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Comment by mrmekon | Hacker News Reader

I see two other people commenting about framing memories based on moving at a young age. I have the same thing, and I wonder if moving at a young age correlates with higher childhood memories.

I moved when I was 7, and it's a very distinct transition in the quality of my memories. I have tons of pre-move memories, including one confirmed by my parents as my 2nd birthday party, but they're primitive. No sense of time, just a jumble of memories that I can't place chronologically, and most are very brief moments. However, I remember the move and everything after it vividly and in chronological order.

I would suppose that the move made me reminisce about my old home during the period when my childhood memories were fading, and saved many of them from being lost.

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I moved houses once a year every year until I was 7. I can remember things just after I was two years old, the floor plans of my parents house, grandparents house, christmas when I was 3, parents friends houses, memories of those things, lots of other things. My parents didn't believe me until I told them the floorplans. Some memories are a little fuzzy, but I remember parts of every place I've lived since I was two years old. Sometimes random memories will pop up that I forgot about. My earliest memory my parents were able to pinpoint to about 26 months old (we moved to a new city at 30 months, and my memory was of my dad leaving to work at night which he had stopped doing sometime around when I was 27 months).

Maybe more interesting is that I can't remember a single seizure my brother who had epilepsy had, although I can remember before and after moments (ages 3 and 4).

We moved when I was three (42 years ago) and I have some memories or what I think are memories of just vagueness of being in the living room looking at the sun shining through the thin white curtains.

I remember the first year or two of school so that would be around age six. I remember suddenly realizing how to tell time, hands not digital, then looking up and the class was empty I was concentrating so hard I didn't realize everyone left.

My next oldest and clearest memories are when we went on a trip to the US and Ontario when I was seven. I remember that year because it's when Elvis died and we got lost in Niagara Falls, NY in a rundown neighbourhood seeing a man in curlers and a kid hiding in a garbage can.

I moved when I was 7 too, but I recall very little of my early memories. Actually, most of them seem to be memories of reading the kind of holidays logs that I used to draw and write with my mom, rather than memories of the events themselves.

My wife only moved when she was older than that, and she has a lot more very early memories, so I'm not sure it is actually linked with moving.

I moved when I was four, and I have a lot of memories of the old house, see my other post in the thread.

How old were you when you acquired language (the ability to compose complete sentences)?

I did not move when I was young, but have memories similar to the other commentators. I have a couple from when I was 2, and several when I was 3.

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