Because — and this is true — you absolutely don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.