid autobiographical system from a “black memory” for academic knowledge that lacks emotional tone and requires deliberate effort to access.
• Standardized assessments (TEMPau and TEAAM) showed performance well above norms for detailed recall and episodic simulation, with a modest drop in vividness for distant future events consistent with typical patterns.
• The authors, based at the Paris Brain Institute and Université Paris Cité, note the absence of public-event and long-term calendar tests and present the case as a starting point for research on links between memory, spatial imagery, emotion, and control.