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Comment by lusr | Hacker News Reader

Impressive - how many people have concrete enough memories from that age? I have maybe one I could use to locate somewhere, but otherwise that age is lost to me.

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I can't help but think that at five years old I could have told anyone that I lived in Oxford, and therefore wouldn't need to remember what it looked like to find my way back there 25 years later.

Am I wrong about the ability of five year olds?

Not at all. When I went to school at age 6, I knew which busses to take, knew the names of the stops that were relevant to me (and after a few weeks the name of all the bust stops in between), and my parent's address and phone number. And I grew up rather sheltered, in comparison to Indian slum inhabitants.

Granted, one year can make quite a difference at that age, I'm sure I at least know the name of the town and which quarter I lived in.

My daughter knew her City and street address at 2.75 years, but then, that's just because we taught it to her as a fun game, not something she picked up organically. Whether should would recall when in a scary environment separated from her family is another thing entirely.

Many places in India don't have definitive addresses. They tend to be relative, such as "across from the train station." And I suspect that when you live in the slums and are begging at the age of five, your world is quite small -- the chances that you might leave town on a trip or know someone who's not from the same area are slim. So you likely don't need to know, much less practice, the name of your town.

Most likely his memories are so vivid because he got lost. Our brain remembers that kind of situations way better.

Plus his life was pretty tough. He might have some rather traumatic memories from that first town where he lived in. Life of a beggar aint that comfortable.

I remember the town I lived in when I was 4 years old vividly. In my case it wouldn't help much because it's been turned into a resort community and everything has changed. I sure hope Google Earth is archiving snap shots over time so people can look back and watch how the world transformed.

My memories before 4 were a blur, but my daughter remembers falling off a Big Wheel and breaking her front tooth when she was 1-1/2. She's 17 now but she can even tell you what outfits she and her best friend were wearing that day. Some people just have sharp memories of their early childhood.

An old family friend of mine has studied a fair few things in this area and his opinion (I'm not sure if this was based on his studies or if it's just a related area) is that people cannot remember anything from that age.

The logic here is that if you are reminded of things your brain can think you remember them. This doesn't just mean that someone can say "when you were 2 x happened" and you suddenly think "I remember x!", it means that, if for example you heard the story when you were 5, a decade later that story might now feel like a memory of the incident itself.

I can't remember exactly what age he said the cut-off was, I think it was 3ish - and I don't honestly know if this is a well-educated opinion or a proven fact, but it's definitely an opinion I'm inclined to believe, both for it sounding reasonable and for the credibility of the person who explained it to me.

edit:

Just looked up his current job, as it's been a few years since I've spoken to him. He's currently a tenured (that bit I remembered!) Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and his bio page says his specialist areas include:

  - Emotional Development and Social Cognition in Infancy and Early Childhood
  - Individual Differences in Children's Socio-Cognitive Development
  - The Inter-Generational Transmission of Social Fears
  - Attachment and the 'Internal Working Model' Construct
  - Children's Theory of Mind and Folk-Psychological Understanding

By directly referencing him I hope I haven't mis-represented him too much, I'm sure there are inaccuracies in my memory of the conversations we had about it, but I'm confident the gist is correct.

My opinion is that this is probably what is happening when people claim to have many clear memories from a very young age, though I dare not suggest it since they tend to take offense at having their reality challenged and I don't have data to back up my suspicion. The correct term for this is "confabulation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation) and is related to "false memory" and "source amnesia".

I'm sure most people have a few legitimate clear memories (the single one I have is indeed of a traumatic, though amusing, event) of the 4-6 age range, and of course you have your savants; it's the unusual number of people who claim to vividly recall their youth pre-3 to 4 years of age who I'm skeptical of.

I just spoke to my mum who happens to be writing him a letter and is going to ask about it to get clarification - though it will be too late for this thread.

She also thought she remembered him saying 3 years old, so 4-6yo memories are perfectly feasible, and I think most people have them. I have loads.

To use technology apologies, the thing is that memory is not a video recording. It is constantly actively maintain reformed in your brain every time you recall it. Some research has shown that a long term memory can be destroyed by inducing minor amnesia at the moment of recall, while many diseases can catastrophically damage brain and memory without harming long term memories. It is very similar in some sense to maintaining hot backups of database data, which can be corrupted by writing bad data over the backups, or messing up during restore.

A 20 year old real memory is not a recording that you have carefully preserved. It is more like a a clarisworks document on a floppy disk that you copied to a wordperfect doc on a hard drive, then to a word doc on a CD, then to Google docs, and each time you copy it you have any to reconstruct some lost details. Rehearing and retelling the memory is critical. As such, the actual different in constructing a real memory vs false memory diminishes to kill over time.

If you set up your questions in the right way, you can make people remember to have seen Bugs Bunny on a Disneyland visit: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065657.ht...

> The logic here is that if you are reminded of things your brain can think you remember them. This doesn't just mean that someone can say "when you were 2 x happened" and you suddenly think "I remember x!", it means that, if for example you heard the story when you were 5, a decade later that story might now feel like a memory of the incident itself.

I don't intend to make this a political discussion, but something similar appears to have happened to Mitt Romney recently:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/mitt-romney-remembe... (warning, autoplay video)

While this was, of course, widely interpreted as Mitt making up a story to play to the crowd, it seems a much more charitable interpretation is that he heard about the Golden Jubilee so often as a child that he internalized the memory.

I watched the video and came to the conclusion that is exactly what his spokesman's official statement was:

> "Mitt doesn’t say he was there," said the aide. "In fact, he says his memory was foggy, he 'thinks' his dad had a job there and that he was “probably 4 or something like that.” He was simply telling the story about his dad."

(And to your point about not being political - I'm an Obama fan, and I extremely dislike Romney, so I think my opinion that the HuffPo piece you linked is a load of bollocks isn't motivated by my politics!)

And something similar happened to Jon Hamm (Madmen) recently too (claiming to have played catch with Roger Clemens when Clemens had already graduated from this schol).

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/iteam/2012/03/mad-men-star-...

I could.

I surprised my parents some while back when we discovered I could remember the full address and phone number of a house we left when I was 5.5 and they couldn't. I found it again pretty easily when I was at university not that far away, along with my school and church. I'm pretty sure I could find our regular shops from then as well. There are occasional details of life from around then that I remind them about.

Kids remember more than you'd think, and tend to get home details drummed into them by parents in case they get lost.

In my 30s, I successfully drove to and found the house that my family moved out of before I turned 2. I haven't been in it since we moved, but I could still draw you the floorplan today.

I've never considered myself to have a particularly good memory, so I don't doubt that anybody else would have an issue doing the same thing.

You may not have a good memory in general, but I think you have exceptionally good early memories. I can't remember a single room of the house I left when I was four.

I can remember the shape of the wheels on my crawl-a-gator and the jumping seat that hung from the door frame.

Let me see if I can find a picture.. yep that's it http://daddytypes.com/2009/02/12/brother_can_you_spare_a_cra...

It sounds like this poor kid spent a lot of time on the streets, literally. It's not surprising to me that he was able to recognize it later.

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