Brian Levine, 
University of Toronto

Reconstructing events from one’s personal past personal reflects an advanced state of consciousness that is engaged in future as well as past imagining. This talk will describe the neural correlates of this capacity in neurological patients with selective impairments in autobiographical memory, in healthy adults with multimodal brain imaging, and in individuals with with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, including a group of individuals experienced a life-threatening plane crash. Although it is self-evident that individual differences in autobiographical capacities exist, there is little research on this topic. Our group and others have identified normal individuals with extraordinary high or low autobiographical re-experiencing capacities. I will describe current research on measuring individual differences in different autobiographical capacities, including correlates with personality, neuroimaging findings, neuropsychological findings, and genetics.