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Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

I once hear the story of a colleague who when going to college met with someone who he felt that he knew although they were unable to establish were they knew each other from as they came from different cities. When he returned home and told the story to his mother, she smiled and told him that they as toddlers had met.

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I have had this experience firsthand - I met someone at a party, and he was intensely familiar, despite me being on the far side of the planet from my usual haunts. We chatted, and it transpired quite rapidly that we had been neighbours and frequent playmates as toddlers in Hong Kong.

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.

Once in college I had a girl stare at me for a while on a long distance bus (we were almost the only passengers in there). When I got home my mom told me her mom called her to ask if I was also on that bus - apparently we have spent a lot of time together as toddlers.

I had a psych professor with a similar story that she liked to share. Her prevailing hypothesis on why we don't remember our infancy was that there's typically little to no reason to recall it, so the memories either fade or morph into general feelings and emotions that often help form the bases of our early personalities.

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.

I've read a hypothesis that it's because when you learn to speak, you remember things in a new way. You don't know how to access the memories you stored before you knew how to speak.

Absolutely - "Tree" is so much easier to file than the magic thing standing there before you.

In other words, you’ve forgotten the class for the same reasons you’ve forgotten being an infant.

I once was at a party where a friend brought a friend from another city, and I for some reason had this strong feeling that I knew her despite also knowing for certain that I'd never seen her before (I'm very good with remembering faces). Halfway through the evening, without us really talking before she suddenly asks me if we know each other somehow, because she feels like we've met before even though she's pretty confident that she hasn't. You can probably imagine how intriguing it was that both of us had the same experience! So obviously we have to know each other, right? But then as we try to figure out from where we might know each other, all we end up doing is firmly establishing that no, we really don't have any mutual friends or contacts or hobbies or anything that could connect us.

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?

Your comment reminded me of the documentary "Three Identical Strangers" [1], about identical triplets adopted by different families during their first months of life who try to re-establish their connection when they meet later by chance. It's a gripping story with a shock ending. Somewhat relevant to this thread and I hope not too much of a spoiler, it's suggested in the film that they may have been affected by separation anxiety.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7664504/

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