That a 16-year old remembers such detail about age 3 seems… unusual. I don’t mean a memory here or there; this child remembers very specific experiences and the feelings he had about them when he was almost pre-verbal.
Seems almost incredible.
Seems almost incredible.
Even today, I remember one "crazy conclusion" like the article talks about from I was very small (probably around 3). We lived near a river, which I inferred must be circular (like an ouroboros), because otherwise it would drain away. For some reason I can't exactly recall, I thought the town across the river was on the island this would form, and the town I lived in was along the outside edge. This of course meant that you could go to the center of the other town, but not to the center of our town.
I also have memories that were certainly from before I was 2 1/2 (my family moved then, so they stuck with me because that made them distinct). One of these memories is obviously real, but got "patched up" with some peripheral details from a little later in life. The memory was set outside at the bottom of the stairs of the apartment where my parents lived when I was born, the peripheral details of the design of those stairs and the setting beyond my immediate vicinity got replaced with those of different apartment building near our new house). I only realized this when I was 10, and we visited the town where I was born and went back to that apartment building.
Also, none of these memories were traumatic in the slightest. They were just little forgettable things to an adult that were new and unusual to me as a toddler.
I can remember back to age 9 months. I tried writing out all my early-childhood memories (< age 5 years) once when I was in college and got to about 10 screenfuls worth (encompassing only up to age 3), at which point I got bored and figured I'd just post what I had to LJ. My sister has similar, though not quite as vivid, recollections. I'd heard all my friends saying they basically couldn't remember anything before age 10, and I thought "bullshit", but apparently they're the ones who are normal and I'm the one who's a psychological oddity.
I have one therapist friend who said that early memories are a sign of trauma, but then I've also had therapists that say early memories are a sign of giftedness. Maybe these are one and the same, and developing consciousness and memory too early is its own form of trauma.
It's been fascinating to watch long-term memory develop in my son, though. When he was about 20 months old, we went on a walk by a house in the neighborhood that had a half-eaten pizza box strewn across its yard. We went back two weeks later, and he asked "Where's the pizza?" I was like "What pizza?" until I remembered what it had looked like a couple weeks before, and was like "It got cleaned up. How did you remember there was a pizza there?"
That doesn't seem normal, either. I mean, they couldn't even remember a friend they had from first grade? Maybe they weren't prompted adequately.
I suspect there's another cognitive difference at work here too, where my wife says she doesn't bother remembering things unless she thinks they'll be useful later, while I tend to store all sorts of random events and facts and figure I'll just sort through them later. As a result all of her early memories have to be "cued" (specifically asked about, or recalled in relation to some other similar situation that came to mind), while I could tell you about the time I got dropped off at a babysitter's house age 9 months or the pony ride I had for my 3rd birthday or how I'd go with my dad to the Veryfine juice factory in Littleton MA to pick up cases of juice bottles for my lunch.
Let's do an experiment, I'll try to conjure some primary school memories and we'll see if that brings forth some of yours:
- I remember a teacher sending me to fetch the polylux (a type of overhead projector) from another room. I didn't know yet what that was, but duefully obliged. I told the teacher in the other room that I was sent to get some kind of lynx, which I found hilarious.
- we did get flavored milk in paper boxes that had to be recycled in a special bin. The bin had only a slit so kids were forced to learn how to unfold the box so it takes up less space in the bin (those boxes are very common for all types of drinks and to this day it irritates me if someone doesn't unfold them when throwing them away). In the summer the bin would smell atrocious.
- I remember a fried who had a color printer & scanner at home and who offered to replicate a paper dinosaur model for the whole crafts class. 90ies inkjet technology was not up to the task and rendered all instructions unreadable - some kids managed to come up with some interesting creations still
- I well remember running through the hallway and somehow not making the turn, hitting my head hard on the wall/door
- at some point me and a couple of friends would build 'spaceships' out of boxes and bring them to school to play with during breaks. I got sick and while I stayed home I used the time to build a really big spaceship - but when I returned the next week, the spaceship craze had already ended
- bubble gum with pokémon stickers in them was all the rage
1. It is too hot. It is always too hot. Don't wrap me up so I can't get cool.
2. Fingernails shouldn't be used on scalps.
3. You aren't leaving now. Don't say you're leaving now when you will not leave for another half hour.
When I encountered that research, I reflected on my own childhood memories and concluded that this DRAM mechanism is what is going on for me.
On an alternate note, I'm in my 40s now and I hardly remember anything. I have two little kids and am often shocked when I see pictures from a year or two ago (can't remember when they were that young). A few other tech friends have suggested things are similar with them. I am constantly having to learn new stuff in my line of work (AI) ... stuff from 2017 is often referred to as "old". I'm a bit worried my memory capacity is finite and starting to overwrite on itself (sort of like a fake SD card that overwrites content or the Johnny Mnemonic movie)
Also, memories become plastic and maleable when recalled, so just because they can recall something does not mean the memory hasn't been twisted by doing so [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation (see section on reconsolidation)
Of course, there's a balance with living in the moment too, but as someone who forgets what happened yesterday, I try to document as much as I can.
Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories (memories of situations or events) before the age of two to four years, as well as the period before the age of ten of which some older adults retain fewer memories than might otherwise be expected given the passage of time.
A side note: my mother majored in education, so she actually talks about Childhood Amnesia, which other's have mentioned, to other parents or teachers mostly. She told it that kid don't remember anything before five. So when I tell her things about the experience of my younger self when I was well in to primary school, she was perplexed.
Also: while I'm actively thinking about it, those memories came flooding in, and though I'm not going to put them here, I think it gives a valid point that yes one can remember at the age of three.
The reason we don't have memories from our first months of life is because, it seems, when we learn to speak the previous experiences become somehow inaccessible to our cognition (but they're still there).
It doesn't seem impossible that people who learn to speak early have more early memories.
But of course, there is always the possibility that the memories are those of the adults who repeated them so frequently that the children began to treat them as their own.
And pre-birth, baby cries have distinct accents: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/babies-al...
But there’s more than one type of memory, and learned associations are not the same as episodic memory.
You will only have memories of memories before three.
Given his belief seem to go to after 3 years it just fits with the current theory.
Pop Science article - https://www.zmescience.com/research/why-we-cant-remember-bef...
Often; in my case; I feel it’s me remembering that I did remember something like that.
Or full on familly tradition about that thing you said or did. « Remember? »
My kid swears he remembers this one incident that my wife and I joke about, but what he remembers is the video of it. You physically don’t have the brain cells for long term memories until around age 5 which is why most childhood memories start around there.
I have some recall of a few, vivid, subjective, first person, "umwelt"-style memories of events that I can date to before I was five.
These feel very different to my normal "episodic" memories.
Having spoken to my dad about the same subject before, he has some that he can place to about age 2 or 3.
I'm not arguing your point; granted, memory is reconstructive imaging from some engram and not a replay of some recording and I'm super convinced that our brains and mind go through several developmental stages that function quite differently.
I also find it super interesting that people with hyperthymesia usually have a perfect recall start date a bit after age 10.
If your research shows that I would strongly urge you to publish it, because that’s a groundbreaking find.
In reality, the brain reaches its “full” size of 90% of your body mass around the age of 3. 75% at the age of 2 and 50% at the age of 1 and 25% at birth. Every source we have in Denmark suggests that the human brain starts forming memories around 5 months into the pregnancy.
It is access to these memories that aren’t always present, and that access seems to depend on repetition in ages 0-2 and language development beyond that.
However, if the brain was physically unable to form memories before the age of 5, well… small children wouldn’t be able to talk, walk or even breathe.