Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> Life must be great as a baby: to be fed and clothed and carried places in soft pouches, to be waved and smiled at by adoring strangers, to have the temerity to scream because food hasn’t arrived quickly enough, and then to throw it on the ground when it is displeasing. It’s a shame none of us recalls exactly how good we once had it.
Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of agency. They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on the kindness of their parents and other older humans in their environment. They lack language so have no other way of communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic need (and on that note, even knowing what those needs are half of the time, given that the ability to make sense of ones own senses is still being developed).
All of this while life is a nonstop series of first experiences, meaning that even the most mundane thing can (and often is) surprising, confusing and overwhelming, leading to a high need for reassurance, because being scared and wanting to make sure that you're really safe is honestly a very sensible reaction to have when you add all of those things up.
I'm not saying life sucks for babies and toddlers, but as a parent of a two-year old myself it's pretty obvious to me that it's no walk in the park for them either.
Journalists and their great education is the more likely culprit.
Funny, the same things happen when you become elderly, minus the screaming mostly.
You just unlocked a memory of me reading "The Praise of Folly" in my teens for literature class and having my mind blown by the passage talking about that:
> Yet abating from this, let us examine the case more narrowly. Who knows not that the first scene of infancy is far the most pleasant and delightsome? What then is it in children that makes us so kiss, hug, and play with them, and that the bloodiest enemy can scarce have the heart to hurt them; but their ingredients of innocence and Folly, of which nature out of providence did purposely compound and blend their tender infancy, that by a frank return of pleasure they might make some sort of amends for their parents' trouble, and give in caution as it were for the discharge of a future education; the next advance from childhood is youth, and how favourably is this dealt with; how kind, courteous, and respectful are all to it? and how ready to become serviceable upon all occasions? And whence reaps it this happiness? Whence indeed, but from me only, by whose procurement it is furnished with little of wisdom, and so with the less of disquiet?
> And when once lads begin to grow up, and attempt to write man, their prettiness does then soon decay, their briskness flags, their humours stagnate, their jollity ceases, and their blood grows cold; and the farther they proceed in years, the more they grow backward in the enjoyment of themselves, till waspish old age comes on, a burden to itself as well as others, and that so heavy and oppressive, as none would bear the weight of, unless out of pity to their sufferings.
> I again intervene, and lend a helping-hand, assisting them at a dead lift, in the same method the poets feign their gods to succour dying men, by transforming them into new creatures, which I do by bringing them back, after they have one foot in the grave, to their infancy again; so as there is a great deal of truth couched in that old proverb, Once an old man, and twice a child.
> Now if any one be curious to understand what course I take to effect this alteration, my method is this: I bring them to my well of forgetfulness, (the fountain whereof is in the Fortunate Islands, and the river Lethe in hell but a small stream of it), and when they have there filled their bellies full, and washed down care, by the virtue and operation whereof they become young again.
> Ay, but (say you) they merely dote, and play the fool: why yes, this is what I mean by growing young again: for what else is it to be a child than to be a fool and an idiot? It is the being such that makes that age so acceptable: for who does not esteem it somewhat ominous to see a boy endowed with the discretion of a man, and therefore for the curbing of too forward parts we have a disparaging proverb, Soon ripe, soon rotten?
> And farther, who would keep company or have any thing to do with such an old blade, as, after the wear and harrowing of so many years should yet continue of as clear a head and sound a judgment as he had at any time been in his middle-age; and therefore it is great kindness of me that old men grow fools, since it is hereby only that they are freed from such vexations as would torment them if they were more wise: they can drink briskly, bear up stoutly, and lightly pass over such infirmities, as a far stronger constitution could scarce master. Sometime, with the old fellow in Plautus, they are brought back to their horn-book again, to learn to spell their fortune in love.
(I obviously had to look it up, it's not like I had this memorized after a quarter century)
I don't think Erasmus was right about the elderly growing blissfully happy with losing themselves to dementia, but then again: the book was satire, so we shouldn't expect Folly to be sincere in their arguments.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30201/30201-h/30201-h.htm
uh.. how do you know this? doubt they even know what agency is or lack of it means.
> doubt they even know what agency is
I doubt some people know what epicaricacy is, but they do it anyway.
This is one of those good reasons to teach babies basic sign language (https://www.parents.com/what-is-baby-sign-language-5115901).
We did this and while our child still needed diapers, we only went through half the number we would have otherwise. Potty training was also a lot easier compared to the experiences of our friends.
Count me in.
Let's say neural memories are encoded in some high-dimensional vector space.
And so memory recall is an associative process that entails constructing a query vector and issuing it across the neural memory space.
And the brain is constantly learning, and that learning entails some changes in the structure of the high-dimensional memory space.
And let's say that re-encoding of a neural memory happens upon recall, and only upon recall.
Then it could be that all experience is in fact stored, but because of changes due to learning, those memories become inaccessible. The machinery constructing query vectors has updated its structure enough that its encoding of those query vectors is sufficiently dissimilar from the encoding of the stored memory vectors (which use the encoding from the last recall).
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/35/12144
Oops, someone else posted this further down too. Great minds think alike!
Age 2: Can point to their own body parts; hold something in one hand while doing something with the other hand
Age 4: Changes behavior based on where you are; can draw a person with more than 3 distinct body parts
There's a huuuge amount of learning that happens through this period. Your brain is learning things like 3-dimensional space, temperatures exist and I don't like some of them, I-have-two-arms, things fall when dropped, I must engage my big toe to stay upright while walking, other people appear to have feelings, other people appear to believe that I appear to have feelings.
And in any case, the difference between 2 and 4 is only relevant to the question of whether a 4 year old can remember being 2, not what this article is about, which is adults not remembering being <4.
Many of those things are completely innate. Walking for example, while people use the word "learn" in casual speech, is something that is innate. I just don't think the original comment is well-grounded in what we know about infant's cognition. And in any case, a 2 year old definitely understands 3D space.
One only needs to see a foal walking less than an hour after birth to be convinced of this.
Part of the problem is that humans are born so premature that people confuse natural maturation with learning. Just as we don't learn puberty, we don't learn how to walk.
Did you read the paper you linked? It describes all the immense amount of learning that actually happens: https://art.torvergata.it/retrieve/e291c0d4-b584-cddb-e053-3...
> One only needs to see a foal walking less than an hour after birth to be convinced of this.
Have you actually seen a foal walking? They are very visibly learning how to do it!
The ones I mentioned in my comment.
>Did you read the paper you linked? It describes all the immense amount of learning that actually happens.
Again, as I said, there is a degree of fine-tuning but the core mechanisms are innate.
Some examples:
> In particular, the core premotor components of locomotor circuitry mainly derive from a set of embryonic interneurons that are remarkably conserved across different species
>Detailed EMG recordings in chick embryos during the final week of incubation showed that the profiles of EMG activity during repetitive limb movements resemble those of locomotion at hatching
> In addition, human fetuses exhibit a rich repertoire of leg movements that includes single leg kicks, symmetrical double legs kicks, and symmetrical inter-limb alternation with variable phase.
I don't think you read the article, or else you think that "development" means learning.
>Have you actually seen a foal walking? They are very visibly learning how to do it!
They can walk right away, but they get better at it. It's innate, but you can fine-tune it. Like I said.
Another (impressive) example of an animal innately walking, this time to avoid predators immediately after hatching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3OjfK0t1XM
Again, I conceded that you have to "fine-tune" to get good at walking. But the contrast that with say, playing golf. That's something that categorically has to be learnt, we don't see fetus practicing their drive in utero.
Your analogy was puberty, which in fact happens with development regardless of trial and error (i.e. learning).
The two developmental processes are clearly distinct. The distinction is that one is a process of learning and the other is not.
My 2 year old went on a mental breakdown of a temper tantrum last night because she saw an apple on the tv, decided it meant she wanted an apple, and couldn't understand why she could not have an apple despite seeing one on the tv just then! A toddler is still trying to understand how reality itself works.
A 4 year old knows that jumping off of the stairs onto tile is going to hurt. A 4 year old understands the apple on the tv is an apple on the tv and is not a physical apple in the house.
They are so far apart.
Wouldn't that result in very bizarre memories instead of no memories?
Children believe a lot of silly things that they "grow out" of thinking.
How sure are you that your childhood memories are accurate? How sure are you that you aren't simply conditioned to ignore distorted childhood memories?
As you know we generally experience timescales logarithmically with age, i.e. your incremental experience of time is always compared in reference to dividing by the total passage of time experienced, which is why children tend to get bored much more quickly than adults, because waiting for ten minutes constitutes a much larger percentage of their current experienced life compared to that of an adult's proportion.
Since a baby/toddler has only experienced a tiny amount of time passage thus far, their tiny reference "yardstick" would result in their memory being snapshotted at an untenable timining resolution thanks to division-by-almost-zero. So perhaps the brain does some form of filtering to prevent the entirety of experienced memory being dominated by the super-early ages, or perhaps there is some equivalent of an overflow in their internal counter.
Keep in mind that the above are purely metaphorical as a functional description, and not to be treated as a literal hypothesis on the mechanistic operation of memory.
My guess has always been there is some optimal approach to learning that works by developing a really basic schema (what does a person look like, which ones are mine, roughly how does this body thing work, etc) then flushing all the training data and starting again. I vaguely expect the machine learning people develop some sort of similar process where they get a lot of value lightly conditioning a model before sinking compute into doing a full train.
Basically, my wild guess is there is a lot to learn in a baby's first few experiences but the risk of mis-encoding the lessons is so high that the brain uses the data to bootstrap but then throws it out as too unreliable and starts again once it orients.
I think the brain compresses experiences.
If you had a routine of k activities every day you won't remember every instance of that routine but you may remember what the routine was.
I think boredom is the brain's hunger more than its watch. It's about the needs of a developing brain, rather than plain time.
Right after the bulk of neurogenesis the brain goes into synaptic pruning where it strengthens some synapses and eliminates others. Developmental pruning is experience dependent and the scale of the process in childhood needs a lot of experiences to fuel it.
Those experiences are literal "food for thought". Building the body takes more food, building the brain takes more experiences.
Second, I've often thought I can correctly remember a scene from a movie or TV show I saw decades ago, but when I see it again I realize I got a tremendous number of details wrong, indicating that particular stored memory is very general in nature and not accurate at all.
I agree with your second paragraph too. I often think of a certain tone of voice or pacing with which a line was delivered, and it ends up being completely different when I rewatch it. And yet there are still Mandela Effect people out there insisting their memories are 100% infallible and it's more likely there's a global time travel conspiracy to change a dot on a KitKat package than that they misremembered something small.
If I ask a difficult recall question (usually some very niche medical knowledge) it will get it wrong or just hallucinate. But if I ask it in the form of a multiple choice question, it often gets it right. If memory works better when prompted with the information this way - I wonder how similar LLMs and humans actually encode memory?
Later in life these same sensations evolved into pretty much nightly existential dread, and it's taken me decades of "I'm not thinking about this" to not have panic attacks about inexistence and the extreme temporariness of my self.
Due to my early life experiences I never really dismiss a baby crying as something inconsequential like "awww he's [hungry/tired/whatever]!" because for me I was often experiencing some really primal variation of existential terror before I could even speak.
I also was thinking, perhaps all memories aren't visual or auditory, and I then I read your post. It's quite possible we all have memories of that time in our lives, but they are emotional in composition rather than comprised of physical senses.
Is the ability to recall something specifically a 'memory,' or could emotional feelings with seemingly no connection to the present also be considered memory? Like a lifetime of emotional deja vu.
When you recall something stressful, and you feel stress in the present, is that stress you are experiencing from the present as your brain processes a stressful scenario in your mind, or is that stress part of the memory, and your brain is re-experiencing that stress in the same way you can visualize a memory?
In any case I've always found it interesting to have such a big delta with the people around me but not particularly significant until I seriously structured my introspection and got into cognitive behavioural therapy.
With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience with extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't register as meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about that period. For example I've come to realize that as a toddler I was very aware of my surroundings, of myself, I had an overwhelming feeling of boredom and probably needed far more stimulation than kids that age ; hence behavioural patterns during adulthood that I previously couldn't explain.
I suppose this is possible, but I personally have many extremely detailed visual memories of places and events that happened well before I was five years old -- including memories that didn't involve anyone who could have reminded me of anything subsequently -- all of which are consistent directly with each other.
If I had any painting skills, I could paint you a picture of interior of the house I moved out of when I was 4, including furniture, appliances, artwork on the walls, even things like a green and yellow cardboard storage box that we had on a shelf in the living room.
When I encounter small bits of information from the same time and place, they always seem to corroborate my memories, e.g. finding notes my dad wrote, which I'd never read before, or finding a photo focusing on one object in a larger room.
This seems to indicate that on the whole, my memories are mostly accurate. Perhaps they were reinforced by conversations with family and varying other reminders, but I'm fairly certain that what was being reinforced were real memories in the first place.
- The exact look and shape of my feeding bottle.
- Starting baby food and good it was. I still remember the taste of the carrot and apple stuff.
- Being in my crib before being able to walk, by myself, just looking around, waiting for time to pass.
- Sticking poop on the bars of said crib. Dunno why I did that. It seemed fun.
- Our first cat (died when I was a year and a half).
- Receiving my first and second Christmas presents.
- Being brought to work by my grandma when she was keeping me (she retired when I was 1).
- The layout of my grandmother's kitchen that was redone when I was two.
- The day we spent at an attraction park when I was two and puking all over my aunt.
- The cotton cloth my mother used to wrap my butt with (I hated synthetic diapers), with the blue motifs drawn on it.
- Being laid on my back and having my ass cleaned. I really enjoyed that.
- The exact flour plan of my house, my school, my nanny's house, all the faces of the kids there, some of their names. The layout of the village. I left this place a few months after turning 3 and never went back.
All that stuff is stuff that's not documented at all and stuff I've told my relatives about, not the other way around.
It brings back another memory, from when I was 7 or 8, but that only makes sense now : we were doing a trip with kids from another school, incidentally kids I had been to school with when I was 4. I remembered them pretty well and I was quite happy to meet again two kids that had been my best friends at that time. They didn't seem to remember me at all.
example , peeling away a chip or two of a bad paint job on the closet wall, to discover, its covering a big scribble,.,. memories then smash the floodgates, and you vividly recall , marker in hand, self in awe, at the ^majic^ marker how it makes lines so readily.
I'm pretty much exactly the same, with the same age thresholds. I remember every detail of the house my family moved out of a couple of months after my fourth birthday, including detailed memories of events that took place there during the two years prior.
I think a big factor might have been learning to read at around the age of two, possibly creating deep and regularly reinforced mnemonic links to my audiovisual recall.
> With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience with extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't register as meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about that period.
Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves?
That's very possible. Although it wouldn't explain much regarding me. I don't come from an educated family, my parents had me very young, they didn't know how to take care of children and for the most part left me to my own devices. I didn't learn any reading besides the letters of my own name before the age of 5.
> Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves?
To be clear I wasn't specifically looking for this. At that time I had the general feeling that there was something that existed in my life, something I could feel the shape of, large but hidden behind a veil. Something that was in front of my eyes but that my conscious mind avoided. And I knew it was strongly linked with stuff I was trying to unravel in therapy. I was intent on getting to the bottom of it but kept bumping into an invisible wall.
So, one day, I just had the impulse to go on a deep and long DMT trip while being obsessed with that stuff in the background. Trying to follow the thread of what bothered me it brought me back to that moment in my life where my identity was still being formed. What's interesting, from what I can tell, is that the sensory content of the memory is unchanged. But what I got access to is the emotional and intellectual state I was in at the time which, in conjunction with my fully developed brain, made me able to understand a self that wasn't then able to understand itself. The way I see it, psychedelics are basically WD40 for the brain.
I may be getting some of that wrong, too. I was not particularly engaged with that class since I was still a rather immature student, back then. I'm not saying I subscribe to her idea, but it's certainly interesting to think about.
Having had a child of my own in the last few years, I would like to think I understand the phenomenon. When we lack comprehensive language, we do not store memories as narrative experiences as we do as adults, rather just as semantic connections and correlations. There have been more than a few occasions where I have been doing something like changing a diaper, rocking her to sleep, playing with her in the bath, and I have had the intense sensation of “I remember what this felt like” - not necessarily a specific instance, but rather a remembrance of sensation.
My earliest memories are from between one and two years of age, and I know that they are memories as they are things that my parents do not recall, and I have been able to verify, and I know when they are from as we left Hong Kong weeks after my second birthday.
I remember the father of the guy I reconnected with parading around his garden on stilts - my parents denied this ever happened, yet he confirmed his father was indeed into that at the time - and I remember the pigs and chickens under the houses in the squatter’s village near us - again, my parents insisted they had never taken me there - and they had not, but my au pair, who forty years on I reconnected with and asked, had.
There are other bits and bobs, glimpses, that I recall, but can’t say for sure aren’t implants.
But after reading this comment and the responses to it I'm now realizing the city that she came from did happen to be the one where me and my parents lived for half a year when I was four, so maybe we went to the same kindergarten and were close friends at the time?
As an adult I have very good visual and audio memory, as well as perfect pitch. They're not as useful as they sound.
Make of that what you will.
Well played, sir, well played! :)
> So what is the point?
What Rust helps with is memory safety, which is stuff like dangling pointers and use-after-free. Memory leaks are not a safety issue, they're an efficiency issue.
> Why are people so crazy about Rust?
The whole memory safety thing isn't actually the reason so many people love Rust. In the Rust 2024 community survey, 82% of users agreed that "Rust allows us to build relatively correct and bug free software." Memory safety is part of that, but there's a lot more to it.
So, for example, while Rust does not guarantee the lack of memory leaks, it does make them relatively hard to produce by accident in the first place. This is due to the intersection of a few different parts of Rust's overall design.
Personally I don't trust most memories I have from before around 4 because my parents had around 20 reels of home movies from that time and I know that I saw several of those movies a few years later.
I have a very clear delineation of before and after the age of 5, and I have hundreds of memories from before the move. Most are rather intense events, but I even remember the layout of my house, construction sites, my daycare, neighbors, friends houses, holidays, first bike ride, first lizard I caught, my pets, even some dreams I had, etc...
I didn't have a good idea of time yet, but I can retroactively tell when things occurred based on facts I later learned, like when certain neighbors moved, even my sister was born, etc...
I can’t guarantee that the memory is genuine, but it is very specific and I had to reconstruct my age from discussing the memory with my mom.
You can be continue to be frustrated being incorrect, or you can accept that you’re lying to yourself and move on.
It’s that easy. Human memory just doesn’t work like that.
This isn't true either. Memories themselves are non-falsifiable. So no matter what we either side says we'll literally never know the truth.
Another says, "You cannot remember it, you must have reconstructed it from being told or from pictures."
The memory itself can certainly be falsified: if you remember your mom using an iPhone in 1998, then that memory is false. If you remember talking to your uncle but he died before you were born, the memory is false.
How do we know if the origin of the "memory" is the person's actual experience, or their imagination of it based on descriptions or pictures?
Well if it's an event that had pictures taken of it, if it's the kind of event which grown-ups talk about, then the simplest explanation is that it was reconstructed.
But my son, almost 5, is always coming out with random things that happened when he was 1 or 2, which are absolutely of no importance to us, and which we would have forgotten long ago if he didn't keep remembering them. Once, for example, my wife put a pair of his shoes on top of the car while she put him in the car seat, forgot they were there, and drove off -- obviously at some point they fell of and were completely lost. Every six months or so my son talks about that incident completely unprompted -- something of absolutely no significance to us, but obviously something that struck him. And about the time I lost my temper and sprayed him in the face with water -- definitely not a memory I'm eager to revisit and bring up.
Someone dogmatic person may still say, "You must be bringing that up yourself somehow." That is certainly an unfalsifiable assertion -- there's no way, other than my assertion and probability, to prove that I'm haven't talking about those shoes on a regular basis. But I think any person with an open mind is likely to agree that "he's remembering them" is a more likely scenario than "the grownups are talking about those lost shoes all the time".
Probably these "revisitations" are his brain's way of refreshing the memory as his brain grows, which probably means the memory as they exist in his brain will have been shifted over the years. But that's still an original memory -- that's how adult memories work as well.
If at any point he misses a "refresh", they'll probably be gone; but the memories he manages to do this for will probably stay with him into adulthood. If at any point he "misses" a refresh, they'll probably be gone forever.
The flip side of this, of course, is that many of the memories we think we have as adults are heavily edited too. A few years ago someone recounted to me an emotional conversation that they'd had with someone on their deathbed (as an adult, only a few years prior to that). As it happens, I was in the other room when this conversation happened, and my memory of that conversation was significantly different. Obviously at least one of us is "remembering" something untrue. As I had little "skin in the game" about the content of the conversation, and the memory this person has seems to me very consistent with this person's narrative about their life, I'm inclined to think my memory is more accurate. But who can tell.
And the scars.
I will say that my strong early memories are of things that were either very positive or very negative.
Any scientist studying memory who doesn't have early memories just has a bad memory.
I had memories as a toddler that I confirmed after meeting my mother for the first time in decades a couple of years ago. Specific things about where I lived, events that had happened and how someone else in our family had died. I had another conversation with an aunt that confirmed other things, including a word from another language that I knew from when I was little but didn't realize wasn't a made up word.
Memory is fallible and we have an imperfect understanding of it, but I know for a fact from personal experience that people can remember events from very early in life if the emotional impact is deep enough.
However, the time that a giant plate glass mirror fall off a wall at a department store and crashed through me when I was about two years old? No idea. My parents had to tell me about that one later in life.
The matter came up because some time when I was in my twenties I said, apro pos of something or other, "[grandma] moved to [office] in year X", and they said "No, it was year X-1", and I said "well how come I remember [mundane sense-memory detail], if I was only two?" And they said, "yeah, [detail] is correct, but it was definitely year X-1", rinse-repeat, until they set out to prove me wrong about the year, which it turned out I was, which was a win for them, but then both I and my aunt with PhD in child-development were forced to conclude that I had a memory from when I was two.
Yeah. It blew my mind, too. I didn't think human memory worked like that, either.
Something-something only a Sith deals in absolutes. Alternatively, don't be such a jerk to that other guy. It's not really within the HN ethos.
5 year later show the same two balls and say you will give the kid an ice cream if it picks the same color. Obviously give the ice cream no matter the pick ...
Look for correlation.
My earliest memory was President Kennedy's assassination, but of course I had no idea of what a president was, life, death, etc. I was 16 months old. What I do remember was a bunch of strange people in and out of the house with the TV on and everyone very concerned, but what I remember most of that day was that it was the day I learned how to shake my crib and move it around the room while I was inside. I remember my parents not liking the fact that I was able to do that. I've never discussed that memory with them, and they're both gone now, so I never will.
I've got memories from when I barely knew how to talk, and didn't understand what the people around me were saying. My memory isn't good enough to decode what was said after I learned the language. I can clearly remember sitting in my high chair eating Alphabet cereal, and trying to make words with the letters I had not yet learned. I get sad when I think about how my parents would brush me off, probably thinking that I was too young to learn much. (My parents were both school teachers!)
However, on rare occasion, people send me pictures where I am awake at 3, but I have no memories.
Sorry folks, I see myself out, that was inappropriate, I hope nobody will remember.
We moved a couple months before I turned three and I have a bunch of memories that predate that. I remember being potty trained and lying to my parents about it so I could get a treat. I remember my dad coming home from the family farm and having injured his hand on some machinery. I remember stealing a pack of orange gum from the grocery store and chewing it all up underneath the piano in our basement. I could keep going and going.
My earliest memory was before I was two. Somewhere around 19-20 months. I know this because I had an ear infection and that's when it occurred. I'm sitting in my crib, crying due to the pain in my ear, and screaming "mom" at the door in the room. The room is mostly dark, but the door has been left open a crack to let in a little bit of light. From my vantage, looking through the slats in the crib, the door is open on the left. My mom comes in once, finally, and then leaves.
I also feel like I have an earlier one, being carried in a room which may have been my nursery, looking down on a changing table. I'm pretty sure I'm being held by my father, but I can't say for certain that this is real.
He is very calm and seems to appreciate the experience, until it's time to get out of it.
We do our best to keep him warm and heat the room, but it does not seem to ever be enough to ease the ending.
I remember laying in bed, my diapers being changed, I don't know who was doing it or what the room looked like at the time, but I remember that there was nothing before that, and that on following days I thought back to that moment with the conviction that it was important for me to remember that specific moment, since it was the first for me.
It stands to reason that this happens to all of the baseline models for the referents we learn (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) that subsequent learning surely reshapes.
This is likely comparable to the revision of 'concept' clusters that goes on in all unsupervised learning NN models, especially in humans, those that arise pre-linguistically (since words surely provide landmarks to memories enabling future retrieval). Perhaps we rewrite our early word2vec tables, making early memories less retrievable.
I woke up and was very scared by what I had experienced.
Human memory is increasingly fallible with time because of this.
It's like playing chinese whispers with our own recollection, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
It makes sense that you would remember distinct events, but the trouble here is that nearly all memory as you so eloquently described, is "just confabulations"- which feels wrong instinctively, until it's challenged scientifically.
Also traumatic memory seems to be stored differently than day to day memory, which helps explain that triggers and flashbacks are valid and real (for traumatized ppl), while the confabulation effect can also exist. Though I’d note that confabulation can happen but that doesn’t mean it “overwrites” the old memory, or that confabulation is in any way more common than just remembering a part or a whole event.
Primary school is still knocking around but I think I (and many others) suppress it to retain their sanity in adulthood :-P
I also remember getting transported to Great Ormond Street in the night. I remember going in the back of a strange car (taxi? Hospital transport?) with a tartan blanket. I also remember being given a suppository, something that I didn't believe was actually real until about 20 years later (people don't really talk about them).
But I can't remember at all whether my siblings were there or not. I'm 2-3 years older than my brothers but in my memory they were just always there.
I’m sorry but, what? You think your extended family visiting a child in a hospital due to illness was not a notable event for them?
> They were all worried.
As a parent I can assure you it was a notable event, or no one would have been there, and they would not have been worried.
Adults' memories don't just play out like a recording either. They remember many other details that wouldn't have been shared with me even if I could have understood it.
I’ve done a lot of work on this myself and one can connect with one’s parts, if that model seems accurate to you.
There's almost certainly some way to tap into this without (what is usually/always) brain damage, which has interesting implications for the long-term future of education.
Memories:
(1) In a few seconds older brother taught me to ride a bicycle: He put me on his bicycle and held me up as I turned the pedals. He kept saying he was holding me up as I kept pedaling and he was > 10 feet back of me!
(2) Mom made eggnog! Last I ever had!
(3) Brother and I got 'twin' beds, with headboards, foot boards, and posts!
(4) Dad took a lantern, some dough balls, a net, and a big wash tub to the coast and returned with the tub full of shrimp!
(5) One baby sitter was really nice -- still remember her smile!
(6) Shela next door was my age, and we played. When her family moved to Milwaukee, I said "When I grow up I'm going to 'Wilwaukee' and marry Shela!"
That's just aggressive garbage collection happening when you wake up, arguably so you don't risk confusing dreams and reality :-)
But you can somewhat partially work around it by taking notes right after waking up, before doing anything else.
I would hazard a guess that the original pointers aren't revised to point nowhere, but are, if possible, moved to point into the revised reference model. (Presumably we do this now when we learn a new domain like music, and as the model for harmony becomes more concrete, our original pointers to elements within it are adjusted rather than lost.)
In other cases I believe it’s quite possible that our understanding of the world, say at age two, is so radically different from our adult understanding, that the old memories don’t even make any sense in the new context. They can’t be remapped in any meaningful manner.
While mine did certainly scream when they were hungry (or annoyed, or bored, or I picked the wrong red crayon, etc.), they also had non-screaming verbal communication.
Both my kids started "talking" very early (I wanna say within the first or, at most, second month of being born, but "and we'll remember this when we are old and ancient though the specifics might be vague". In any case, definitely while babies), it's just that we (obviously?) didn't understand them. But they had a very definite "language" of different sounds, which was also different between them if we compare it.
Screaming is a good way for babies to get attention, but it's certainly not the only one!
Well sure if you just redefine what talking is...
It is true that there are many other cues, like opening their mouth, trying to suck or lick anything around. My son gets agitated in his sleep quite some time before he actually starts to scream.
Interestingly, in many languages it is very common (or even normal) to say that a baby is "crying". But babies are not actually crying. There is no tear or sadness involved. It's a primitive form of communication, aimed at signaling a need and creating a sense of urgency to caregivers, but it's different from crying.
I'm still very new to this, but there are also different nuances and pitches within their communication. "I am hungry" and "I am too cold and that makes me feel in danger" are notably different and achieves to communicate a very different sense of urgency.
Recently, I unlocked a memory at the age of 2 months. It is difficult to believe except to me. After unlocking it, the memory felt like it was yesterday. And I have recalled this memory multiple times in my childhood phase. I guess I am now recalling my childhood in greater detail which is causing me to remember what memories I was recalling at the time.
So why can't we remember our baby memories? Because of shock. The present day gives us so much stress. So we focus on now. We focus on what helps us now. We recall memories that help us in the NOW. If you want to recall a memory from before, imagine a stress that likely would have also occurred from before. Like being hungry and being unable to communicate. And reaching for a bottle of milk. Being unable to walk or crawl. Lying on your back. For me, hunger does not evoke too much stress. Other things do like headaches.
I guess all that is to say you can’t seem to be in control of when the tape player starts recording and you can’t reliably find your old tapes.
Age 3. My father assembling a solid plastic child riding horse with springs.
Age 4. A residential home converted to child day care, where I first encountered Cosmic Encounter on a table (probably left out from the night before). I had no idea what that was until my teens.
Age 4-6, a rather large number of memories like beginning to formally write with my left hand, almost choking on a sea shell I had been sucking on, Jimmy Carter was president, my first memorable Halloween, etc. All at a Kindercare facility, which is a national pre-school chain.
Norepinephrine is a key regulatory of memory. Before a certain age the body is much more in parasympathetic activation v.s. sympathetic activation, very low Norepinephrine, lower cortisol response needs, etc. Once growth slows down and this can flip over then mammals will start to form memories. Human curves for the curious: https://obgynkey.com/growth-and-puberty-3/
Some fun notable mentions such as many earliest memories are "super scary" and those with poor ability to produce Norepinephrine and slower growth velocity will have later "first memories" than everyone else.
I recall one time when I was around 2 years old and my parents took me to Pizza Hut. When asked about toppings and hearing that we could have three, I said I wanted extra extra extra cheese. They thought I was being cute. However, I had no concept of cuteness or how to be it. I simply wanted all 3 toppings to be extra cheese and to my disappointment, 2 of the toppings were not. At the time, I had not known how to say 3 toppings of extra cheese and I thought repeating extra three times would communicate what I wanted.
That said, I stopped playing my memory recall game around age 5 when I began to be bullied and did not want to remember the past anymore. That left me with far fewer memories from early grade school than I had from prior years. It also let many of my early memories fade, although not enough for me to forget them entirely.
My memory isn't as good as yours, but you just reminded me of this fairly distinct feeling. As a child you're being earnest; only as an adult do you see that as being cute.
It sounds to me that this memory-recall game likely started when you were a toddler or preschooler rather than an infant, and that while this may give you additional reach back into your earliest memories, it was likely more a game of creativity than genuine memory recall. Into adulthood the real memories and the invented ones can end up feeling roughly the same.
Unfortunately there's really no way to test the accuracy of your memory aside from comparing your memories to a previously unobserved but concrete record. For most of us, our childhood was documented by our parents, and the stories shared with us over the course of our lives, so there's no way to prove that even the accurate recollections weren't simply our memories of the stories rather than the events themselves.
Humans have poor memory anyway. We misremember things that happened recently, so it is probably unwise to trust your memory of things that distant as being accurate, especially when they reach back to an age where most established science suggests that you wouldn't have even possessed self-awareness.
One trigger was fear of sleep. How do I know I wake up the same person? Seems silly right? Well, past me without a whole lot of experience was really concerned. I can remember a ton after that time.
What I find really interesting is both of us made some active choice to remember. Like we ended up with self awareness really early.
For me, it was mostly about unanswered questions. I have memories that are strongest from that time:
One was flicking the spring in my crib. Swoosh doing, doing, da,da,doing! That is me earliest one.
Why does it bounce like that? And the noise! If I flick one today, on one of those
Another was a trip to the neighbors. Their kid was named Cash. That is what we call money! WTF is with that?
Cash took me to play down stairs and they had a ton of nice stuff down there. Fencing for a ring of thieves. I recalled enough to nail them many years later to which my mom confessed they moved to get away from those people. Lol.
Another was this big bee. I looked at it and bet I was faster and stomped! Ouweeeee! The need died, but also totally stung me. Was not faster. Ugh. Boy, I can recall our porch, welcome mat, bright clear summer day, that bee and my foot going down. . I have more. Turning on the TV was vivid. Old tube one made noises as it came up. And smells. I recall it like it was yesterday.
Anything intriguing and I go into record mode. Everything about that time gets saved. Where I was who I was with, happenings...
I was afraid I might forget and never learn the thing one learns on one of those.
I still do it. Not as often now due to experience, but if it is really new to me, I will feel that switch and off it goes.
I have quite a lot of early memories. More than usual. And I remember that I remembered more early stuff when I was a child but I have no recollection of my first year now and only really vague and maybe indirect memories of my second year.
Interestingly, my grandparents had witnessed all of this. Later, when I could speak and asked my mother why my aunt kept putting something on my head one day when I was younger, she recalled what my grandparents had told her and told me it was the nurse on the day I was born. I had not realized it had been the day I was born until she told me. At the time I could speak to ask about it, I simply had regarded it to be when I was very young.
* The time in the room where newborn children are placed. The events here were witnessed by my grandparents and told to my parents.
* The remnant of my umbilical cord falling off my belly button at my aunt’s house. That really hurt.
* My baptism. I had misunderstood the water as a prelude to being drowned and was terrified that the deacon wanted to kill me.
I assume that there are more memories from my first year, but since they do not correspond to something others witnessed and remember, there is no way of dating them to that year.
In the case of the first two, I had asked my parents about them when I could talk and they realized that I was recalling very early memories. In the case of my baptism, my mother had decided to recount my baptism talking about happy she was that I had been the only well behaved child there (the Catholic Church often baptizes children in batches). Upon hearing that, I remembered the event and responded complaining that I had only been quiet because I thought if I had opened my mouth to cry, I would have been drowned to death soon afterward. What was a fond memory for her was a horrific memory for me.
> I had misunderstood the water as a prelude to being drowned and was terrified that the deacon wanted to kill me.
Sounds like a rationalisation way later though? I don't think you could be aware of either concept at the time. Like, the fear of the priest as a stranger, or fear of the other babies screams from pouring water on their heads. Not the concept of drowning or killing.
Coincidentally, I have had a lifelong aversion to putting my head below water. It made learning to swim impossible.
The hack evolution landed on is that we're born 1-2 years premature compared to most mammals.
From that perspective, this isn't especially weird.
Further, I have also noticed that when I meditate sometimes my mind wanders and brings me some memories from the childhood - totally random, unrelated to current events memories.
I can't remember many things from that decade+, but more significantly my sense of when things happened that I do remember is usually off by years.
It's not much better in more recent times. I could say much the same about everywhere I've lived as an adult.
I took lots of pictures of my kids. Those pictures trigger memories, but it's unclear if they would have remembered those things without the pictures. And there's no real way to tell if those memories are real, or just narratives attached to the trigger.
It's interesting to think about.
There's actually some quite suprising stuff in that article, e.g. some cultures have earlier childhood memories than others, and there's some interesting suggestions as to why that is. Also considerations about how early events can apparently be stored but not consciously remembered.
To quote:
"""NEW YORK, NY – A recent study showed that 70% of people actually never read more than the headline of a science article before commenting and sharing. Most simply see a headline they like and click share and make a comment. A recent study showed that 70% of people actually never read more than the headline of a science article before commenting and sharing. Most simply see a headline they like and click share and make a comment.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…"""
- https://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-o...
Just last week, my two-year-old spied the freezer pops in storage. She pointed out back and said, "Eat on deck!" Clearly, she remembered eating freezer pops on the deck, but the last time she did that was last summer (northern hemisphere) when she didn't know how to talk at all, let alone say "deck".
The same way one rides a bicycle without telling themselves to balance and operate the brakes.
I'm writing a memoir right now, since I dont know what else to do to shed this since it's pretty horrible stuff I remember.
Same goes with chewing on things - and the first taste of anything.
Not really. Genital mutilation is very barbaric and traumatising procedure. Most victims suppress it, and develop all sorts of mental issues. Victims have very high suicide rate!
One of the reasons we can not remember our early lives. It was a horror!
That opposition doesn't quite make sense to me. If you are examining the linguistic view of it, then what we're talking about is that memory requires symbolic understanding. Not just language (a fairly sophisticated symbolic tool), but also just the ability to schematize your various sensory impressions into conceptualized objects. My earliest memory is sitting in a high chair playing with Duplos (large Legos for young children) being frustrated that I couldn't connect two pieces. That requires a few concepts such as a high chair, the tray sitting in front of me, the pieces I was playing with, and emotions like anger. Symbolic understanding isn't necessary for any of that to happen, but it does seem necessary to store it for recall decades later.
The problem with comparing this to rat memory is that I'm not convinced that rats have anywhere near the same kind of symbolic understanding, so how can they be compared to humans in this capacity? Rats can remember things, but babies can also be taught sign language starting at around 6 months, which seems much closer to rat memory (the direct linking of a perception with an emotion, unmediated by a symbolic transformation).