Memories from when you were a baby might not be gone
nature.com
nature.com
The data is still there, but it's in a forgotten file format.
It’s a bit more like they’re there, on the hard drive, but they aren’t in the FAT.
Our memories operate on association, be that by topic or by causal chain. Infant memories are laid down without those associations.
I have some early conscious memories - I remember my second birthday, our neighbour walking on stilts in his garden, finding a snake in a gutter at the end of our garden - things which left an impression. I know these are memories as my parents have zero recall of any of these events, yet talking to my au pair of the time a few years ago, she, who was present, does remember the stilts, and the snake.
Interestingly, since having an infant daughter of my own, I feel those primordial memories that I don’t consciously recall far more presently - I’ll cuddle her just so, or will tuck her into bed, or will make stupid noises while feeding her, and will have a moment of “she is the baby. I am the baby. She is the baby” with either just a feeling of familiarity or in some cases a brief glimpse of visual information.
It’s an interesting topic - along with how “past life” memories form, as apparently about as soon as I could talk I was keen to lecture anyone who would listen on mongol siege warfare in the levant.
As if you compressed a chess game by using a chess engine and saying, "The move ranked #2, the move ranked #1, the move ranked #1" and some very tight arithmetic encoding. If you come back and decompress it with a different engine, it'll put out similar results for a little bit, then diverge into nonsense.
(All speculation, for fun of course)
Sometimes I feel at odds with my memories. There are certain images I always return to, and I'm not sure why. I'm not even sure what emotions they evoke. Nostalgia, I guess. There is one overseas trip where I barely remember anything, except that I hated it. I feel like I fucked up my childhood and need a do-over, but they say everyone feels that.
When she was ill, she could recall other memories while she was ill.
and vice versa. She could not recall what she did when she was ill while on medication.
Sort of more than plain memories too, like how she was thinking, deciding, frame of mind, what she felt, etc.
All that to say... I think some of it is the result of either novelty or trauma. Like when the brain first experiences something, it is more likely to make a point to remember it over it being something less novel and thus less memorable. What's odd to me is I can remember pictures of some events that must have happened before I was about 4 that I really don't remember apart from seeing the pictures and acknowledging that apparently I was there - which tells me the things I do remember must be actual memories rather than some kind of implanted suggestion.
Some people can, some cannot. My first memory is when I couldn't yet speak, could barely walk, was near some big pot, wanted to go inside, dad put me inside, then immediately started crying because I couldn't get out myself, dad took me out. We had that pot until about 5yr ago, it was about 30L.
But overall, I had maybe only a dozen total memories up to middle school that I can remember last time I wondered about this (when pondering Johnny Mnemonic plot). I have overall pretty bad memory. I was even on one memory training course, but it didn't help.
Our memories work associatively, so probably we have a lot of memories which we can't access just because they are not associated properly or we don't remember the triggers. Probably there is some "list of triggers" association with some memories working like an index.
I have distinct visual and auditory memories from when I was about 15 months old and going forward. I can still recall them in exact detail. These were not events anyone ever spoke of, to plant seeds as it were; it was many years later in my early teenage years when my parents were reminiscing about their first house in Texas that I recalled them to my parents and they were flabergasted. It had never occurred to me that not everyone (turns out most people, it seems) don't have memories going back that far.
Now, I don't think it makes me "special" — it's just something about how I remember things: very, very visually, kind of immersive "full screen" in my mind's eye.
I have very strong visual memories of events from when I was still in a crib to the present. Lots of those memories are from when I was alone so there was nobody who could have implanted them.
Also, neuroscience says (unless theories have changed) that all memories are "implanted" in that memory works like DRAM. Every time we remember something, it's getting retrieved and then written back to long term storage. It's a destruction-recreation process.
That said how would you design a study to validate this? If parents or members of the family are the only ones with the information to verify this, it’s hard to eliminate the conflict of interest.
Also in the age of digital cameras children nowadays are much more likely to have a big library of photos or videos of their early childhood and be able to reconstruct memories based on looking at them later.
Take thousands of children, give them some kind of experience without explaining why, and without anyone they know being there. Then ask them questions about it 20 years later. Have control groups where parents and photos give them information - some true, some false - at different intervals.
Interesting thought experiment, though impractical and probably unethical. But without that kind of independent verification it’s impossible to say you can accurately recall childhood memories. While your story is harmless, it can get dangerous when people recall crimes that may not have happened in the way they think.
I recall the extreme isolation, boredom allowed him, in time, to go completely back to his earliest childhood in his memories.
Maybe someone remembers that article.
The more I recall this memory, the more I can tell, I am recalling a copy of the memory rather than directly experiencing that memory.
I feel that is very true. I have some memories from when I was young that aren't really clear to me. It's more of a feeling thing rather than something specific.
And every time I think on that I wonder how much my mind fills in that I didn't remember.
A woman who wasn't my mother carried me out from a house porch into the sunlight with my head on her left hand (heart) side.
There isn't much more to it and I try to not recall it too hard and/or often because it's far too easy to add false detailing to it.
But not always. I have a handful of memories from before I was 2 and a half, and they're real. I know because they're mainly of mundane stuff that would be unremarkable to adults but would have been much more significant to a small child (e.g. apartment maintenance man coming to fix an appliance). No one would tell a kid stories of that stuff.
I also know they're from before 2.5 because that's when we moved from an apartment to a house, and they were clearly from a different home. I think that's probably why I remember them today: they were obviously very early, so I valued them even as a very young child an rehearsed them. A few of them got distorted and mixed with stuff from a little later (e.g one of being outside my old apartment, being shown something my parents confirmed was there, but the setting was transmogrified with features of an apartment I was regularly driven by as a 3+ year old).
While I believe you, I rehearse stories with my 2 year old about mundane things that happened yesterday, last week, last month to him a few times a day.
That said I am pretty confident the article is correct both from my personal experience and what I’ve read as a layperson regarding child development.
There’s a lot of research about biographical stories being a very American cultural phenomenon. My parents never did this with me, and I have maybe 1/10th-1/100th of the memories of childhood compare to an average American with no immigrant parents.
Not my memory. The one I'm specifically referring too is a visual memory of a very specific cleanup activity I don't think my parents even saw or would talk about. It's certainly not something they would have talked about later.
The same happens with more recent memories of what happened 10 or even 20 years later: not everybody remembers when I recall a shared experience, but some do. So, at least I know my brain isn't fabricating tales.
What I can't understand is that most of those memories aren't traumatic. Not even of important events e.g. asking my very young mother how to tell apart left sock from right sock ;(
Call me skeptical of this explanation.
As a small talk conversation starter, I've developed a habit of asking people what their earliest memory was.
For lots of people they don't have any memories from early childhood. I'd say the most common age I hear is around 5 or 6. The oldest I heard was a 30-year-old who doesn't remember anything before high school.
But when there are those early memories, they are short, strong, and associated with fear. But not consequential in the 'lore' that a parent would develop about a child.
One girl told me about a time when she was at a restaurant with her dad. He got up and left the booth, and she was scared to be alone.
Another story was about throwing a toy car and watching it puncture a soda can, which then began spraying, and being scared, not knowing what was going on.
A guy related a story to me about hearing their parents talk about being pregnant with their sibling (who is 2 years younger than them). And he distinctly remembers their emotions, their stress, and how it made him feel (scared).
It's not like the parents are telling their kids about that one time they got up for a few minutes in a restaurant or that one scary time a dog barked at them or that time they rode in a car with a cigarette smoker and the smell was disgusting.
They'll remember one sensory input like the image of a can spraying soda or the smell of smoke or the words someone said and then they'll remember, distinctly, the emotion. When they tell the story, you can tell they know exactly how they felt in the moment.
That just doesn't jive with saying they reconstructed those memories.
Yep, although I'd expand that to any strong emotion. I have early memories of embarrassing moments and times when I had a lot of fun also.
But the first thing I can still remember was definitely fear, as it was of me drowning, at age... I want to say 3, but I'm not sure exactly when it was anymore, maybe it was 4. We were on vacation visiting my grandparents in another state, and were in their pool. I was to stay against the side 'cleaning the pool' by using a scrub brush and rubbing it on the ledge of the pool, and apparently at one point I didn't stick to the ledge, because I remember going under and swallowing some water and my parents noticing and coming to my rescue. I ate cheese and crackers at their table afterwards. He also had a golf cart and I remember driving that up and down the block.
That's pretty much it for that young. Next thing after that is while I was in pre-school, and I only remember a few things from that time.
And for anything earlier than like, high school, I don't have a lot more than just a few images I can mentally pull up of any given memory, and the knowledge of what happened on a kind of basic level (anything too detailed is pretty much gone now).
And if there are pictures that helps a lot. I can remember a few details not present in the pictures, but without the pictures I doubt I'd remember that happening at all.
I think this is true. And I recall reading that adrenaline helps form strong memories, which makes sense (best to remember your existential fear of tigers forever)
I was young, maybe 2nd grade, and the teacher pointedly ignored my raised hand. I ended up peeing in my chair. I remember it pretty well. :)
I also remember revisiting that 2nd grade classroom, and the room (and desks!) was MUCH smaller than I remember. My memories were from eyeballs closer to the ground looking around at a spacious room.
My first memory is firmly datable to 10 days after my 3rd birthday. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was announced over the radio while I has sitting down with my mum at the kitchen table. Not a particularly traumatic memory. The response was surprisingly intellectual: something along the lines of "hmm the world is complicated", so not particularly traumatic. The memory has definitely never been externally re-implanted, but I sometimes wonder if it is a memory of a memory of a memory. It is nonetheless very vivid with lots of visual detail. There are a few other memories that are of events that occurred before my 4th birthday, but none that can be firmly dated.
I agree. In my experience, first memories dating to 5, 6 or 7 years old, or occasionally even later are pretty common; those dating to 3 or 4 years old, less common. I've never met anyone who has a memory that can be dated to before their 3rd birthday.
But the biggest challenge for almost everyone is attaching dates to early memories.
I have strong memories of my life since I was 3. My wife, otoh, says she can’t remember anything until she was 6+
I’m asking do we know why some people retain early childhood memories and some don’t?
However, there is always something that bothered me: I remember the exact moment at 5 years old where I got out of the shower room confused and afraid because I could not remember anything.
So it is not like my memory gradually faded, but really that there is a specific moment in time when it happened.
I also remember that at several times in my life, from as early as 5~6 and up to today, I was wondering about the fact that I could not remember anything from before 5 (like a recursive memory).
Anyone else in this case?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/am-i-right/201307/yo...
Your earliest memories have had the most chances to be changed and not reflect what really happened.
So what, exactly, might not be gone? Something that formed early and was edited over and over and over by experiences through a lifetime?