A case of hyperthymesia: rethinking the role of the amygdala in autobiographical memory

Much controversy has been focused on the extent to which the amygdala belongs to the autobiographical memory (AM) core network. Early evidence suggested the amygdala played a vital role in emotional processing, likely helping to encode emotionally charged stimuli. However, recent work has highlighted the amygdala's role in social and self-referential processing, leading to speculation that the amygdala likely supports the encoding and retrieval of AM. Here, cognitive as well as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging data was collected from an extremely rare individual with near-perfect AM, or hyperthymesia. Right amygdala hypertrophy (approximately 20%) and enhanced amygdala-to-hippocampus connectivity (>10 SDs) was observed in this volunteer relative to controls. Based on these findings and previous literature, we speculate that the amygdala likely charges AMs with emotional, social, and self-relevance. In heightened memory, this system may be hyperactive, allowing for many types of autobiographical information, including emotionally benign, to be more efficiently processed as self-relevant for encoding and storage.