Why can’t we remember being born or our first words?
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The clouds covered the sun, and a gust of wind passed over me, and I was cold, and I could only experience the sensation of discomfort. Then the sun emerged, and I was basked with warmth, and I experienced happiness that brought a smile to my face and a feeling of safety.
For about two hours I existed in this language-less state. Without words I wasn't able to think. There was no internal dialogue. I couldn't reason about things, or think about the past or future. There were no words there to attach to the objects around me let alone abstract concepts. Then, as quickly as my language had been erased, it returned again in patches. Once it was all back I was able to reflect on this experience using my words. I have always wondered if this is what it is like to be a baby.
You may have a point in some way (not specifically narrative alone, though): It is true that certain anesthetics don't even render us unconscious, but just make us forget what we were perceiving while having our CNS motor functions paralyzed... and maybe deep sleep is similar--while paralyzed maybe we forget our senses moment by moment. But ego death from psychedelics is not the same thing: it doesn't completely erase your ability to recall impressions and images.
Either way none of this explains how qualia can arise other than it helps to remember things for us to have a sense of chronology/persistence of experience, and so I doubt a machine that can come up with a narrative of what it is sensing would magically have qualia (we would have no way of knowing, even if it claimed it did--all we could know is that WE are consciously observing an apparently conscious thing).
I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. Like "the prestige" the man drowns each night and experiences death, but the clone has the illusion that it has been alive up until the point it was created. In this case I see consciousness and qualia as a temporary instance/shape of neurons activating in unison that is suddenly conscious, but can lose residency, and when it re-forms has the illusion "it" is the same thing and maintains an identity.
Considering it takes many depths of artificial neurons to simulate a single human neuron, and the speed at which learning can regress is so slow now, I think we are a very very long way from having such an instance of consciousness appear in an active neural network. Such a network would need to be so analog that it would be effectively the same thing as actual grey matter, and you may as well just have a baby. At least with a baby you would have a true sense of the responsibility you have in creating such an instance (or persistent series of instances that creates an identity).
That makes me think about a saying I've heard about how memory isn't read-only, it's always read-write, and you write back the modified version of what you read. We're constantly changing our past to be more more like what wished it was, and you can see an example of that process in another of my replies in this thread.
That's a really interesting thought that I'll have to spend some more time with. It makes me think of an experiment I heard about[0] with people who had lobotomies. The split brain leads to one side having verbal facilities, and each side having one eyeball sensory perception. They showed the non-verbal eyeball a sign that said something like "stand up", and most patients did. When then asked why they stood up, they had unrelated answers, like "my legs were stiff". So the idea that we just create narratives as post-hoc explanations of our actions is pretty compelling.
[0] I really wish I could find the reference to the experiment, but my google-fu is failing me and I don't recall where I read about it.
Once my language facilities came back, I could remember only the "shape" of the experience, but none of its contents. I remember feeling the emotions, but I don't have the usual internal voice that narrates them. I knew there were sounds, but I can't describe them well, except in terms of my emotional response to them.
This occasionally leads to communication difficulties in translation into language.
What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.
It’s not dangerous. I still know where I am, how to drive, and what’s going on. It just doesn’t feel like I’m doing it. So if I think “I need to pull over” and then I pull over, it’s as if I’ve observed myself doing that in some sort of higher abstracted state. I’ve thought the action into reality, but I had no connection to my body doing the action.
The hard part to explain is that I can still “feel” my body during these episodes. But it just feels like data being processed by my brain. I have no sense that the things I’m feeling are me, or a part of me. This is why the video game analogy sometimes works.
If you’re playing a game you’re making decisions, you’re physically controlling the actions (through a keyboard or controller). You might even have some haptic feedback that you can feel. But you have no sense of that character being you. You have no ego connection to that character, at least not in any meaningful way.
That’s what these episodes feel like. It’s like experiencing an ego death, just very quickly and without any lead up or warning.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/depersonalization-disord....
I’d like to say it’s gone away since it first appeared two years ago, but it hasn’t entirely. The “not real” sensation seems to linger in the background of my life permanently now. I notice it’s worse if I’m stressed, haven’t had sleep, or haven’t hung out with any friends in person in a while. I also wonder if working remotely via Zoom meetings all the time contributes to the problem; it would be interesting to know if diagnoses of depersonalization spiked during the pandemic.
Frightening. The longest I had one was about a day. Most come and go very quickly now since I've learned to manage them. I feel like the longer I panic and think about the longer they last.
During the competition, while I was on the platform, I felt like my consciousness was ten feet above my head, and all my actions happened autonomously, without any conscious direction. I can hear, on the video someone recorded, my father yelling my name from the stands, but in the moment I had no conception of that. I bumped into the spotter while resetting my stance on one of the squats, and didn't even really register or respond to his presence.
It felt incredibly powerful, but that's probably because of all the purposeful preparation that led up to it. I can't imagine how terrifying that would be to have happen at random without any warning.
Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?
Somewhat unrelatedly, I've recently been toying with a philosophical idea: what is the inverse of solipsism? Solipsism is the belief that the Self is the only real thing, since it's the only thing that can think. Everything else, and everyone else, may all be false perceptions. So I am real, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. The inverse of that would be that everyone else is real, and I their collective mass hallucination. Who am I to say that I exist? The best way to exist is to not believe in one's existence. I wouldn't say I exactly subscribe to it, but I do enjoy thinking about it.
No I maintain full muscle control, physical feeling, etc. It's much harder to explain because of this. It's more or less sudden onset ego death, which is why it's so frightening when it happens. You can only get so used to it, and even now as an adult my heart still races although I don't panic.
One physical way to think about it is that my movements feel like they precede my thoughts about that movement, but I'm still thinking and bringing those movements into existence. Time gets jumbled during these episodes much like what happens the moment before you're knocked unconscious, but the unconscious part never comes.
The only time I've been able to replicate even a small part of these episodes was when I was very very high. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time and I hadn't had an episode in a long while. I smoked a ton of weed with one of my friends and parts of that high felt like these episodes, though much more subtle. So I would say if you've ever been so high that you have a hard time keeping track of time, and you often get stuck in these mini loops of saying or doing the same thing, it's kinda sorta like that, but not really.
Sorry for such a short, bizarre reply. Your comment and GP are fantastic accounts, and I genuinely appreciate you both for sharing these experiences. Let me know if you have questions, but certainly no need to reply otherwise. Cheers :)
Shrooms are wild.
Language is more like a tool than an innate part of me.
Jokes aside, yeah, I have no internal dialogue, I at best have an internal monologue if I'm specifically trying to express something in language (e.g. to write it down like now).
I wouldn't say I think in "symbols and visual elements" as I also have aphantasia, which means y'all literally seeing pictures (or even being able to place imagined objects in your perception of the physical space around you) in your head feels equally weird to me as the voices.
I find it hard to imagine my future selves ("Where do you see yourself ten years from now?" is hard to answer for me because I literally can't) and feel detached from my past selves (memories are somewhat abstract because of my aphantasia), but I've read that this may be related to my autism. I can anticipate changes/events but it's more like seeing a cartoon sketch than directly interpolating the present and the predicted outcome.
My thinking is definitely spatial though. If I work on anything that requires focus, I sense concepts I work on persisting outside my "peripheral vision" much like you'd perceive a faint directional noise.
I also have terrible memory when it comes to names and dates or mathematical formulas (or chemicals for that matter). I find it easier to memorize processes (if they have a logical flow), which is probably how I ended up in programming.
Oh, and I am terrible at perceiving things like hunger or needing to pee until it's urgent, but that again seems to be an autism (or ADHD) thing.
It's a common belief, but a myth, that you need language to think. You can tell you don't, like when you can't remember a word but you know what you are trying to say, or when can't remember someone's name but you remember everything about them. Deaf children (certainly before modern times), they know how to think no problem, but they don't have language.
In the same way that if you fail a high school math test based on material you covered in class already, it is because you were unable to recall the bits you don't yet understand. You've seen it before the test, but since you didn't understand it, you can't recall and apply it.
Edit: Oh, and of course the memory from when I was exactly three.. I fell on my head from quite high, landed on ice.. I probably fainted, but I remember a guy came and carried me home. I got a concussion from that.
I remember thinking "Holy shit, they remember it all."
If they're young enough, I'd do that!
The prototypical scenario in which this is relevant is the whole "there is a monster in my closet". Sure, they just imagined it. But the visual feels just as real as if they had actually seen it.
It's easy to dismiss this as an adult, but modern parental advice is to treat these flights of fancy very earnestly, and engage it on it's own rules ("I went inside the closet and I chased the monster away" is a much better strategy than "There's no monster in your closet") [this isn't advice for you, I'm sure you don't need it, but any non-parent reading that may find it interesting]
My 2 year olds frequently tells me and my wife stories that we know are factually inaccurate. (Like something that happened on a walk with one of us so we know for sure it didn't happen)
The best leading theories about infant amnesia is that language IS what causes it. Memories are indexed by different keys until language is developed. Once language comes in, it becomes the only key function for accessing memories, and the ones mapped before language just become unsearchable.
I hope I'm wrong. It would be super cool if your kids actually remembered these things for real. But I doubt it.
That actually makes a ton of sense. Also a bit eerie to think that my brain holds information that I just can't search for. I wonder if certain triggers could cause that information to surface, since even though our memories are searched through language, maybe there are other 'pathways' that can reach those spots. Kinda like memory that's not mapped in any pages, it's physically there but you can't normally address it.
Think about all the time you couldn't remember an actor's name, or some detail about a party. But then as soon as someone tells you, or starts telling a story from the party, it all comes flooding back.
When she was 3 years old, she still remembered them. Forget everything about them at age 7.
I can date other memories relatively accurately because they are from an apartment where I only lived until I was 2 years old. They probably don't go as far much farther back than my first memory. I remember playing with a car, looking out the window, meeting my neighbour who I never saw again after we moved etc.
Some may call them false memories, but I don't see any reason why we should not be able to keep memories alive if we think about them from time to time? It's not like there's a big "reset" on your birthday that deletes all information from your brain. I have always reflected on the past from an early age, and I think the memories were kept alive by this and moved into the more mature part of the brain as time went on. At least that is my theory.
Maybe most people don't remember their first years because they don't reflect on them from an early age, and the memories are destroyed as the brain changes and evolves? Like a LRU cache :-)
During the same trip, I also heard my mother as if my mental dictionary of sounds was made of her voice.
I think half the memory might be imagined, which is while I was underwater. I remember it being green and seeing fish nearby, which seems a little unlikely to adult me (I would scare the fish away presumably).
The rest of my memory is being rescued. I'm relatively certain it's a real memory, because I can describe to you what it feels like to have your entire body weight pulling against your scalp, as my dad lifted me out by a handful of hair onto the dock.
It was not painful, as you might imagine. It was rather nice.
They did a vocabulary test and played a game. A year later they did another vocabulary test and memory recall challenge. They found that for the kids that remembered the game they played, if they didn't know the word for something at that point, they wouldn't use that word when recalling, even if they had subsequently learned that word in the meantime between tests.
Their conclusion was that memories were closely linked to the vocabulary the kids knew at the time the memory formed.
Been trying to find it again to no avail, sadly.
I don't think I'm particularly prone to suggestion (although I was young at the time). I feel like if it can happen to me, it must happen to other people also, and I too wonder how much of what we remember is false memories.
Obviously not a true memory. I remember remembering it, and that feels weird, because I don't actually remember it happening anymore (saying that makes me realize that the false memory is either me remembering that, or me remembering remembering that). I think it came from a weird dream.
It may have something to do with my mother telling me not to go near the window because I could fall. My grandmother used to visit us there a lot too, and I liked that. The brain is super weird.
The only reason I can recall anything is because the words that I use to try to recall it ("what did I do yesterday morning?") take me down a chain of associations that hopefully will spit me out yesterday morning sometime, and that thing I remembered (maybe that I dropped one of my shoes when I was putting them on, or that one of my teeth hurt when I brushed it) can be a conduit to remember the rest of my morning.
The memory experiment just seems like spaced repetition to me [edit:which you can use to teach a cockroach, or a worm.] They show a baby a unique object with a particular use. The next time they show the baby that unique object, they either recall the particular use, or the experimenter demonstrates it again. As these periods grow longer and longer, the memories grow longer. The intuitive reason it would be less effective earlier in life than later is because babies can't see properly, or understand the positions of things in space, so they don't care when a mobile or a train moves; they don't recognize it as interesting.
Note: I can never remember what I did yesterday morning, because with the way I process the world, there's usually nothing in the sentence "What did you do yesterday morning?" that would associate with a particular day; every morning is yesterday morning. If I'm celebrating having done something significant "yesterday," however, I can start with that thing and work backwards to how I prepared for that thing. Some people are journalers/diarists, or heavily scheduled, and knowing what they have to do today, or maybe the last thing they wrote in their journal, would bring up almost immediately the memories that I have a huge difficulty recalling.
Even then, though. At a very early age, they will recognize their mother. This comes well before "object permanence," which happens at about 8 months.
(Object Permanence is the ability to remember a thing even after you can't see it anymore, and to recognize it as the same, rather than a new one, when it returns. It is the ability to mentally follow an object when it "goes away" and to understand that it still exists)
If there's any stimulus that gets worked over and over, it's your mother's face. Surely in a traditional mother-child relationship you use your mother's face to learn how faces work, probably even your own face.
I'm not sure what you're trying to explain to me. I'm aware of object permanence.
I've lived in the same house for 20 years now, and don't have anchors to connect memories to dates because of that. I have memories that could be 5 years old or 15, I couldn't say.
I also do this thing, where when I read about something that was some time ago with a specific year, I try to see it in the context of what I was doing back then, and what situation I was in. For example "ah, this was my last year of university, so I was living in that apartment, meeting so and so...".
Again all those things are "free floating" with no feeling of calendar in my mind, but factually knowing what I was doing during some time frame and using other specific "anchor dates" of important events in my life and the world, it's fun to read about something old and reconstructing it in the context of my life back then.
It does not work very well the other way around. There are a lot of memories similar to: "Oh, I remember that party... wonder when that was. I definitely was in university then, but that's not narrowing it down." (Especially because "pre-PhD" university studying lasted much longer in Germany back then than it is nowadays.) If I really wanted to know the exact year, it would be detective work.
My dad kept a journal of his WW2 experience. He told me some years ago that he read it, and was shocked that it didn't jibe with his recollections.
Sometimes I wonder how people who write autobiographies can possibly remember things in such detail.
I would re-state what you said as:
"semantic memories" (of facts in objective reality), "procedural memories" (how to do something) and "autobiographical memories" (of subjective experience).
I met my great grandmother, whom was nearing her death. She knew that we were making one last visit and that I was coming. I remember meeting her, being in the old 80's hospital room with the upper white and lower green tiles. I remember how frail her hands were, like delicate paper. I remember getting out of my stroller and laying my head on her hand, carefully.
I could feel this was my last and only moment with her, and that somehow a continuation or some completion was right then and there.
I have other memories that become more 'solid' later. My memories really start around when I was 3 onwards, along when I was able to read. I never was taught... I just knew how to. My mom even still has my first alphabet I wrote down when I was 2.5y old.
Direction was important to me somehow. I can remember the orientation of every house we've lived in. And it's coarse, like north, west, etc...
The very earliest one is of being in my crib, bouncing the little spring that is wound around one of the shafts that hold the crib together. I would lay there and lift it up, and it would bounce. Boing, boing, boing... Lift higher, more bounces. Slamming it down worked too. A related one, a bit later was flicking the little springy door stop and realizing they were the same kind of thing! And that realization is probably why I remember.
I can remember my crib, parts of the house, and the porch with little walk leading to the fence and the little gate that could open to the sidewalk, out of our yard, into the world.
One day, my parents set me down, opened that gate and walked next door, across the street! And there was this other little kid. A little older than me, his name was "cash" and I had associated "cash" with money, and why would someone name a person like money? I thought about that a lot while we met, and I have a set of photos from that day in my head. The walkway, being set down to walk. The gate opening, or open. Walking up to Cash, my parents on my left, us talking while they talked, and then the best:
Cash said, "you want to play downstairs?" I said, "yeah" because I had been downstairs in our house a time or two and people had all manner of interesting stuff in the downstairs! Parts, equipment, things, and all sorts of smells, and the walls are usually not finished, can see stuff we don't always see.
We walked in the door, Cash opened the door leading downstairs and flicked a light switch, and the light came on. He said, "Two way switch" and that it just worked when you needed it to. I remember being super impressed! Like that was some high tech our house did not have. Their house was much bigger than ours...
I need to cut this short. Bottom line is those people were thieves. They had way more stuff downstairs than I had seen and it solidified in my mind. Tires, radios, stuff..
Years later, age 17'ish, I mentioned all this to my mother, who said they moved after finding out!
The people in this discussion saying that memory is about connections are on the right path. The earliest ones I have also have a basis, a connection of sort, a place to be.
(This stuff + sleep deprivation is a heady cocktail!)
Edit: this is what a pediatrician said to help console a parent who was hesitant to try sleep training
A variation on Merlin Sickness.
How can he be afraid of the thing that happened yesterday if he doesn't remember yesterday?
Interestingly language shapes memory. There was a study I read years ago (digging up that citation would be next to impossible) that revolved around psychologists asking adults to recall memories from their childhood. And what was curious about the study is that all of the participants reverted to using simpler, more child like vocabulary to describe the memories, because the memories formed at the time were formed along with the level of language they had.
I have observed this in myself when discussing certain computing concepts, talking about projects I undertook 20 and 30+ years ago, and describing in language those concepts that today we would simply say "oh, that's this data structure" or a particular technique or algorithm or concept.
You observe the same thing in certain cultures that do not have the words to describe certain concepts, e.g. complex familial relationships in English. And you observe certain things in gendered and non-gendered Romance languages.
I grew up before there were camcorders and video recording in every phone or even instamatic polaroid cameras in every hand at every point in life, and I have "core memories", very distinct events in my life, where I describe them as "riding a bicycle" moment. One day you cannot ride a bicycle, and then something clicks inside you, and then you can. Learning to swim, learning to read, learning to ride a bicycle, learning to wire up a circuit, learning to stand up in my crib, learning to take my first steps, learning to get out of the pushchair. I have a recurring nightmare, that has lessened over the years, as I've gotten older, but still holds the same terror, that forms part of my earliest memories, I would say I have had that nightmare before I could even speak coherently. It's like a movie that plays in my head, the exact same way, the exact same sounds, the exact same feelings of dread.
I also log a lot of my life, so I don't recall "yesterday" but I can tell you a lot of what was going on in my life on any particular day, from deaths of pets and family members, to changes to my workshop, to code I wrote, to algorithms I was pondering, to new stuff I learnt.
This correlates well with the study on toddlers I described here[1]. I guess it's not terribly surprising that words are being used to encode events, they're pretty darn good at compressing details.
If I get a new piece of information, I'm much more likely to remember it if I can relate it to things I already know. The things that don't relate to anything else are difficult to remember, or at least difficult to recall.
My theory is that when you're first born you have no basis to relate anything to. Eventually you experience enough things that your brain starts making connections to make it easier to start remembering things. Those early memories, if they exist, are orphaned and lost to time without a clear path to recall them.
You're right in another way, though: when you are born your body is still not physically wired up completely yet, a process which starts in the womb but we're not in there long enough to allow it to complete.
This is part of the reasons newborns flail around so much -- they're learning what's connected to what, and that takes lots of repetition.
I would be surprised if this didn't affect the physical wiring of the brain, too.
Also keep in mind that in the body, connectedness is not a binary idea. It's really the strength of connections in relation to each other that make up how we respond to things.
With the same level of stimulation that you get from a sensory deprivation tank (by design.) Without memories and associations to get lost in, lying in a sensory deprivation tank would probably be a completely timeless thing, no different than being dead. There's very little you're going to learn in the womb that will help you to interpret what's happening outside, other than you may get some experience with the sounds of your mother's language. [edit: Feelings of acceleration? A sense of one's own mass?]
Hope my kid will more memories of me, her mom and the people that love her than the few I have of my dad.
Yes, it implies that we are essentially conscious through others and no man is truly an island.
As the article mentions, it might explain the lack of autobiographical memories in early years.
It also explains how treating a person as if they were X results in them eventually behaving as if they are X, especially if you are of consequence to them (a parent, a teacher) or if this treatment is persistent in their life. Since their model of themselves is partly your model of them, it adjusts correspondingly to whatever label they are assigned.
I have a number of other memories from the ~3 year age range, including my brother being brought home, and they are still pretty vivid, though of course I have played them back in my head many times.
Notheless I repeated it to him since more than anything it seemed he just wanted me to say it for his own amusement. Shortly after while I was under this fog of confussion I was given photographs of me with some cousins at some nearby park, the event had happened a week earlier and I was very intrigued by these photos and spent a long time looking at them trying to recall the event in some way but no matter how much I tried I never did, to me it was the same as looking at a stranger's photos.
That's my first memory, since then its been an uninterrupted stream. By my calculations I must have been older than 3 and younger than 5 since I remember when my sister was born who is the youngest but not my younger brothers. If someone ever mentions a past event all I ever need is a few pieces and then I will eventually recall without problems and with many more details than they themselves remember, same thing with any photograph that includes others. I've never experience anything similar to that initial event.
If you could remember that, you'd have PTSD for life. It's too much like waterboarding.
I used VIM for a long time in read-only mode (not saving / creating memories).
Then one day I finally learned the VIM language command “:w”, which allows me to save a file (save a memory).
I wonder if memories are highly dependent upon learning a language/commands. Once you learn a language, it allows you to create and save.
At some point, the more basic constructs (the ones you created as an infant) are not as useful anymore, as your thoughts are now grounded in the more advanced constructs. This causes you to forget about the more basic constructs, as they are not used anymore; the basic constructs have served their purpose and you moved on to the more advanced ones.
I have a collection of memories from when I was 22 months old, but I can date those in retrospect. I also have various memories of being fairly young, but have no idea if they were before or after 22 months as there is nothing to date them by. It's not that different than more modern memories - I can remember something happened about a decade back, but often have no idea if it happened eight years ago or twelve years ago, unless I can date and contextualize it by some means.
Memory at this age is extremely malleable. And I mean "malleable" even years later. I mean "malleable" as in you can create false memories. Consider this experiment [1]. Participants were told about meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney. A significant number of participants then added their own stories of the same thing happening. Bugs Bunny isn't at Disney. He's a Warner Brothers character.
What I suspect happens is that you're told about these events at various points, enough that you start to fill in the details.
Dating memories from childhood is even more difficult. It's easy to be years off the mark. Often it's only successfully dated by corroborating details eg you remember a dog that died when you were 4 or you remember your room in a house that you moved out of.
[1]: https://www.washington.edu/news/2001/06/11/i-tawt-i-taw-a-bu...
The scientific evidence? Scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons moves to the left or the right, how can a scientist determine that I don't remember what I remember?
There is further a memory I have of being outside of an apartment being carried inside the apartment and to the left of the entry way was a mirrored wall with an orange couch in front of it. My parents have no pictures from this time period, and we moved out of that apartment when I was a little over a month old, because it was, according to my mother, a childless apartment complex, so they had to leave.
I have a lot of memories that pre-date me being 4 which many people I know have no or only one or two memories from their lives that young.
I just find it hard to believe that I manufactured all these memories.
I don't believe that everyone has Infantile Amnesia. Maybe many do, but not everyone.
Years later, soon after learning to speak, the baby girl (my ex) kept talking about going back into the warm, dark, safe room.
By the time she and I were in a relationship, it was unclear whether it was her own memory, or just what her mother had repeated back to her over the years. But the story has stuck, and it does make me think deeply about life.
I'm convinced that I would dream of being born when I was 3-5 years old.