Maybe those infant memories exist, but they aren't accessible to our adult minds because our understanding of sensory data at the time was so different from our more developed minds?
The data is still there, but it's in a forgotten file format.
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.