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What's Your Earliest Memory?
spazoid12 writes "I've been curious lately about memory. For example, why is it that my earliest memory is from about 7 years of age? (I'm mid-30's now) Most people I know remember much further back. How far back can a person remember? Is there a theoretical limit? What are the requirements for acquiring memories? I've read that oxygen is one; as in actual breathed-in stuff. This is supposed to explain why you can't remember anything from within the womb. That seems silly to me. My own theory (with nothing to back it up) is that language is required. We spoke mostly Brasilian Portuguese and some Russian in the home up until I was about 5 or 6. We moved to Brasil for a year when I was 8 and I barely remember anything from that trip. I really don't know either language today-- could this explain why I have no memories of those years? What if I re-learned those languages now, 30 years later? Would memories flood back?"
Slashdot has jumped the shark.
take a class, read a book, learn. Its around age three if I remember right, we cant remember those years because our long term memory isnt needed or developed.
I can remember all the way back to when Slashdot had news stories Linux geeks cared about. Not dinner party conversation starters. What's next Dream analysis? Sheesh.
I'm 20, and my earliest memory is from when I was 3 I believe. My family's business is general contracting, and my then 53 year old grandfather was moving some uniform lockers into a building at our shop. The doors/sides of the door on these lockers were razer sharp and when the door slammed on his hand...whammo, cut the tip of his finger off.
What I believe is that we start remembering things that are memorable. Waking up and looking at smiling people and other mundaine tasks arn't worthy of kickstarting the memory centers of the brain. While my mind jolted awake and fused brain cells together to create and sustain this memory, maybe other people's brains didn't deem anything "worthy" of remembering until later on? Beats the heck out of me.
--Reverend Raven
Desperate days demand dire deeds.
Was riding on a 4-wheeled red-pinkish toy duck with my brother pushing me from behind. I was maybe 2.
My next earliest memory was flying to america when I was around that age as well. I remember trying to look outside there was another plane below us or something.
However, you might find some interest in my friend, who remembers his birth (coming out of the vagina and muching on amniotic goo and what not).
...from when I was two years old; but actually it's more like a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory...
I understand memory is formed when brain cells make connections. I wonder if new cells continue to be created for the first few years of life. That would explain why you don't have early memories; because the cell that controls that memory didn't exist yet.
you ought to try hypnosis. I've
observed many sessions, and the results
are astounding. If you are able to be
hypnotized (I've tried, but never been able
to do it) -- it may help you remember early
memories. Have someone that you trust
put you under, or a professional.
I don't remember..
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
I drowned when I was 18 months old and while I dont have a step-by-step memory of it, I remember what it looked like and felt like quite clearly.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Wow. This is a new stretch for Slashdot. Slow news day or something?
Under hypnosis, people seem to be able to remember far more details from the past... which would imply that what our brain stores is far more intricate than what we can pull to mind in common conversation. Some people believe we could train ourselves to remember more... just as we can train ourselves to remember dreams if we write them down anything we remember as soon as we awake. Proust's "Remembrances of Things Past" is a lovely study on memory, what is remembered, and why. I've never gotten past the first thousand pages, though...
[[Insert Sophomoric Movie Quote Here]]
I remember my birth, it was painful and my entire body felt like it was stinging and everything was very bright white, and loud (like acid?). I also remember being a baby, and my mom would hold my hands trying to get me to walk. I don't remember much, but I do remember some things of early childhood. Does anyone else remember things from when you were that young? I am 15 now.
This is a good question to think about while on LSD.
No seriously, if you are familiar with psychadelic drugs you know what i mean.
It's quite interesting, although some people may find it uncomfortable.
My earliest memory is writing a FOR NEXT loop in BBC BASIC to move my name across the screen, using a CLEAR after each itteration. I'd have been about four or five at the time.
The curious thing is, I can remember it too well. That's what leads me to feel that memory is associative: I remember what the programming language looked like, the characters on the old screen, what the code would have looked like and I can remember that I did it. Combined, I have a vivid memory of exactly what that code from that specific instance would have looked like. I can remember too exactly, making me think I have a memory formed of the recombined elements rather than the specific instance.
Alternatively, I've spent too much time working with relational databases and they're affecting my world view WAY too much.
When I was approx. 2 yrs old, I remember my father lifting me up off the floor to sit in the recliner with him and watch early morning reruns of 20,000 Leauges Under the Sea on our black and white TV. Initially, I believed I was floating through the air and only realized later what happened as I grew older. Iwas still in diapers. Aside from that, I remember learning how to make paper airplanes in pre-school when I was 3 yrs old.
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tried to bake a cake in the toaster when i was 3 and a bit. Remember quite clearly the sparks and flames coming out of the slots. figured that rising should work for cakes if it works for toast.
...I was wearing a typical 70s brown-and-yellow striped shirt a-la Charlie Brown, those hard little leather shoes they make little kids wear, and I was sitting on the car holding my little birthday cake which had chocolate icing and three orange candles on it. I remember my mother taking my picture and my grandma bitching about how she was just SO certain I was going to drop the cake. Hmmm, now that I think of it, I also believe that was the first time I talked back to my grandmother (and certainly not the last).
I also remember getting into the dishwasher when I was really little and pulling a kitchen knife out. I dropped it and as it fell it cut my left index finger. My mother tells me I was two when that happened.
Spread the RC luvin'
Humans cannot physically remember events that happen before the age of two. Any "memories" that appear to come from prior to that age are either a) purposely or inadvertantly implanted by a third party ("remember when..."), or b) the result of typical happenings for a very young child. For example, many children fall out of bed at least once, so you may remember doing so too whether or not it actually happened.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
My earliest memory was when I was 2 years 7 months.
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...is that his earliest memory was BSD kernel hacking ;)
Sorry I can't find the reference, but I once read that most people are able to remember from when they are 2 years old, whether they actually do depends on whether you have ever tried to think back on these memories to "keep them alive".
The 2 year limit comes from the development of the brain, you simply dont have a real long term memory when you are younger or even references to understand what you experience.
Personally I can remember a few scenes from when I was 1-2 years, some of them are a bit strange in concepts, but common to all of them is that I have known these as my earliest memories since I was 8-10 and have thus kept them alive.
To remember something, you generally either need to know what you are trying to remember or need a prompt of some sort (a word, a smell, a place, anything can be a prompt really - you'll just get that "aha, I remember this" feeling and memories from around that period will reveal themselves).
If you try to just restore memories you are more than likely making them up (not that you realise you are making them up).
I would say it's unlikely that anybody remembers anything from around age 3 - they may think they do but it's more likely the memories have been implanted (nothing conspiritorious, just a purely natural thing for memories to be "implanted" unintentionally). Reason is simply that a childs brain takes a good long while to develop - long term storage isn't high on the agenda.
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I was four years old (four years and two months to be precise). My father told me sternly to go back to bed - they didn't want me around while my mother was giving birth. Next morning I had a younger brother.
;-)
Strangely enough that younger brother has described the layout of the room in which he spent his first week (and only his first week) in significant detail. I find it slightly annoying that his oldest memory is nearly as old as mine, despite that four year gap
I seem to recall reading a study (newscientist.com?) showing that infants and young people in general could only describe their memories using words which they knew at the time the memory was acquired. Which would lend credence to your linguistic theory of memory, if I could remember where I read it :)
I specifically remember the way the stairs were laid out at my old home, but my family moved out of there when I was 2, and I hadn't been back in since. I asked my parents one time and found what I remembered was right.
what was posted yesterday!
SING!!
Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe of URL Dupe Dupe Dupe of URL
...but I was 22 at the time! Ha!
Oh, the requirements of dating an Orthodox Jew. The relationship didn't work out, but I have no regrets. I feel so free and unencumbered, it's great.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It was my first day of nursery school. I don't remember much, except when they took us outside to the play area. There was a two-car garage, and the teacher lifted the door. Inside one half of the garage, literally stacked to the ceiling, were all manner of Big Wheels. I remember feeling like that was the greatest thing I had ever seen-- like that scene in the latter part of Clerks where Randal walks into Big Choice Video, is overwhelmed by the selection of titles, and simply drops to his knees.
Well, I recently cleaned up and threw most of my old hardware away, so the earliest I have is the stuff in my old 486.
I have a vivid memory of having visited a famous monument with my uncle when I was about two years old. However, I also had a photograph portraing my uncle and myself during that visit so that although I feel my memory of the event is real I'm more inclined to think that it was made up some years later when my mother told me about it while showing me the photograph.
So, I think you can't really be sure about what is your earliest memory.
Gustavo.
My earliest memory was from when I was one year old. My father was carrying me down the stairs, and tripped. He managed to cradle and protect me, although he sustained a broken tailbone in the fall. I distinctly remember the arrival of the paramedics, the color of the room (brown), even the fact that the stretcher had 3 straps.
Incidentally, my second memory is of my father's return from the hospital, whereupon he immediately went to our kitchen and got some pretzels. I have no other memories of that house (we moved out less than a month later, though).
Anyway, I'm not a medical sort, but on the oxygen issue: I suffucated during my mother's labor due to complications in the birth, and was dead for a couple of minutes before I was ressuscitated. I have no idea whether that had any affect on my brain development, but I don't have cerebral paulsy (the most likely outcome of those circumstances), so who knows?
Incidentally, my sister acquired language at a much younger age than I did (she was forming complete, gramatically correct sentences at the age of 2), and yet her earliest memory is of preschool at age 4.
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I don't remember.
--
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I am 28 and I remember static images back when I was about 2, moving images of 3 and moving images with sound, only stereo though.
...taking a big stinky dump this morning.
Well, I can specifically remember an incident walking home from school while I was in first grade (I'm now 26.) That is the oldest memory that I am certain of. It was some older students playing on the playground equipment, faking that one of them was hurt badly, and I refused to run to the principal for help (to me, it was obvious that they were yanking my chain.) Well, after I had gotten a few dozen yards away, they yelled out "Oh, no! He's dead! You killed him!" Even though I knew they were playing around, it still left an indelible memory.
I have some specific mental images of places and actions from when I was around 5, but nothing that I can declare to be certain memories. (Babysitter's house, a couple kindergarten memories, etc.)
I have vague recollections (could be 'implanted memories') of the house my parents lived in when I was born, and moved out of when I was 4. For example, I haven't been in the house since, yet I vaguely remember the view out what was my bedroom window. I do not 100% trust the memories of that house, though, because my family did talk about that house later, so I could just be 'remembering' their descriptions. For example, I seem to remember the house having rampant spider infestations, which my older sister concurs with; yet my parents insist that that house was fairly spider-free, and that it was the apartment they lived in before I was born (but after my sister was,) had spider problems. So I'm probably just transferring my sister's misplaced memory.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
For example, why is it that my earliest memory is from about 7 years of age? (I'm mid-30's now) Most people I know remember much further back.
Almost everyone I know has what strike me as overly clear memories from when they were extremely young.. 2, 3 years of age. Often, I've found that when you talk to their parents or other older relatives, the story you get from them is almost word-for-word what the child 'remembers'. My guess is these are things that the child has heard many, many times in his/her life, and eventually forms a 'memory' around it. Sort of how some people hear a story about something happening and incorporate that into their stock of things they believe happened to them.
What we hear from others influences our own memories highly, it's amazing how many people can recall group events years later, even if some of them weren't actually present for something that occurred. Also, a child's sense of time is really out of whack - remember how long summer seemed to be? Things that happen when you're 5 or 6 can seem to have happened when you were much younger.
Memory is a very tricky, changing thing, even for recent events in fully cognizent adults. I don't find it surprising at all that childhood memories aren't terribly reliable nor consistent.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I'd say that before a certain developmental stage, you are unlikely to form memories. When might that be... who knows, probably depends on the person.
Whether you can recall early memories that you DID form might have a lot to do with the type of memory, and what brought it to the surface. Painful memories are obviously going to burn brightly, unless they are so painful that your subconscious edits them out.
Odors often trigger memories quite powerfully. In theory, is has to do with the sense of smell being closely tied in with the limbic system. These kinds of memories are often very emotional. Can you still remember your first girlfriend's perfume? Maybe not specifically, but you might remember it if you smelled it, if only from the emotions is would generate. I can still clearly recall my grandmothers perfume, and my uncle's pipe smoke (the uncle died when I was pretty young).
It's a good question... a child psych person might know.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I was about 3 and a half years old, based on the chronology. There are two memories I have of about the same time.
One is my parents washing and scrubbing the empty floor of a house we were moving out of. I was sitting on the floor watching them and it was late at night (at least by a 3-year-old's standard).
The other is standing in the backyard of the same house at night with my dad near a chain-link fense, looking up at the stars. I was asking my dad questions about the stars, but I don't remember the questions.
Table-ized A.I.
Mine start around age 3, with one exception.. I have a flash of memory of picking up my sister from her crib (I would have been in the 2'ish range). She ended up dying before she was 6 months old. I've sometimes wondered about it, thinking that maybe I kept it at least until she died, then my brain kicked in and said "OK, you're remembering this."
I was born in August 1976, and I do remember going to see Empire Strikes Back at the theatre. I remember it because there was this kid from my daycare in there as well. I remember thinking "NO!" when Vader broke the paternal news to him. I was @ 4 then, I think.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
256k
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
I remember reading/hearing that the reason why we remember so few from our early years is that there is a hypothesis which states that our memory forgets in the younger years to protect our sanity.
You see, a young kid goes through very rough traumatizing experiences (falling down, being psychologically hurt when mother says no or leave for a few hours, etc...) Off course, these are benin experiences for us, adults, but for a new, undevelopped brain, they are tragedies. If we would remember those experiences, we might have developped some psychological problems. Forgetting our younger years would help us keep our sanity until the brain is well formed.
As I said, its a hypothesis I heared somewhere. If anybody got a link to this, please share it with us.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
"[Regarding age 7]I know remember much further back."
:)
How much further back can you go? Even 5 years back isn't really "much" further back. Anyways, as for early memories, my earliest is probably my mom rocking me and singing lullabies while I could still fit on her lap, and I remember that eventually my feet were hitting the bookstand next to the chair, so I was getting taller. I remember some of the lullabies, passed down to me from her father's mother, my great grandmother, from Spain. Another early memory I have is from preschool. I've always been a science geek, and I remember a kid brought in a periscope for show and tell and I remember coveting it, and wanting to see through it so badly, and wondering how it worked. And another early memory is probably from around 4 or 5, when our car got stuck in the snow and some joggers came along and helped push us out. But the lullabies are probably the oldest. I remember the fabric of the chair, how it was a rough weave, and I remember the bookshelf was black sheet metal that made a tinny twang when anything hit it. I also remember playing with Legos for hours, going to an apple orchard, singing my first song in front of strangers when in my then-church's "cherub" choir for 4-5-year-olds (Morning has broken). I was lucky. My mom is a biology major, and a scout leader. When she wasn't helping me to do great science fair projects, we were going to a picnic, or to the zoo, or chasing hot air balloons. Or she was checking me out of school for a doctor's appt, only to surprise me by taking me to the movies. Dad was the authority, mom was the adventurer. Good mix. Now, at almost 25, I don't doubt for a moment that I was and am a very lucky kid, and I think I've got good insight as per how to raise an independant, compassionate, knowledge-seeking flaky kid just like I am
My earliest is when I was two. I remember my grandpa taking his false teeth out and biting at me in play. My parents said that was when I was two.
I suppose it could be tied to language, because (having Asberger's Syndrom) I was speaking rather well at that time. Honestly, I think it has to do more with chemical balances and the ability to record, and the usefullness of the memory compared to helping you survive (in a primitive way). The event shocked me, therefor my mind recorded it for future use in case a simlilar situation occured I could react quicker.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
...is often reported by people undergoing the process of Rebirthing.
This process, through a deep connected breathwork discipline, appears to simultaneously engage the sympathetic and autonomous nervous systems via the breath, and open a deep portal into the subconscious.
Allegations of 'false memory syndrome' can't be thrown lightly, because in many cases people have had memories of their earliest infancy, even birth and inside the womb, that have been later substantiated with hospital records, accounts from relatives etc.
Rebirthing is in desperate need of formal scientific study, but the memory retrieval phenomenon suggests that individual cells of the body may be capable of storing memory, albeit in a much different way to the neural-net cerebral-based memory we're familiar with.
Personally, I've seen more than enough to forever debunk any notions that retrievable memory can only be written after the first couple of years of infancy.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Maybe for "Total Recall 2". That would make this article remotely relevant to the /. crowd.
About three maybe.. I remember going to an open market. Then sporadic memories, but quite a few of them. Of course, every time I read another programming book, I have to loose a few to make space!
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I was laying down on a couch and someone was changing my diaper, and I was given a mirror, I looked into the mirror confused, eventually i began to understand I was looking at myself and from this moment on I had self awareness and memory.
I can remember from Age 2.5 on up. I cannot remember anything from age 1.
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I also have vague recollections about being a hershey bar in my dad's back pocket.
A better article would have been, "what's the earliest troll on slashdot".
Seriouslly, I have memories that go back to when my youngest brother was born. I was 5 then, I'm 40 now. What's hard is that most of these "memories" are more like feelings and impressions rather than solid memories. I have a number of memories of when we lived in Italy back in the late 60's. But again these are more like impressions than memories. It's hard to seperate the feelings from the thoughts.
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Humans are vulnerable to false memories and memories of memories. In the first, your mind simply accepts a lie; in the second, you remember not what happened, but what you remember when you last thought of it or, worse, talked to someone else about it who was there. So I suppose your true oldest memory would be something you recall for the first time today, and which happens to me true.
The mind plays all sorts of tricks that infect eyewitness or child testimony, psychological counseling, and so on. Controversial are "suppressed" memories, submerged for years by trauma such as child abuse, which later come out and may be accurate (courts have even extended statutes of limitation by the period of the suppression).
So it is important to be very cautious and critical. I have a few faint memories dating from when I was 1 1/2 to 3, but since I've thought about them now and again over the years I don't really think of them as true 30+ year memories, and they may entirely false by now. Perhaps how far back you remember reflects how introspective and literal you are.
Memory has been studied extensively in the psych literature. I mostly looked at it from the standpoint of the effects of organic brain injury on the ability to learn or remember. I bet you can find many books on childhood memories at Amazon et al; unfortunately I do not know the field well enough to recommend any. Much of the literature is in a subfield called cognitive science that I never cottoned to.
For the layperson, Oliver Sacks' books (especially "Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat") on psychological ephemera are quite entertaining, if not rigorously scientific.
What's you're earliest analytical memory? My earliest memory is probably moving into my new house, which was probably around 4 years old.
On the other hand, my first memory where I figured out something by myself is when I turned 5 -- and I remember distinctly realizing that my age was the same as the number of members of my family.
Of course, this is an easy one to tie to a date because of the specifics of the thought. Others probably don't have memories that are that easy to date. But anyone have any other examples out there?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Early memories for me were firsts of things. Like the first time, I saw or heard or understood something. Sort of like the camera freak. Oooh this is new! Better take a shot of that for later. Goofy, but that seems to be how it worked for me back then.
Most of these are snapshots of a sort. There is a visual image combined with a rough time of day, and some direction. Very little sound, unless it was a key part of the memory.
All of them are short like movie clips. Could be my attention span at the time, or maybe just somehow only the relevant things were stored. Who knows? I was pretty damn young!
So I remember walking past a guy (who I could describe fairly well) who happened to be cutting some pipe with a saw. To me this was very interesting because the cutting of things happened with metal. What then cuts metal? This was in the summer about mid afternoon. His house was three up from ours on the same side of the street. The door was a dark color, he wore coveralls with no shirt underneath. (Ewww.) I was walking my bike up hill because I could get a nice ride... His house and ours faced east.
Another was a group of kids all riding bikes down the hill we lived on. They were jumping at the end. One kid in particular had an odd sized sprocket for his bike. He pedaled really fast. I don't have a thought for that one other than hmmm... Oh, and they called him 'little kid' only he was the same size they were. Later on I remember seeing sprockets on smaller bikes and thought they were referring to that with the name. Have always wanted to ask... which is likely the reason why I still remember.
Earliest one is in front of the first house I remember living in. I can remember the shape and color and one of the rooms. (The one where I got busted for turning on the TV for the first time... Hehe. Got started bright and early I did!) It faced north, though I did not know that until later, but managed to remember enough to know. Some people across the street did strange things. I remember their basement and some other things that led me to realize (when I was 16!?!) that they were fencing stolen goods for some thieves. (Don't ask, it just popped in there and my parents verified it.)
Just goes to show you never can tell what the little ones might remember. My parents were surprised that I knew. They moved because of it.
Language seems to play a part though. I can verbalize thoughts I had then. I am not sure if the verbal thoughts were constructed later or not. I suspect almost all of them were.
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... is recorded forever and is available to me. The secret is in learning how to access it. Move beyond "physical is all there is" - and the horizons really open up - because what if your physical brain memory storage is complemented by another non-physical storage system?
email for some books to read on the subject...
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I did not know what they meant. I described them to my father. He told me what the event was. I was 6 months old. The memory is sight and sensation only, nothing cognitive.
I believe I have memories from a very early age
(before I could walk).
My father used to regularly display his collection
of 35mm slides. I saw pics from outings and holidays over, and over.. and I believe as a result of this I still have real memories surrounding those events. We didn't have a TV when I was young,
probably making the slides more interesting.
Also a few unplesant things stick out from a very early age(bad falls etc).
I remember big events in my first home. Like when the stove caught fire during a big party, or when I stole a cigarette from my dad, or when I peeked through the door when my mother was showering and surprised her. I think was between 2 and 3 for all of those.
But you know what? I suspect that instead of that being the earliest thing I can remember, it's rather the earliest thing I remember remebering.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
If you read the literature, you will find there are proposed limits to what can be remembered. I think the age of 2 is often cited as the limit, associated with the massive death of neurons at that age.
That said, I do have memories that have be corraborated from the age of 3 months. On the other hand, it may also depend on what you call memories. It has been pointed out that most old memories people have are from a third person perspective. If they were strict memories of what you perceived of the world, they should all be first person perspective.
There are also proposals that language is required for memory, but if you trust what people say, many people have memories other than language. For example, I can remember what the Mona Lisa looks like, or how Beethovan's 9th starts. These, as Daniel Dennet would say, are made up of qualia. That is, the sensations that you experience, and cannot be expressed easily (or at all) in language.
A related issue is what 'forgetting' consists of. That is, does you unlearn something (such as a neural network), or are there other mechanisms involved, such as loss of retreival cue. Endel Tulving showed that it appears to be loss of retreival cue. This means that if provided with the correct cue, such as going back to a house where you lived at the age of 4, you will start to recall other events at that age.
Having known people who cannot recall their childhood, I have seen those people suddenly recollect memories from their childhood provided the correct prompting. This is, by the way, very different from hypnotism, which is not known to produce reliable memories.
Being in the car when i was two years old. It was a relativly grey day to be out, my mother was taking me to my grandfathers house for the day because she was going to be out. Then all of as sudden a huge possum leaped out infront of the car. wa didn't hit it, but i remember quite distinctly the green color of the trees on the sidewalk, other cars being parked along the side of the road. Perhaps memory requires something relativly significant in life. but then one would argue that your birth is incredibly significant. Maybe it isn't.
The Blade Itself
I remember my assistant telling me not to go to Waterloo.
Oh, you mean *this* life? Damn! because I got some nifty stories.
Table-ized A.I.
...eating a bottleful of Flintstones vitamins. I was about 2-3 years old. She was four years older. -- anthony
I was hit in the head by a minivan 3 years ago(I'm 16 now). Since then I have very few memories of when I was bored.
:-)
I remember nearly every day of Auto Mechanics from last (freshman) year, every day of of Adv. Geometry from the same year, but not one memory of Adv. Freshman English or Keyboarding beyond the teachers name and some CDs I listened to in class
In a decade or two will I still remember AP Physics(awesome course) or nothing but the different class, variable, and method names of my code?
As for my earliest memory, it is getting my first book on GW-BASIC in second grade. I still have a 5.25" floppy with some of my code from the time and a notebook of flowcharts. I hope I still have a few discs to look back through, but I've given up on notebooks. I just might port some of that code; the "Uno Warrior" was a backbreaking 2000 step 10 lines! Now that we no longer use line numbers, tens of thousands seems like less to brag about whereas 200 with no external dependancies seems amazingly efficient for an "adventure" game.
As for the author's "language" theory; I'll never be able to forget BASIC though it is a lot of fun to insult it. I don't remember Pascal, nor any of my programming in it.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I have a few memories of the apartment me and my parents lived in until I was about 1,5 years old.. I remember pulling the plug of the vacuum cleaner for example.. I don't know why I remember that, but I guess I hated the sound of it and I found out that it got silent if I pulled the plug, or something like that.. ;)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Remembering past experiences is called episodic memory. There are a few things that enable it: 1) Sense of subjective time. Remembering what happened yesterday involves travelling backwards in time mentally. There is no evidence that other animals do this; probably because it is not necessary biologically. 2) Autonoetic awareness. This term refers to a special type of consciousness that allows us to separate real events from imagined. This is why we don't confuse events happening now from memories; or experiences from dreams; or sensory input from imagination. 3) Sense of self. This is the notion that time travel requires a time traveller. This information was taken from: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0961/2002_Annual /83789638/print.jhtml
Some good evidence that episodic memory is "special" is the case of amnesiacs. After recieving brain damage, e.g. to the medial temporal lobes, one might lose all knowledge of personal experiences, and yet retain basic language and mathematics skills. I believe that this is consistent with damage to the hippocampus. These people can also learn some factual information although they have trouble picking up many mundane facts due to their inability to remember experiences. You may remember a movie not too long ago named Momento whose main character had this problem.
I have severe shortcomings in my short term memory but I make up for it in long term. My earliest memories were when I was sitting on some steps and looking at the baby fat in my hand and being curious about why I had lines or folds on the palm of my hand. My second was when I took some thermometers out of a fishtank and threw them on the floor. I asked my mom how old i was when I did this? She said I was still a toddler and I was around 2. I also have an unusual ability to memorize details in my surroundings because of my lack of ability to filter them out due to autism. For example I described to my father where he use to work by the 4 rusty train tracks that surrounded his office and I described half of his team and where they all sat. I even remember seeing an old DEC PDP-11 that I only figured out what it was after seeing pics on the web. He told me he quit that job when I was only 3 and he knew the names of all the guys I described in vivid detail. I also remember a cousins backyard and bedroom perfectly from when I was 5. I have not seen his home since.
It all matters on how your brain is wired. I assume someone who can not remember long term events has superb short term memory. My brain just made up for one shortcoming by strengthening another. This is how our brains are designed to work.
http://saveie6.com/
Questions such as this are interesting. However, the Slashdot editors seem to have lost interest in computing, but I haven't.
Read The Primal Scream, a book by Arthur Janov. He was a Los Angeles Russian who didn't have the good fortune to be connected with Brazil.
The practices of Primal Therapy bring back memories. Janov found people who say they can remember being born. After having done Primal Therapy for 4 years, I find the claims credible. (This was more than 20 years ago.)
John Lennon of The Beatles did Primal Therapy. Before he was doing 4 drugs and sleeping around. After, he stayed home with his child. The therapy seemed to have done him some good.
I remember back to about 2.5 to 3 years old.
I have this theory that our brains work like set-associative caches. Different people probably have different set-associativities depending on how they were raised, and how their minds were used. Some people have larger but slower L1 caches, while others have faster but smaller L1 caches.
For example, if I study like mad for an exam right before taking it, I've basically managed to shove a bunch of data from my I/O devices (eyes, ears, etc) into my L1 caches. It's there for short term temporal use, and usually, it works fairly well.
Every now and then, though, my body will generate an address as a result of an interrupt request (i.e, something triggers a memory), and not immediately, but a few seconds later, the memories will flood into my system. Basically, the trigger caused an L1 cache miss, and an L2 cache miss, and forced a fetch into DRAM.
The only thing is that the DRAM for humans doesn't really have any really decent form of error correction.
This is where I think God messed up a little. Also, it would have been nice to be able to add secondary storage devices. Instead, we have to use cameras and writing utensils for that...
Were from around 1989, when I was around 3 years old (I was born on 25/8/1986), back when I was a toddler. I remember going to a nursery called the chantry. I can remember it was a girls birthday, and I was VERY naughty and blew out HER candles on HER cake!
I have very vauge memories of a place called the Jack and Jill club as well, but they are too fuzzy for me to accuratley depict.
I remember seeing my first computer around 1991, A BBC Micro.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
...claims that he remembers his own birth.
For me, that would be a very disturbing experience.
-- anthony
I met my first best friend in my drive way when I was 4, that my earliest memory and strangely enoug it's in black and white.
Some people remember further back, for instance the Dali Lama remembers vividly the day the monks first visited him at age 2. I seriously doubt anyone could remember anything before then.
I think Mr. Hubbard has you all beat. He claims, "I know with certainty where I was and who I was in the last 80 trillion years." For those of you who don't know which Hubbard this is, it's not poor mother hubbard who had no food in the cubbard's husband. This man is the founder of Scientology (head to zenu.net for more info). I just happen to know this because I just finished a paper on Scientology I did for a class on Major Cults.
This is a little convoluted, but bear with me...
I can remember a few dreams that I had of being able to fly when I was about 6 or 7 yrs of age (I'm 37 now). The dream usually involved me floating around my school of that time. How I floated was interesting though; I simply raised my knees to my chest, and tilted my body forwards & this let me float in a forwards direction.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that this was a memory of floating in the womb & a foetal position! I'm sure I didn't dream *that* too (the reading, that is..)! Anyone else with similar dreams??
Matt
Midnight
Not a sound from the pavement
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone
In the lamplight
The withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan
Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember a time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again
Touch me
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me
You'll understand what happiness is
Look, a new day has begun
My frist memory is of the 14 inning game between the New York Mets and the Houston Astros in the 1986 NLCS, then my second memory is of "Buckner, through the legs, Mets Win" that made me a Mets fan, for life, which also made me screwed, for life.
-"Nice jacket, who shot the couch?."
About ten years ago a lot of therapists had people "remember" childhood sexual abuse (and Satanic abuse) by their parents. Now it is widely accepted by psychologists that complete repression of traumatic memory is very rare. Memory turns out to be very delicate and pliable. The research gets kinda scary when you realize that US law puts such an emphasis on eyewitness accounts.
I have to agree with the guy who remembers when he was 3. I remember a pelican stuffed toy I lost when I was 3 or 4 ... because we moved. My parents claimed I drove a bigwheel off a coffee table, but I can't remember that (different memory, much earlier).
I can however remember things like kindegarden, so I *know* I can remember back when I was 5.
One of my theories on memory is that your mind makes judgements on what is important and what isn't. I can memorize ip addresses until I'm blue in the face, yet sometimes I have a difficult time remembering what I was talking about thinking about, or even where I was going when walking somewhere. It boarders on absent-mindedness!
Right now I'm teaching myself perl... and I think just going through the motions and doing similar things repeatedly, will help me remember it. Maybe sometime in the future it will be second nature, and I'll laugh at myself struggling to learn it. Then again, maybe my brain will throw out "other" things that it believes not to be so important, and I'll start to forget to wear pants...
FLR
The human brain's development is designed to enable our upright posture.
The human femal pelvis is a bowl with a small hole in it, unlike those of our forebears, which are tubes with large holes.
As a result, a large head would block our birth. But if we had small heads, we'd have small brains. But we don't. How does it work?
The human brain is not fully formed at birth. The insulation on the wiring is left out, saving most of the volume the brain will eventually attain. This insulation is called "myelin".
The brain's wires (axons) aren't fully myelinated until about 6 months after we are born. So a human baby can have no coherent cerebral activity at a younger age. It's mostly hardwired activity coordinated by the more primitive portions of the hindbrain.
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/dah18/america/ page2.html
Enjoy!
once claimed that he could feel the coldness of the metal on the weighing scale on his little newborn baby back.
Me, I can remember sitting on my dad's shoulder's as he walked around, chewing on his hair. I would have been about 13 months old.
I have a kinda fuzzy memory from when I was about 2. My parents and I were walking along a path in an arid region, and I somehow managed to fill my right foot and ankle with lots of lovely spines from a cactus. I was lifted by my one of the parentals and was held almost horizontally and I can remember looking down, seeing my foot covered in spines and the path in front of us. I don't remember any pain or a lot of details or the actual sights, but I remember seeing them. The next memory is from about 3, at my baby sitters' place with a toy car you pull back, let go, and vrooom! A fridge was near. I have some other scattered memories with detail up until about 5 or 6, and now I can't remember what I was doing 6 hours ago at work. :)
-= I can't think of anything witty, creative, or insightful for my sig, so deal with this. =-
The earliest memory I have is of my birthday at (I think) age four. I'm twenty-four now. My dad, a timber faller, was working down in southern Oregon, and my mom, my sister, and I all went down to see him. We stayed in a little hotel, and I remember getting a Fisher Price airport set for my birthday. I can also remember my dad's truck, a 1978 F-150, blue. Of course, there are pictures of that, so it's not too difficult to forget.
;-)
The next memory I can think of is when I was five, in kindergarten. I was making some sort of picture book, where you use fingerprints to make pictures of bugs (by drawing the legs and whatnot), and then stapling the pages together. I accidently put a staple through my finger and proceeded to bleed profusely.
Oh how I wish I could remember more from my early childhood. I might look at it as being more enjoyable. That airport set wasn't too bad, though
I guess the most things you remember, you remember from having remembered them before. And before. And before. A sort of pointer-to-pointer structure.
Sometimes we have to restore the forgotten parts of these kinds of memories by asking people how things exactly were, or make up small parts of our own. That's when things get foggy. My 2c.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Memory is a strange thing. For instance, people may say "I can't remember anything from before the age of 5." However, before the age of five a child has learned his or her name, he or she has learned that a hot stove burns. Indeed, the memory is functioning at a very early age. The question is, then, what is different about the type of memory which deals with direct recognition.
The simple answer would seem to be that a schema (so to speak) must be formally stated in the human mind. I am not a doctor (IANAD) but neurology is a side-hobby of mine (at least reading about it). Neurons in the human brain store information not only through the network of dendrites and synapses, but also through the difference in potential between dendrites as well as differing frequencies. Neural networks are something indeed.
Recognition is a type of memory that only humans seem to possess. Language seems like it is necessary for this type of memory to exist. However I think that Language is actually made possible through recognition.
it is well know that around the age of 3-5 Children begin to make a astronomical jump in their language skills, they begin to form abstract concepts and so on. Around the ages of 7-10 children learn around 20 words a day (meaning and usage!). this amazing spurt in brain development is indicated by this jump in language skills, but I don't think language is the key player in recognition, I think the radical brain development is the key. also, traumatic events tend to stick around in memory. This makes sense in a survival sense. Since being able to recognize threats and remember they would be important to survival. However, this type of memory cause by traumatic events is important, but I don't think it fits into the classic type of memories the poster is referring to
when I was 8 months old my mother gave me swimming lessons (yes a child can swim at this age). For clarification, 8 month old babies learn to swim by having the "instructor" blow in their face (to cause the baby to instinctually hold their breath) and then tossing them in the water! It's pretty brutal, but the baby can swim pretty good for a while. Of course the baby can never get out of the pool and will continue swimming until the batteries run out so to speak, but that's another story. I seem to remember this - but I can recall over the years how I have embellished on this memory. Slowly adding onto it. I think the initial memory was more esthetic, emotional. And as my abstract memory abilities came to life in the proceeding years I think I slowly added this and that here and there. I think this happens with all memories, but especially the patchy early memory.
Some background on me (31 yrs old), which is similar to that of the story submitter:
I learned to speak English and Spanish at the same time. I subsequently totally forgot Spanish at around 7 years of age from lack of practice. I then re-learned Spanish starting at age 13 by studying it in class as a foreign language, just as any other person would (although the classes took place in Venezuela and later Guatemala).
Now for the memories:
My family moved from the US to Mexico (diplomat) when I was 1 year old. This was when I learned to speak. I can remember some things, but not more than about 1/2 dozen. Some of the places we travelled, my favorite food, etc. The few memories I have are very clear, where I can remember exactly what I was thinking and what I was seeing; it's like watching a 10 second television show. I can remember *much* more about the Dominican Republic (other side of the island from Haiti), where we moved when I was 5. These memories are as complete as an adult would have: relationships and conversations you had, places travelled, etc.
Returned to the US for a 6 year stay and forgot Spanish altogether. My memories from Spanish-speaking lands from 2 yrs old were still intact at that point, however.
So, I think language has nothing to do with it.
BTW, I have been studying Brazilian Portuguese, and it is fun for those who already know Spanish!
Mr. Ashley Jacobs
I had a false memory like that too. When I was about one or two years old I took a plane trip. Until I was fifteen or sixteen that was the only time I was on a plane.
When I was still young (single-digits) my parents told me about the trip. Then I was convinced that I could remember the plane trip. But then, after a few years, I saw a picture or TV shot of the inside of a plane and realized my memories were nothing like the reality, and I had constructed them after hearing that I was on a plane at that age.
My parents tell me that after a while on the plane I started saying "I want to get off this bus!"
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
My first memory is my grandmother telling me my little sister had died. I must have been three or four (we don't talk about it much in the family, and I haven't thought about it for years). I don't remember knowing what that meant.
My next memories that I can really put a pin on are telling my parents that my next sister should be named Jennifer, and I must have been four by then.
Right now I'm 23, almost 24.
Well, maybe not.
I remember a lot of my early child hood. My earliest memory was in a room with a bunch of women, I was being held by one of them and I was drooling all over the place. And all I could think about was that lamp. There was a lamp on a table and I couldn't stop staring at it.
I was born in 68 and I remember keeping track of 71,72 and 73 from the game show, MATCHGAME. They would append the year to the name. Although I had no idea what it was about. I remember watching an Asian guy give a speach at my dad's office (dad was in the Air Force). Only later in life did I figure out it was a Vietnamese General.
Hell, I remember going with my dad to pick up his brand new 1971 Ford Maverick!
As far as theories go, about memory (and language), start reading... a lot! I'm so sick of language and it's relation to the Logical Positivist's movement that I'm happy to burry my head in Oracle and Mysql! Matlin has a text book called Cognition, in which there is a chapter or two about memory retintion (long and short term). Reference at the end of the chapter. W.V.O. Quine is a good start to reading about lanaguage and philosophy, and how it shapes our world. He's more toward the latter Positivist's movement, but he is a good read, better than most.
being in a crib, wearing an orange coverall and crying.
I also have this rare dream where I'm walking around and the chair seats are all as high as my face - I turn a corner and wake up.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
My family moved alot when I was younger and I remember sleeping upstairs with my older brother and my dad had an office up there as well. I don't think my younger brother was born yet which was just before I turned 2. I know it was before I turned 4 since I remember I wasn't in school for a year when we moved to a new house without an upstairs.
I remember this incident because my brother make a scary shadow on the wall and scared the hell out of me.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Yep, remember some of my presents and where in the house i was when i opened them.
I was thinking, "GOD it's cold out here... maybe I'll cry about it."
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
I'm 35 now, having been born in 1967. There are 3 things that I consider to be my earliest memories.
:-)
I remember crying for a bottle in my crib one night. I was crying so much that my Mom thoght that I wanted to see her. I remember her saying so. She wheeled my to the other end of my bedroom so I could see her & Dad sitting on the living room couch.
I remember crying and crying, and she gave me 2 bottles of milk. I drank them both. I remember her telling my Father that I must be hungry, but they didn't have any milk left. So Mom gave me a water bottle. I wanted milk, and I kept crying.
The second one goes like this: I remember Apollo 11. I remember watching the launch. And I remember sitting at the apartment window a couple of days later, looking at the Moon with my Aunt, who was explaining to me that "there are 2 men walking on the moon right now. they are very far away from home now, but they're going to come back with moon rocks for scientists to study".
I was fascinated, and this was what got me interested in astronomy, science, and eventually computers.
The other thing I remember, is watching Star Trek in it's first run. I remember, very early on, sitting next to Dad on the living room floor, watching the Enterprise scrolling across the screen in front of a planet.
Kirk was going through his captain's log routine. I had no idea at the time what a log or a stardate was. But I remember thinking that the captain's log was the warp nacelle. and that maybe the number on the log changed all the time. I knew after a while that the stardates always changed.
Even though I couldn't read, I knew that letters and numbers were different, from each other, and that printed and spoken letters and numbers were the same. So knowing that Kirk was saying numbers, and knowing that numbers were written on the side of the 'log', I imagined that the numbers must change on the 'log' every time.
I can only imagine what must be going through my 20 month old daughter's head right now.
I hope that she's as fascinated with her toys, TV and her imagination as I was.
Huh?
On my brother's 4th birthday I must have been 2 years 9 months old. He got a black helicopter which I envied greatly. My earliest memory is of it sitting on the hall table. My brother didn't allow me to play with it and that made me cry. The next day I did get to try it out. Thinking back I guess the toy was unsuitable for a youngster really as it had moving rotors (not powered, though.)
My Dad had a copy of Pet Sounds by the Beach Buys and I would sing along with the harmonies, though I didn't really do the words right. I wasn't allowed to touch the vinyl, but he let me look at the sleeve while it was empty. The picture was of the band feeding a goat, but I called it a sheep.
Our postie was called Derek, who told us a joke when he delivered a parcel for the birthday (not the helicopter and I don't recall what it was.) I didn't understand the joke but I laughed when everyone else did because it was infectious. It was raining hard and Dad mentioned something about bad weather, but Derek said there's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. He had a peaked cap with an oiled silk rain cover, which he said kept his hair dry in any downpour.
I can also remember eating dough at the Kindergarten which we were meant to be sculpting with. Mrs Talbot said I shouldn't but I'd have a chew when she wasn't looking. I'm pretty sure all these things are from before my third birthday (except the dog bite.)
I can recall being 2 and 1/2 years of age with my parents while they were playing Tennis in Jupitor, Florida. I can remember the salty air and the feel of the soft sandy beaches. I believe I am blessed to have such a glorious first memory.
[ brakken ]
is from when I had to have been about 2 or 3. Those were the days when I'd get a "shower" from the kitchen sink. By the age of 4 we stuck to a shallow bath in the tub.
For some reason I also have vague memories of being in the womb. But then again, that just might be the Discovery Channel or PBS kicking in =P
my mother holding me while talking to a lady on the other side of a white picket gate or fence. My monther said I was about two when that conversation took place. From about 3 on I have many memories. I used to have a photographic memory, until Aspartame destroyed it.
they can fuck up your mind, put in false memories, like past lives and alien abduction memories into your head.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It seems to matter how 'big' an event was - I can clearly recall my fourth birthday - we packed up and moved from a large city to the middle of nowhere. Big yellow rider truck, I got to ride with my father, my little brother rode with mom.
I have one earlier memory that my father confirms, but I'm way too embarrased to post it on slashdot
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Well, I'm 26 now, heading close towards 27. I have vague memories of certain people saying certain phrases, certain images in my mind, and even a couple of thoughts or two from when I was around 3 (perhaps before or after, I don't remember exactly). I'd bet that there's not too many people out there who can consciously go back much farther.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I remember back when I was probably about 3 or 4 years old, I reached up and turned the lights on in my parent's basement. Everything before that was tranquil blackness. No sound, no images, no feeling, just kind of floating in blackness. Then I turned on the lights.
Suddenly I could see and hear. I remember running (well, since I was a toddler, it was probably more like toddling) over to the other side of the basement to play with legos with my cousin Matt. Of course, I didn't know his name at the time, but he was about my age and he had legos, so it was all good.
That is my earliest memory. After that I remember a bunch of things. Day care: picking on an older kid named Reese, called him Reese's pieces and he'd chase my other cousin and I around a bit. Toddler memories are pretty few and far between relative to my other childhood memories, but there are still a substanstial number of them.
So Dr Freude (sp?), what is the verdict?
Tough call what mine is. There's a huge number of events I can remember with exquisite detail (semi-eidetic memory), but the timeline loses cohesion. It's kind of weird. Ask me what's the earliest, and I can't really tell you. Ask me to describe an event, and I'll give you more detail than you'd think possible.
When you ask for the earliest memory, half a dozen immediately popped to mind. I'm 21 (22 in February), and they're all from many years ago. Maybe it was the time I went to see my mother's cousin Allison. That event stands out because we stayed the night, and I woke up around 3am with her boyfriend's "pet" tarantula sleeping on my face.
Maybe it was learning to count to 10 in French. I remember with great detail walking down 2nd Ave. in the small town I still live in, and having David, my nanny's boyfriend (now her husband), teaching me while we were walking to a soccer field where Sylvie (the nanny) was with my older brother, and I remember having a lot of trouble learning to pronounce "cinq".
Maybe it was my first soccer practice, when I threw a temper tantrum and my dad pulled me from the field and took me home.
Then there's a family dinner at my grandmother's, many years ago. My uncle had just returned from Korea (he worked, and still does, with Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and had been on the ambassadorial staff). I remember two things: first, my uncle brought me a jacket from the Soeul Olympics (was a satiny blue plush jacket that I wore for over a year before outgrowing it), and second, my grandmother's big dog, a mastiff named Maggie.
All of these events happened around the same time in my life. But I can't, for the life of me, tell you what order they happened in. Memory's funny that way, I think. You have a lot of memories in your mind, but you have to be prompted. The question "what's your earliest memory" is loaded, because your earliest memory changes from moment to moment. Really, the only answer to that question is "5 seconds ago", because the remainder of your memories aren't currently on your mind. Memories aren't there unless they're prompted.
You say you can only remember about 7 years back. If I were to ask you what the first Christmas gift you remember was, you could probably go back a lot farther than 7 years. What if I asked you about the first sports team you were on? It all comes flooding back if I ask you the right questions.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I had surgery when I was about three years old. My earliest memory is the anesthesia wearing off and being in agonizing pain. My life has just gone steadily downhill since.
standing, holding on the rail. Mom came in the room, she was angry at me. She picked up the bottle and gave it to me. That is probably the earliest event. I do remember other times in the crib, the painted beeds, and the bambi on the headboard. I do also remember walking out by the mailbox in my diapers.
I am in my late fifties, so that was more than a few years ago. i do remember the rag man and his horse drawn wagon. I also remember the old women in bonnets working their gardens.
photosMy Photostream
The Human Mind works on parallel planes of thought. If there is a substantial change which changes the way a person thinks, then memories will seem to disappear. The memories are instead stored in an inaccessible part of the brain. There have been studies that we use 10% of the brain at one time or less. It's possible that the other parts do get used in different times of their lives. If a person was to suffer a severe shock, they would most likely not remember everything even if they were conscious through the whole ordeal. Learning something that will strongly change the patterns of thought in a person's mind such as speech will change thought patterns permanantly. Since we cannot go back to the thoughts we thought without language, we cannot remember what it's like. Through hypnosis and other types of treatments without scientific backing have supposedly helped people remember some very early things about their life. It also helps people remember a trauma which has been blocked out. Both early life and shock are very similar and have the same basic solution. Will it be possible to someday remember our own birth? I believe we will sometime in the near future we will be able to.
My first memory was from the 2nd day after I was born. The bastard doctor cut part of my dick off. I remember being naked on a cold hard surface under fluorscent lights, being cold and scared and alone. And the pain. No timeline in that memory, no faces.
I have many memories of when I was 4, and some memories of 3, including briefly tricking my parents into believing I could spell, using a fisher price school days desk. I am 34 now and can spell quite well on my own.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
My earliest are all around 3-4, and all for things that frightened me. My family was stationed in Germany back then - I was the family interpreter up to the age of six when we moved back to the states. I lost the language around 12 and can only count to ten now. Anyway, I remember being a tom-boy and climbing on clothes lines - I fell off and landed on a spike. We lived off base, so no hospital near by. I have a pretty decent sized scar on my butt to remind me. But I can pretty vividly remember trying to get myself off it, and trying to get home afraid I was going to get in trouble. Still in Germany, we went to a haunted house thing on the base, and you were supposed to close your eyes and reach in to some unknown scary goop, I was told it could be worms and freaked. It was only spaghetti. My parents never did that to me again. To this day, I can still remember a bad dream. We must have gone to Disney Land before moving to Germany, and I had a nightmare one night that all the 'It's a Small World' characters (which I loved then and still do) were dancing around my feet and poking at me. The cat had gotten under the covers and was playing with my toes, but it turned into a nightmare - I can still remember my mother running in the room to wake me up and pull the cat out. I know the age is right because we lived in two different houses while there so I can pin-point the location.
When I think about what I can remember, it breaks my heart when children are abused, because I can understand how it affects them forever. And I count my blessings that my earliest memories, though caused by fear, were for nothing more than kids stuff.
Early childhood amnesia is pretty well discussed by neuroscientists. Not that that means they've got any excellent answers.
The best one I've heard, expressed to me in some cognitive psychology course, is that accessing memories is facilitated by a better frame of reference, and our current frame of reference is so different from our early childhood, we are left unable to access the memories.
I'm sure I'll gloss over important details, but: If you're hungry when you learn something, then it may be easier to recall that memory when you are hungry. This seems to be due to spreading activation. If memories, concepts, feelings, thoughts, smells, or anything else is linked in your mind, then it will be faster to access one if the other has been activated recently.
So, since everything about us is so fantastically different from our childhoods (we can control our muscles properly, speak, see the world from 6', rather than 2', etc.), now we have no connection to those memories to exploit.
Iduno. This was definitely not presented to me as a conclusive explanation, and I'm sure I'm missing parts. If you're really interested in the subject of memory, you should take a course on cognitive neuroscience or cognitive psychology. It was really difficult for me, but it was definitely the most rewarding subject I've ever learned about.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I had eye surgery at two and a half and remember the
black rubber anesthesia mask and the sickly sweet
ether. This was in '58 back when they still used that stuff.
I believe that a shocking or frighteneing experience will stick in your mind while very very young, while the day to day tedium of learing how to walk and talk becomes clouded in no man's land.
I personally remember getting out of the car when my family moved from Maryland to Wyoming. I don't remember the trip, or any of the life we had in Maryland. This was about age 2. I know I didn't have a full grasp of english yet, but I was fully mobile and tactile. (Probably a handful of trouble) We had 2 dalmations in Maryland, I've seen many pictures of me playing with them, but I have never had any conscious recollection of them, even when I was a lot younger (side note:now 30 , damn hottie 18 yr olds are still looking tempting, but milfs are more my style these days.). I've seen alot of pictures of the house I learned to walk in, but I have no recollection of bouncing off any walls or tables, and all the pictures are foriegn to me.
Maybe, I'm really a space alien with no actual past, just fake pictures??? Probably not.
I have a friend that swears he remembers his first birthday quite vividly. I kind of doubt this, but his mom is pretty wacko, so that might have been a disturbing enough event to warrent being burned into his memory.
Anyway, I have to throw the BS flag on the guy above that claims to remember shooting out of the birth canal. While I freely admit a lot of amazing things are not so impossible as they may seem. That's a tad far fetched. You never know I suppose. The human mind is and amazing thing. I'm hoping we unlock some of the "secrets" of the mind someday, however I doubt that will happen any time soon. Jeez just look at the Tech section of cnn.com. Is there nothing technical in the world except the internet?
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
That memory is still pretty vivid and I don't remember having any conscious memories at that time. It's as if I woke up for the first time.
i agree 100%
another thing i do to people is ask if they have a photo of this event or object they remember. more than not they do. so they are remembering the picture and story they were probably told about it the first time they looked at the picture.
For the longest time, my "first memory" was when I was 5 and was in the process of becoming deaf (3-day process) due to chickenpox. I clearly remembered laying on the couch and being pissed off that I couldn't go easter egg hunting (it was Easter weekend) and being pissed that everyone was speaking really quiet to annoy me.
It's only recently that I'm able to remember anything from a timeperiod before that. Stuff like having my diaper changed, which must have been early 'cuz I was potty trained almost as soon as I could walk. I remember getting a kewpie doll for my 2nd birthday and throwing it out the car window 2 days later. And how everyone jumped out of the car to look for it, and I was terribly amused. Until I realized they couldn't find it. Then I was pissed.
When did I start remembering these things? When I got hearing aids for the first time a year and a half ago. Something about not having my hearing as a stimuli made me forget these incidents. Getting hearing aids brought certain sounds back into my life, and unlocked the doors my memories were hiding behind.
-Sara
Expo '86 - Alien water cannons. I think they started my Love of Sci-fi. I remember seeing them from the stroller I was in. :P.
Stairs - When I was about 2ish, my dad dropped me down a flight of stairs. That was... Fun.
And about that language arguement, I was able to read when I was 3, but I do have memories before that one, these are just the earliest. Strangely enough I remember more dreams from when I was 5 or 6 then actual events
There has been some research that suggests that a certain level of conceptual development is required to retain memories, if one is define a "memory" as the structured recall of a specific moment in time. Before that point (which may or may not map directly to the acquisition of language), we take in data from our senses in a disordered, impressionistic way, and therefore we cannot retrieve that data and express it in a meaningful, narrative way. However, there seems to be evidence that some people can retain impressions or feelings from before that point.
As to how far back one can go to pull those early memories, it seems to depend on how one develops and on how vivid an event is. An example is my earliest memory, which was when I was about 13 months.
It was a beautiful late summer's late afternoon in Southern California. The newly-cut grass was dark green and fragrant, and waning sun and smog created vibrant reds and oranges in the sky. A baseball game was blaring from the radio. My father stood in the midst of it all, watering the roof as though an approaching wildfire was a fairly common occurrence.
The only memory I can access between then and sometime around age 3 or 4 was a birthday party (either 2nd or 3rd), wherein some odd custom of setting a perfectly good cake on fire was re-enacted.
It's the vividity that matters. Supposedly, all of our memories are in there somewhere, but we usually need something about them to stand out in order to access them.
English / Brazilian Portuguese
Hi / Oi (Oh-ih)
Son / Filho (roughly: fill-yo)
Breakfast / Café da manhã (kah-feh dah mahnyan)
Icecream / Sorvete (Sor-veh-teh)
Ball / Bola (Boh-lah)
Soccer / Futebol (Fuh-teh-ball)
Bye / Tchau (from Italian "Ciao")
I once took an intro psychology course and one of the things we learned was child development. They had different stages like persistence (when you hide the ball under the blanket the ball is still there, you just can't see it ... which is, btw, why babies are so amused when you hide your face behind your hands and then reveal yourself with a "boo"), and other various things like getting potty trained, language etc. I think, or at least from my own personal experience, one of them is sentience.
Let me explain from my own personal story of one of my most notable earliest memories. I was in kindergarten and we took individual pictures by the swingset. We had them developed and the teachers gave us a copy of the pictures. I went out to the playground sat on the swingset and looked at the picture. The realization that I was looking at myself sitting at that same spot but at a different point in time sort of made a light bulb fire in my head. I guess that's what I meant by "sentience".
Other than that, I think most memories we keep are large events that shifted our way of thinking (whether we are young or old). Perhaps it's a memory of getting burned as a child by a hot pan, or almost drowning. Later on in life it's relationships etc etc.
Lastly, it is my belief that the older we get the more we discard "useless" information and only archive those most significant events. I liken our memories to computers: short-term is readily accessible (Cache) but not necessarily permanent, while long term memory is not always so readily accessible (tape drives) but can be remembered with a picture, smell or taste.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
My earliest memory is pointing at the fridge when i was hungry. I spoke real late... this was at about 3 years old I guess.
I *feel* like I remember being washed in the kitchen sink when i was a baby, looking out the front door, but I don't consider that memory reliable, even though my mom confirmed that yes, I was washed there sometimes.
But dude... I remember the first day of KINDERGARTEN like it was yesterday! But maybe that's just because it was a parochial catholic school and the whole ordeal of waking up at 6am to the sound of 1010 WINS AM and getting into uniform and taking my The Black Hole-themed lunchbox onto the freezing-cold school bus, was a shocking pain in my ass...
the close-your-eyes-and-it-will-go-away attitude.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Looking over a bay in Guam at the age of 18 months.
I couldn't tell you what happened last week, but I remember seeing the water and the boats in the bay.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I remember watching JFK's funeral on TV and my mom crying while we watched. At the time, I had no idea why it was so upsetting to see this procession with a horse drawn-buggy. I was about 10 months old then. Years later, I saw video of the funeral and recognized it.
Maybe it's a manufactured memory, but I don't know how that would have happened.
My next oldest memory was from when I was three or four years old.
My earliest memory was when I was one year old. I remember that there was a tornado and it was green outside and the trees were bent over. I remember that my mother had flipped the couch over and we got underneath it. I told my mother about this a few years ago and she couldn't believe that I remembered it because I was so young when it happened. I had thought that it was just my imagination, until my mom told me it was true. I have other memories that I don't know when they happened, but the tornado memory seems to be the earliest.
Smeghead every day of the week.
My earliest memory by far was created when I was only a couple of months old, at most. I was being placed into a scale; I remember seeing my father looking down towards me and the doctor. What I remember most vividly (and probably the exceptional event that made me remember this event) was the metal scale was freezing cold (at least it felt like I was on my back on a plate of ice).
:) I also remember seeing that I had splashed her right thigh, and her jeans were dark where they were wet, and a few details that identified that I was in the kitchen of my first house (which according to my parents we moved out of before I was two).
My doctor had passed away when I was still little, and we have no pictures of him. Describing the scene, both my parents confirm the appearance of the doctor (I remember his face quite vividly) as well as my dad recalling that specific visit to the doctor once I had described the situation well enough. That memory of the cold scale is quite clear and complete.
Another fairly early memory was probably a bit older. I was in the kitchen sink being washed. I splashed the water, and got some on my older half sister. I remember her face with a big frown looming closely and a loud, ominous "noooo!".
I have a few minor recollections of that first house (I picked up a pencil, toddled to the table in front of the couch, and threw the pencil into my dad's coffee mug, much to my father's consternation), and all seem to be at moments when stress or a threat. The scale I was put on was _very_ cold, my sister was angry, realizing my father might be about to get mad.
I don't think it has anything to do with language.
these fears can also be subliminal, where you are unaware of them. i've read studies where people who can't encode new memories (like memento) are introduced to a doctor, who pricks their hand with a pin when they shake his hand. upon meeting him again, they flinch when going to shake his hand, even though they can't remember the previous event or the doctor. so you could have a negative reaction/creepy feeling towards something, without knowing why, and it may be because of early trauma you cannot recall.
I think that most early memories are flickers of things that happened. The entire memory might not be there completely but your mind recalls that one instance and fills in the back story.
When I was very young my parents had to put my legs in braces. I was very pigeon toed. Somewhat like displaced hips and oddly formed legs. I remember having to wear bars between my ankles and special shoes for alot of my early childhood. that was from about age 2 - 5.
I remember once choking on a lifesaver in church. I was about 3 or 4. That memory is more 3rd person in my mind. I'm sure my mind remembered the incident and created a situation around it for my memory.
Childred are very observant and as children we have to be. We have to learn a language, learn to communicate, learn to get around. We do all this by watching people. Some children are more observant than others and tend to look at the world around them in more detail.
WHen I was about 2 my parents took me to a friends house some states away. We spent a few days there, went to the beach, and came back home. A year later, I was 3, we went back. I asked the people where their grandfather clock went to. They had sold it in between the times we were there. Everyone was floored that a 3 year old would notice something of that detail about a place.
All my life I've remembered places I've been and situations, most from early childhood. I couldn't tell you where these places were, but I could describe them in every detail as well as draw them.
Memory is quite interesting, I just wish i could remember to use it.
My very earliest memory is probably when my sister was born. I'd have been about two and a half, and I can remember (but not very well) looking through the glass at the hospital. May have been manufactured, but there's at least one more from roughly the same time period that I can still remember which I know wasn't manufactured. So I'd have to say that memory is good at least as far back as the age of two and a half years old.
Canthros
I suspect that the reason why we don't have memories from the womb or infancy, because we didn't really know what anything was, so there was no context into which we could place these memories.
Think about it. If I come and show you Rorshach inkblots today, you won't remember what they look like 10 minutes later, let alone 10 years.
But if I came to show you pictures of your favorite PC or your pet, you'd remember for days, months, or even perhaps years if asked to describe what I brought you.
I think that we require some conceptual framework in order to remember something. We don't remember data points, but objects. Without the ability to recognize objects as objects or to give them names or context, how can you remember them?
I got some 1MB 80ns 30 pin SIMMS.
I think my earliest memory is a blury image of being in nursurey school, i was wearing a diaper and I remember painting on a large piece of kraft paper. After that my memories get more detailed when I was kndergarten. I'm 25 now.
Here's a short story about my first memory.
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
I can remember what I can reasonably guess to be very far back, to the time when I was perhaps around two. But the deeper into my memory I try to recall, the harder it is to come up with any sort of sense as to when these memories took place.
It's sort of like opening up a directory that you archived within a filesystem that didn't support timestamps (?!) and then you upgraded somewhere later on... you know the files are old, but you can't tell exactly when they were made. Maybe this is only my brain; I can't really say I've heard of this happening to anyone else. Just an odd observation for you to chew on.
On Slashdot, we don't say "thank you." We say "that's enough..." -_-;
there are specific areas of the brain dealing with memory. As far as I know, they are not fully developed when we are first born. So as far as I know, anyone who talks about 'in-utero memories' or memories right after they were born is full of crap.
Our brains are not developed enough at that stage to remember things like that.
Development of language skills may be linked to this just because we generally need to have some memory to start using language.
Maybe a google search might turn up some good links.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
I remember standing in my crip and hearing a certain beatles song... from the phase where they were using a lot of symphonic crescendos etc.. and thinking "wow what an amazing sound" or somehting.. being impressed with the sound...
through my whole life - i've remained obsessed with sound... I can mark a lot of really important events in my life by what the background noise or music was at that very point.
An interesting fact is that different languages are stored in different areas of the brain. There was a scenario with a man who had to get part of his brain removed in the language sector. His wife knew only french and would refuse to learn english, and he was bilingual french/english. He decided that he should get the part of his brain that was fluent in french removed to force his wife to learn english. Interesting stuff.
I keep on telling others of this memory and they're amazed but I don't think it's so amazing because I feel there are those who may remember more. What I do recall is I was in bed, feeling unhappy, probably because I got ran out of milk. I then thought I would throw a tantrum and cry a little; but when I saw my dad with a somewhat angry look, it scared me more and I cried even louder (for real this time). I think that event imprinted my natural instinct to fear my dad.
I actually remember the time I was learning to walk. I remember the feeder, even its color, and the frequent crying. I remember massacring insects, and kindergarten friends.
However theres a large patch of time spanning 3 years (12 yr old) that I dont remember much. Theres no language difference involved here, I can speak 4 and still actively use them.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Tschernobyl took place 25. April 1986. I can it remeber clearly as my mother was abroad and phoned home. After the accident, we weren't allowed to eat the whole yoghurt because of the fallout (which went into the gras->milk) but I eated up anyway and well, I'm still alive. I was then 4 and a half year old.
I picked up a bumblebee that had fallen into a bowl of water when I was two and a half. The settings and everything are clear in my memory, but I can't verify that they're not from photographs - not that I remember seeing any such photos, I just can't say I never did. The bumblebee lifted out of the water though - I remember it. Problem is, it's a pretty easy memory for the brain to fake.
It's really hard to trust these "memories".
I still remember it.
I was four years old - i held four fingers up in kindergarten to a girl i wanted to impress (yea, insert your opinion about that here). i wanted a kiss - what did you want at that age, eh?).
I told here: thats how old I am (i didnt knew the word "four" actually, i just recently acquired the knowledge that four fingers equalled my age). And soooooon I'll be this (holding five fingers up). I have no clue what soon meant. I think it was like tow or three months maybe.
Whatever - this is the earliest memora i have where i can tell *when* it was within a three month period. There are other things, but none can be trace to a certain point of time.
On a related subject, several years ago I handed a camcorder to our (then) 4 year old daughter. She took some video walking around an adult social event. When viewed, it brought back long forgotten memories of how the adult world looks from a child's (i.e. short) perspective.
what was the question?
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
My earliest memory is of a hospital, the ceiling to be exact. The ceiling goes by until I'm under and intense light and then I'm held down as a clear mask is put over nearly my entire face. The audio for this memory is just crying and screaming. I never knew what it meant until I was 10 and my dad told me I was born premature, they didn't think I would make it because of a respiratory problem. I spent 2 months under a respirator, having blood drawn from my feet (that's what they do for kids) nearly every hour to test the oxygen level in my blood. All I have to show for it are memories and nearly 100 scars on the bottom of my feet from all the needles used to prick me.
I don't think memory has a limit... it just depends on how important it all is to you when it happens.
I have tons of memories from before I was five. When I was four my family and I moved from Richmond, VA to OBX, NC. I can remember all sorts of things from our home in Richmond: building a dam of rocks in a stream with my brothers and sister, at least two winters, the swimming pool, playing with the cassette recorder with my younger brother, playing with the Richard Scarry toys, etc etc.
I also can remember my crib, which contained a ton of great things to play with. There was this hanging toy that had a bright red air button that, when you pushed it hard enough, a little plastic piece shot up and rang a bell. At first I wasn't strong enough to push it in and had to ask my parents or siblings to ring it for me. I used to wake up every day and start off trying to ring the bell, eventually I could.
I had a checkered yellow and white blanket, lots of stuffed animals. My crib time was filled with jobs, I felt that I should play with every animal so none would feel neglected.
I remember my dad singing me to sleep to Harry Chapin. Years later, if I hear any Chapin song -- even if it isn't familiar to me -- I find that I already know the words.
I don't remember my first steps. I do remember the move from VA to NC (though I have stronger memories of the yard sale that came before -- a lot of my toys were included!).
None -- well most -- of these events were related to me, in fact when I was probing the extent of my memory I told these stories to my parents who were a bit surprised that I could remember so far back.
I don't remember tripping my baby brother, I remember remembering doing it. I think that if I had not re-inforced the memory regualarly over the years, by remembering the memory of the event, it would be gone.
I remember walking down the path to my kinda/preschool. I've also got some memories from when i was about 2 but they also exist on 8mm film so it's more likely that watching the film 're-implanted' those memories to some extent.
I remember stuff fairly clearly in snippets. I remember being burned and screaming and stuff, but I couldn't see (one of my shut eyes was doused with boiling oil). Remember being dumped into the bathtub but the hot water had been turned on in a panicked mistake. Remember the hospital, the plastic hood over my bed, and being smeared in goop & wrapped. My skin turned black and the nurse joked that I would be going home with her since I was black now. Made sense at the time. Remember getting a Mickey Mouse stamp ring out of a filing cabinet drawer as a parting gift from hospital staff.
Lot of scarring, but not on my face - mostly on arm, neck, and chest. Even progressively got feeling back after 30 years - despite that the doctors said it "wasn't possible". (Since the nerves were dead, I didn't notice when I'd been cut.)
I also remember watching Vietnam on TV and watching Nixon resign with Dad. I was confused and said to my father something like "I thought the President was like God - that he'd always be president." My father replied that "Nixon thought that too, but it wasn't so." Something along those lines.
I remember being younger ~2-ish being pulled in a waggon by Gramps. Everything was covered in snow.
I have a VAGUE image of being born, but my mom couldn't verify my blurry description of what I "remember". I do remember interesting details of:
- escaping from my crib
- yellow and blue diaper pins
- having my bottle taken away and replaced with a big-boy plastic cup
- somewhat remarkable memories of being 2 and 3, including my birthday, my town library (play-hour), my yellow stroller
I block out anything after that until college, as my parents raised me horribly and I barely forgive them, if at all.
I was 3 years old. I found an old bucket of paint under the porch and managed to get it open, then I splashed some around to see how everything looked in yellow. My memory is this, my Mom standing over me asking me who did it and me blaming my 1 year old brother.
"You see officer, I had to vandalize that building and frame that guy for it, it's genetic."
Not just answers, the correct questions.
My first clear memory is having a discussion about pickles in preschool when I was 3. I have vague recollections of a family reunion I went to when I was 2 and 6 months.
I think that memory is trigger based. Memories come back to us when something specific reminds us of them. Example: I got a new piece of code a while ago from a colleague, and was having a tough time working out what it did. I spontaneously remembered when I was 3, playing with my parents' Apple ][. I used to pound on the keyboard and pretend that I was typing, even though I couldn't read a word of what was showing up on the screen. My inability to read the code triggered the memory of my inability to read the screen.
I remember seeing a movie with my mom. The movie was "The Aristocats". We never saw movies at the theatre because my family never had much money. This was the one exception and I remember she sneaked sodas in because she didn't want to pay the outrageous theatre prices. Mom says that I was about 3 when we saw that. I also remember an incident in kindergarten when another kid peed his pants. I remember thinking how immature that was.
My first memory was from when I was five. My family and myself took a trip to Disney World in Florida. The exact event I remember was Donald Duck taking my propeller beanie. The duck fscking STOLE it! He brought it back a few seconds later after I started crying though.
(Several google searches later..)
Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist and one of his notable beliefs were his four stages of cognitive development (this won't explain memory, but I know where memory came in for me). For me, memories started developing during the preoperational phase (which would make me another case of having memories around the time when i started developing language skills too).
Sensorimotor 0-2 Years Your child will begin to make use of her ability to imitate, to think, and to memorize. She will begin to realize that objects don't cease to exist when they are out-of-sight. Her actions will become more goal-oriented, rather than motivated through reflexes.
Preoperational 2-7 Years Your child's language skills will begin to develop. She will be able to think in symbolic forms. Your child will be able to think mental operations through in one direction. Your child will have difficulty seeing another person's point of view.
Concrete Operational 7-11 Years Your child will be able to solve concrete, hands-on problems in logical fashion. She will be able to understand laws of conservation and will be able to classify and seriate. She will also understand reversibility.
Formal Operational 11-15+ Years Your child will be able to solve abstract problems in a logical fashion. Her thinking will become more scientific and she will develop concerns about social issues and her identity.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I remember learning that I could get all kinds of attention by pulling the adhesive tape off my navel. My mom told me somewhere along the way that I had done that repeatedly, so I can't say with certainty that it isn't an implanted memory...but it still seems quite clear.
r "innie" j
I like to think my earliest memory was when I was 3 years old. For my birthday (this was in the early 80's) I got A*TEAM guns. I could remember 'shooting' guests as they arrived at my party. At that party, I had a Ghostbuster's themed cake.
Do I remember it? Or, do I remember 'remembering' it? Thinking about memories helps embed them into your long term memory.
Lets say, I'm 7 or 8 years old, and I'm looking through a family photo album. I see the cake, I see me with my gifts. I might have forgotten all about that had I not seen these pictures.
And, as you remember memories, details fade, embellishments occur, much like JPEG artifacts.
I remember being alone on the floor of an empty room beside my crib, and I had a dream of flying around,
I also remember being in a crib and a mobile hanging above it and trying to reach it but the memory is very unclear and I have no idea what age that could be.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
I can remember back to 2. I clearly remember things that were benign and traumatic. But there are bits of blanks in my memory through some of my teenage years. I guess I was too polluted to remember those gaps in my memory...
"It is essential that justice be done
Likewise, I remember driving in my dad's 1970 240z to the airport, listening to the Allman Brother's Brothers & Sisters with "Ramblin' Man", which was a 1973 release.
This is all conjecture, but it's the closest I can come to empirical evidence of my earliest memories. I'd say with some leeway that my earliest are from when I was 4 years old.
(NT)
I havent registered yet but will promptly.
/Eneq
The way longtime memory works (as far as I know) is repition, that is repeting events have a higher weight factor.
Now if this is true it leads to three conclusions for this thread;
1) Early memories are related to wrongly (in this scope) weighed memories.
2) Early memories have been reinforced by repeting tales from nearby relatives.
3) The theory of repetition and memory is not complete, see photographic memory etc. Would be interesting to see a study on memory with people with early childhood memories.
I think my earliest computer memory was when I saw a NeXTcube in a store near where I live. Of course, at the time, I had thought it was just a big Lego box or something :-/ This was about 1990--I was about four years old at the time.
As for my earliest memory, it was a funeral. Not the funeral itself, but I do recall how my parents were taking me to some shop to get my suit adjusted; we were delayed by a train. I think I was three.
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
I recently read about an experimentally observed connection between language and memory (sorry, I don't remember where - maybe Discover magazine?). My recollection is (ironically?) terribly short on details.
The experiment was basically to take children at some age where their vocabulary was of some measured size and expose them to something (maybe watched a video?). Then they went back to the kids some time later when their vocabulary was of some size significantly greater and asked the kids to describe the previous event. They found that when describing the memory, the children only used words that they knew at the time.
An extrapolation of this data is that your ability to form memories is directly proportional to the number of words you have in your vocabulary. As with all things, it's probably more complex than that, but the evidence that there is a link between memory and vocabulary is compelling.
I know I have memories back at least as far as 22 months. I have no memory of the interior or back yard of the first house my family lived in, but I remember the front yard vividly. The front yard was where I ran around on my own. Apparently I was mostly in the back yard with my Dad on the hammock, and obviously when inside, due to doors and stairs and child gates, I would have been limited to wherever my parents wanted me to be.
Perhaps the fact that my exploration of the front yard was self-directed explains my memory of it?
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
According to my sister and my mother, my oldest memory is from when I was six months old. We were talking about parties when I brought up one that was at my grandparents place. Since they have had several, I had to describe what happened. After giving details, both my sister and mother were just staring at me. They informed me that that party had taken place when I was only six months old. I have no recollection of what was said at the party, I just remember who was there and what they did. I recall watching the fun from inside a crib and felt very left out.
I have quite a clear memory of crawling out of my crib, and onto the floor as a child. I'm assuming I was 1-ish more or less. Also have a few memories of being changed in diapers, so I think it can happen under 2 years quite easily. Under one year, is probably less usual.
Anyhow, just one more reference point for the survey.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I vaguely remember being born. All I remember is light -- everything was dark, then progressively brighter. Of course I didn't realize anything at the time. Being a fetus, I was ignorant of absolutely everything in the world. But later on I remembered this. At the time I couldn't put events to senses, i.e. being born to the increasing light, sounds, etc. but in retrospect things started making sense.
The next memory I have is of my first steps. I remember mainly because my father didn't care. All of my brothers and sisters (and mother) were going apeshit but my dad couldn't be bothered. Not that I'm bitter.
I also remember picking up gum off the sidewalk and chewing it in front of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, when I was about four years old.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
remain of my father who died when I was 4. I have sevaral "flashbacks" seeing him playing with me, giving me a fabulous birthday gift, a car ride, a vacation at the Sea where I smashed a Window, and a car accident. Not too much for somebody who would have been very significant in my life but still maybe more than others. This might be because he died, because he was gone, and those memories were not "replaced" by others of my father. Funny enough, the earliest memories of my mom start later ...
I was four - my earliest memory is swimming in the toddlers' wading pool at a cheap vacation hotel on the tacky tourist island of Mallorca with my mom and grandmom. I believe the reason the memory is so strong is that a chewed-off end of a carrot was bopping in the water. Ewww. :)
I remember being held in that damn scale!
It was so cold on my back and My head hit hard.
I rember another visit and that same scale but I could sit in it now and hold the side.
I remember the large toy room at a store my mom would go to. It was a jewelers I think and the toy room was a 2x3 foot closet.
I remember taking baths in the kitchen sink and swimming in the water.
I remember being in my playpen.
I remember feeling my sister kick through my moms fat belly
I also have a flase memory.
I remember seeing a large seesaw wrapped up sitting on top of my bureau.
I know this is false because years later I saw pictures of it and they were my memoryt of it.
We had the toy before I was born my exposure to it was in the photo albums.
I am now early thirtys
comment directly in my journal
I was born in June of 1979. Mount St. Helens erupted in May of 1980. I live in Colorado and can clearly remember the effects of the eruption. I can remember wiping ash off the fender of my Dad's truck, and I remember my neighbor washing his white car almost daily for a week. I can remember tracking ash into the house off my bare feet. I suppose it is possible that these "memories" were implanted in my brain but I can see myself doing these things from a FIRST person perspective. This is why I don't think these memories were suggested to me by my parents or anyone else.
Any sane two year-old child would've just output a trailing space to write over the previous characters!
i was one year, twelve days old when my little sister came home from the hospital. i clearly remember being upstairs with my grandmother at the time, and walking down the steps as my parents entered the house. this has been confirmed. however, i sucessfully blocked the rest of my childhood, to the point it is difficult to remember friends names. its all about selective memory.
I remember my birth, i once described it to my parents better than they remembered it without telling me about it.
My first memory was when I was around 3 or something (don't know the exact age) and I stuck a knife into the wall socket. I got knocked out, but I can recall the room's wallpaper, the location of the outlet, etc. This room got remodeled before I have any other memories: the location with the socket got replaced with a closet, and the wallpaper was removed and replaced with white paint. My Mom thought it was really weird that I remembered the wallpaper. I think they still have the blackened knife.
I tell this story all the time, whenever there's some talk about my primary school life (I'm now in my mid thirties). I was teased and taunted, sometimes beaten, for being a "queer" in elementary school in TX and OK, all because I played with girls during recess.
My first memory (and I know that it's mine, because no one has ever told me a story about it, unlike my earlier memories) is of a girl. It was before I moved from TX to CA when I was 1.5 years old.
She was a little mexican looking girl, and I thought to myself that I liked her, in a prepubescent sexual kind of way. I have never seen a home movie of the incident or anything, so I am pretty sure it really exists.
As a side note, I never went through the I don't like girls phase about 6-10 years old. I liked and actively sought a girlfriend from my first memory until now. My sex drive was so strong that I had to move to Thailand to fill it...heheh
Put identity in the browser.
Well, I am writing as anonymous coward cos I am wifi and unencripted... mmmm
My first memory was when I had 2 years ago about to have 3 and I remember the age perfectly because I was asking my mom when it will be my third birthday (I remember it was a week before or so) and I was very very small, I had to look up to speak with her.
I think I am lucky for telling my age in my first memory.....
Mom has a great story about when she and her brothers were kids and were eating dinner. Someone brought up the topic of earliest memories, and my uncle (who was three or four at the time) described his circumcision in great detail, much to the horror of everyone at the table. He's now a doctor, fittingly enough. The reason I mention this is that my uncle has a tremendously high IQ, and it's possible that could have something to do with his excellent memory.
I can remember back to when I was three. Can't remember MUCH at that age, just a few little events. The day my sister was brought home from the hospital, telling someone how old I was, waking up in bed one morning wondering what side of the bed my stuffed animal fell down on. I figure the reason I can't remember much before that is that before I was three I didn't have a firm grasp of the language yet. Not that I was a linguist marvel at three, but at least I could understand what was going on around me. I could look at something and associate it with a word. And later when I thought back on it, I remember looking at, or doing something that had a tangable name. Its hard to remember something as simple as "the picture on the wall" if you don't know what a picture is, a wall is, and that there's a significance to the relationship. Otherwise it's no more significant to you than an inkblot, and even that has no relevance if you don't know what an inkblot is.
You can't imprint those memories without some way of knowing what to recall. In fact, the memories might actually be there, but your brain wasn't able to "remember" them in a useful way you'd be able to recall. When the whole world is one big multicolored inkblot, there's not much worth remembering.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
My earliest memory is of sitting on the floor in the hall of my home (don't know why I picked that spot) and my mother coming to me and saying I was going to be four years old the next day.
Before that i have loss of carrier ~
Tony Buzan started the research (or at least he is the source I remember) of Mind Mapping. I remember seeing a show on PBS when I lived in a log home in Fayettevilly Georgia, USA. It struck me that the concept of mapping the mind could make recall completely mechanical. It is an extremely organic process otherwise.
You can pick up his books at any online bookstore. Just search for Tony Buzan and Mind Mapping. There are a ton of quacks that ripped the ideas and produced varied qualities of literature on the subject. I understand his book is dull, though enlightening. Buzan Centers is online, along with a short explaination at James Cook University's (Australia) website.
There are two basic focii for the memory enthusiast. There is regressive memories and improved recall. People who focus on recall are typically goal oriented toward application for career or educational purposes. Regressive memories are usually sorted to deal with tramas or personal growth.
Mega Memory is a course available from Kevin Trudeau's website. You may have seen that goofy infomercial whilst staying up late on wee morning hour in the mid nineties (showing my age here). Also, there are a ton of similar courses available online. I endorse none, but many have great ideas behind them and will improve your memory.
I find this subject facinating and hope anyone who wants to pursue the improvement of their mind shares their findings with me personally. If you have had success, please feel free to share via email directly.
Build something beautiful!
Memory is a really strange thing: sometimes I can't remember the name of something (someone I haven't seen in ages, or maybe some obscure term), but I can remember the length of it -- such as that it's six letters long. Other times, I know a letter or two -- it begins with a b, and has a w in it. (These are random examples, not anything in particular.) The thing I think is really weird is that I don't necessarily count the letters when I see the word. It's not like I, in the process of memorizing it, think "Slashdot: 8 letters... 8 letters, Slashdot..." But years later, I might think "What was that site I used to go to all the time? It had eight letters, and I think there was an S..." It seems like a really strange thing to remember -- in theory, I shouldn't know the length without knowing the word. Am I the only one whose memory works this way?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
This hypothesis has been debunked and is used to teach students about the current theories of how the brain represents information, which involve patterns of responses across populations of neurons. These so-called "population codes" are evident in visual and somatosensory (and other) sensory systems, as well as motor systems. It is quite likely that the same mechanisms are involved in memory.
I'm not saying that it's impossible for the experience of birth to be stored somewhere in the brain, but we need to be careful about assuming that just because someone has an experience which is in some way similar to being born (gasping for breath comes to mind, from what I've read about 'rebirthing'), that they remember their actual birth. That they provide facts that are consistent with those obtained from relatives and hospital records is not very surprising--surely they might have been exposed to this information prior to the rebirthing experience.
Believe it or not, I can remember a time when repeats on slashdot were a rather rare occurance. Also, I can remember when the questions on Ask Slashdot weren't complete crap. Typical example follows:
Dear Slashdot,
I am a tech geek who likes to masturbate to pictures of Linus and the Penguin. Anyway, here is my question. I am in the market for a *fill in the blank* and am wondering what your readers have to say. Obviously, I'm too fat and lazy to do any research myself, even though a quick google would turn up the results I am looking for. Please do my work for me while I continue to grow my hair and further the Communist movement.
Thank you.
I remember wayyyy back to my dad and step mother's wedding. Where I was the the guy who brings the ring on the pillow next to the flower girl, whatever that's called. I don't remember exactly when that was though. I remember my parent's just had an anniversary, that might help, I forgot which one it was though, probably 11th or something. I guess I could call them, if I remembered their phone number. That memory was so long ago though, I guess some things just never leave ya.
My earliest memory is from sometime before I was two years old, though I can't pinpoint exactly when. A few years ago, my parents rearranged their bedroom after having it laid out the same way for as long as I could remember. Or so I thought.
When I saw how they had rearranged their furniture, I remembered seeing their bed positioned that way before. I asked them if they'd ever arranged their room like that before.
MOM: "Um, yeah, when you were a baby."
ME: "My crib was over there, where you just moved the bed from, wasn't it?"
MOM: "Um... yeah... how'd you know?"
ME: "Because I remember lying in a crib, looking out the door of your room and watching you come toward me from down the hall. I remember your bed being where it is now, too."
So that's my story. Now here's my question. Is there a correlation between the age at which a person's memory began to develop and that person's intelligence (or academic performance, for that matter)?
I was probably just a shade over a year old when I formed that memory (though I said two to be safe). All through elementary and high school, I was always way ahead of my grade level. And now that I'm almost through with college, people are still saying that I'm above average. I wonder if developing a long-term memory early is related to above-average intelligence.
What do you guys think?
(DISCLAIMER: I am by no means saying that people who can't remember anything before they were seven are not intelligent. I just didn't think about that when I was writing this post, until now. And I'm too lazy to go back and work it in.)
Harlene Hayne recently published some of her research that theorizes memory is limited by the vocabulary one has at the time of the event. In essence, when you recall something from your past, you use the words you knew at the time to describe the memory. Pretty interesting stuff. Further description of the work is here.
I really have trouble membering even yesterday. Most of the time I can't recall what I ate or anything besides than where I was and with who. A week back; it's very hard to recall anything. I remember only bits and pieces of what happened when I was in school. But then again I have a good memory for faces, but not for names. Some things stick, most don't. It's strange.
You may have something there with that whole language thing. I have some extremely early memories. Some traumatic, some not even noteworthy. I remember my first day of three-year-old kindergarten vividly. That was traumatic. I was really digging it, but no one told me that Dad was going to leave me there. It was my first time in the company of only complete strangers. But it's not just traumatic stuff, not even mostly traumatic stuff. I remember some from the days leading up to that first day of kindergarten, and how excited I was when Mom was telling me about it in the little blue Chevette. My sister was too little to go, I liked that. It was a total letdown though. There was no "Candy Garden" where I was going, and it really hurt my feelings when I saw the most massive, beautiful, awe-inspring pile of crayons ever witnessed get shaved down with a cheese grater and melted into these muddy-brown "candles" that we weren't even allowed to light. I remember the first time I saw blood, and that was before I was doing a lot of walking, because I pulled myself up from the floor to the opened dishwasher, grabbed a knife and proceeded to saw up an orange, and a finger. Before that, I remember coming to understand that "Baby Scott," the little brother that was inside Mommy, was actually Baby Heather when she came home from the hospital; she's a year and a half younger than me. I vividly remember diapers, my crib, my walker, and I think my earliest memories involve the extreme frustration of not being able to talk. I remember being hungry and yelling about it, then Mom comes in and changes my diaper, but no bottle.
I'm told that my first clear words were at four months, and that my first complete sentence was at eight months, and if the connection you've made with language means anything, then it explains why my first few years are so clear and I can remember back further than most of the people I've discussed this sort of thing with.
And if the connection that some have made with alcohol and pot mean anything, then it explains why my past few years are so vague and why I can't remember a damn thing I did last week.
was going to Shogun (japanese hibachi steakhouse type of place) with my godparents when I was VERY young.
:)
Maybe that's why I'm so into japanese things now.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I share the same theory, I think back to my own earliest memories and I think that I have the ability to remember back very far. I can recall some tramautic memories from the age of two, when i had to get stitches in my head from a fall. I didn't have a complete control of language at that point, but could recognize certain things. I have other shadowy memories of situations where some things would be familiar like mother, ball, grass, but other things being complete mysteries, like i didn't have labels for them.
The memory is a fascinating thing.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
i've thought about this a lot and have tried and tried to push myself to earlier memories, but i can't get earlier than this one at about 2-3 yo. i remember many at 4+, but then, they're all out of order. matching years to memories isn't my thing.
...
my earliest memory
it must've been summer, because I was
wearing shorts
standing with my mom in the doorway of our
apartment
watching a dog lying on the sidewalk
panting,
which is another reason it
must've
been summer.
ah (in mi)
Lots of things go into your memory. Remember first and foremost that memory is reconstructed. Images of your past, no matter how vivid, are a product of your current life and what is currently accessible.
Second, most memories that are verbally reportable are dependent upon the development of a concept of self (autobiographical memories). Once you have the concept of I, you can associate your memories and retrieve them more accurately and readily. This is typically around age 3. Memories before that are very rare and often more influenced by what others around you have told you. Any memories from before this time should be viewed with skepticism.
Hypnosis is not likely to aid in the recovery of old memories, you're more likely to conform to the expectations (explicit or implicit) of the therapist than you are to recall anything new.
Another tidbit about early memories: early neural structures aren't developed sufficiently to develop really strong autobiographical memories that are integrated in a coherent manner (the integration of the memories into a coherent whole requires well developed frontal lobes and hippocampus).
One final bit - people can change their personas many times in life. This effectively produces many different autobiographical senses of the self. This can make recall of your previous self's memories more difficult later on. There are some fascinating (at least to memory researchers) experiments that entail invoking different personas in individuals and finding improved memory for relevant memories and decreased preformance for non-persona memories (and this can be reversed).
A good way to think about your memory is that it is a dynamically optimized system that is tuned to maximizing your future performance. The extent of the future time frame is difficult to pin down - but since we have the benefit of consciousness we can manipulate our memory performance to suit our individual needs [look at any expert - they've manipulated their information usage so that they can perform optimally (or optimally-enough) within their domain]
...About three years ago I drew a rough floorplan of the apartment we lived in until I was two. I had the living room and kitchen, table, couch, TV (big cabinet on legs), record player/albums and the stairs up to my room. The only thing I didn't have down was my parents room or the bathroom. A couple of weeks later, I took it over to my Dad's and he confirmed that that was our apartment. Told me that I wasn't allowed to wander into their bedroom or bathroom and was carried in there each time.
I also remember pulling out the Door's "LA Woman" album so that my Dad would play "Riders on the Storm". I'd lay on the floor, looking at the album, with the storm sounds on the record player while a thunder storm would roll in across the Indiana fields (we lived in Muncie).
I have a few other very vague memories from back then but those are the only definate ones. Oh yeah, I remember my baby sitter having high boots, knee length, earthtone skirt and long brown hair and glasses (1969 college student). Guess what kind of girls I've been attracted to ever since? My wife's 10 years older than I, long brown hair, glasses, long skirts, hippie blouses and is into all the same '60's music I am. Too cool!
Just goes to show how the early years of a kid's life can really shape things down the road.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The earliest memory I ever had, that I could truly call me own, was a 64k expansion card for the family's Apple ][e. I relished in how a simple 'pr#3' could make the screen jump from 40 to 80 colums, and would spend hours fiddling with HGR2. I was, now with a whopping 128k, truly eleet.
Ahh. . . recalling my earliest memory has brought me such warm feelings.
The Internet is generally stupid
I can vaguely remember the kitchen table/booth from when I was a young child. (Age 0 to 1.5) At the age of 1.5 my father passed away and we had to move. A few years later the memory came back to me, i asked my mother if we had such and such a booth in our house, suprisingly she said we did and wanted to know how I knew. Guess I've been right all along.. I am a freak. :>
My understanding is that it's basically related to the myelination of the long term memory sections of the cereberal cortex. My simple minded view is this: when you are born there is little myelin surrounding neurons as they travel through the white matter tracts in the brain. Myelin is the insulator that keeps your neurons from just shorting together into one electrochemical blob. I could well be wrong, mostly I work at the other end of life w.r.t. Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative disorders.
The common thread in all of these replies seems to be one where traumatic or otherwise highly stimulating events create a memory prior to when memories become imprinted as a normal course. I will not dispute the claims that most such memories are "false" as put forward by some, except to say that while the fullness of a memory may be falsified by the taints of conversations with adults, there does seem to be some kernel of a real memory at the bottom. My earliest memory is from about 2 1/2 years, and it is of the back of a chair at the house of a woman who eventually became my step-mother. I don't remember the house, and the only way I know it was there is because that location is the only place where anyone in my family can place such a chair, and that I used to hide behind it when my father went to visit her, but the chair is a real memory. Not long after that there is a memory of a horror movie. i don't know why anything was happening the way it was, but some creature was lurching forward slowly, and some people within the movie were trying desperately to get something accomplished before the creature got to where it was going... I'm assuming that it was a movie on the Saturday Movie Monster Matinee, because not long after, my memories of those movies become quite regular. Both events were probably quite frightening to me at the times when they occured, and a common thread among the posts seems to be where it is a stimulation such as fright that imprints the "first" memories in a person. I am sure that such memories are colorized with the accounts from others as time progresses such as if I'd simply said that "I remember watching Monster Movie Matinee" or saying that the chair was at my step-mother's house; it probably was, but there could be other unknown possiblities.
I remember getting my foot stuck in the crib. I remember it when my foot hurts a certain way. I may have been 2 when that happened. I would suggest trying to learn some of one of those languages and seeing what happens!! You might find the words come easily because they were there at one time. Picking up a 1000 words shouldn't be too hard to do and you might be able to find them on the web, or hay talk to your parents....
I can remember when I was about 6 months and crying for my pacifier. It's a very clear memory.
My oldest son is almost 3. He just had his third Christmas. He remembers his second (last year). He could tell me all the toys that Santa brought for him last year. He seems to have a very reliable long term memory. Only time will tell if these memories will last.
My earliest memory that I can recall is going to be ~2, because I remember wearing diapers. There was this brass post that was used to hold up the curtains in my parents room at the end of the hall. At night a light at the far end of the hall would reflect off the post and it would be like a shiny point, or the reflection off someone's eye. I always thought of it as the reflection of a monster's eye and would scare the me to run away from it. I specifically remember wearing diapers when running down the hall way.
IIRC, in psych class they covered how we don't remember anything before age 3-5 because our memories are encoded differently than after that age.
I personally think that a lot of people who believe they remember things from before that age are actually remembering the story about it that someone told them after that age.
I was 2. My father was holding me over the edge of London Bridge making stupid baby noises. I am now 19, I mentioned this to my mother when I was fifteen or so, and she remembered it. No pictures were taken. Beat that.
Memory can vary pretty much from person to person. Some are better at remembering visual things, and other audio. Personally I certainly tend towards visual memory, sometimes even remembering the layout of the page I read something, but not the text/information itself.
:)
One thing that is for certain is that memory is linked to emtions. The stronger the emotion, the clearer the memory. Perhaps your childhood was just very uneventful?
About this 2 year limit some people mentioned, it's not that simple. You start to learn language from the day you are born (if not before), something you certainly store indefinitely. In fact, everything you remember longer than about 20 seconds (IIRC) takes a trip through long term memory.
However, long term memory is in no way permanent. For something to be stored permanently, it will have to be reiterated over and over, through manual repetition (what you do in school), being put in similar situations over again, or simply through the memory being linked to strong enough emotions that it bubbles up by itself once in a while. It's the long term memory that needs to get reiterated. Just repeating something over and over is not that good, as you just keep it in your working memory. If you want to learn words or whatever, make sure you have more than 10 items, that way you won't be able to keep it all in your working memory, unless you group 2 or more into a single item.
It takes about 3 years for a memory to become really permanent. Everything you remember from further back you will always remember, disregarding diseases/brain damage. For fresher things, you'll need to access the memory once in a while. Something you should think about if you spent a lot of time 1-2 years ago trying to learn a new language or similar.
Disclaimer: this was all taken from memory.
My earliest memory is breakfast this morning when I ate... Oh, damn it!
Son, I accidentally dropped you on your head when you were seven. That's why you can't remember anything prior. Sorry about that. If it's any consolation, you didn't have a very interesting childhood.
Love, Dad.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I was born in February, 1977. I clearly remember my father carrying me upstairs to bed on New Year's Eve, 1979. My mother told me, "When you wake up, the 70's will be gone forever!" If only... :o)
I have even earlier memories than that. Most of my earliest memories are visual. My brother was born in October, 1979. I remember what the outside of the hospital looked like when I went there to see him for the first time. And I remember a big storm we had in the summer of '79, although I wouldn't be able to put a date on it if my parents didn't remember it. I remember being in the car, and my dad pulled over because it was too windy to drive. I think he was really upset. I thought it was fun. That must have been some wind to rock that old cast iron Chevy or whatever the heck it was...
My earliest memory is also of my birth. Before all you disbelievers say bullshit... this is no bullshit.
Very few people can remember their birth and it is rare indeed, but true nonetheless, and is very special for those who can remember.
Before my birth I was conscious, aware of myself and knew I had sisters, and one was particularly closer to my mother and me during my mother's pregnancy. And indeed she spent a great deal of time staying very close with my mother during the last couple months of the pregnancy. I remember waking up one morning expecting to hear my sister's and mother's voices, but in a way I really wasn't aware that my mother was my mother... I thought that she was just another sister "out there" too. Something was not right that morning. I knew I was being taken to see "Doctor Knight". It's very strange that I knew his name although of course I'd never seen him before, but I think I must have known who he was from my mother's office visits during the pregnancy. He had been the family doctor for many years and delivered two of my sisters before me. Anyway, I don't recall much of the labor, but I remember hearing Dr. Knight's voice and the voices of all these strange nurses. I had no idea what they were saying of course, but Dr. Knight had a very distinctive deep voice that I still remember to this day, even though he is long gone many years now. I remember that before all the commotion, that I was comfortable and feeling just fine, and I did not like this disturbing thing that was happening and wished it would go away. I wanted to go back to sleep and just be with my "sisters" and be comfortable again. Everything was suddenly becoming very harsh. All of a sudden everything was blindingly bright and cold. There was a very bright overhead light on the ceiling of the delivery room (like in a typical hospital of the 1960's) and the brilliance of this lamp was painful. All these strange big people were there moving around and talking frantically and I did not like them. Doctor Knight was the first person to hold me but I did not know or understand who he was now. I don't even think I was capable of understanding the concept that I was a baby and was being held by a giant adult. I just remember screaming and crying so intensely that I could not catch my breath and I could not stop crying either. I wanted to be back with the comfort that I thought was my "sister" (but was actually my mother). I do not remember much detail about what happened after that, except being exhausted and falling asleep again. That's it.
I am in my 40's now. My mother died of heart disease a few years ago. As I write this post, my tears are flowing quite freely right now.
To those of you out there who remember your own births.... keep that memory alive in you as long as you live. It's very important whether you like it or not. I know that I will remember it as long as I live, and that it will very likely be what I'm thinking about when it comes my time to die.
Peace.
I remember a spider that lived in a bush outside my window: orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day, there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched... and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.
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I'm 24 now, I was 2 yrs 1 month old then. All I remember is walking down a green hallway with a window on the left that looked into another room, just before the hallway turned to my left. Nothing after that until I was almost 4, remembering running through one of those beaded curtains people use in arizona instead of doors. After that it's as steady as the rest of my memory:)
My earliest memory is the layout of my old house. We moved in when I was 3 years old and moved out just before I turned five. When I was about 15 my mom asked if I remembered anything about the old house. I drew the floorplan out exactly as it was laid out, she was amazed.
--Vinnie
Well sonny, my first processor was a 1 mhz 6502 with 8K of memory. I saved up and upgraded it to 16k. I made my own modem. Beat that.
I once talked to someone who actually studies things like that and she told me that language does have an effect on whether you remember things or not. People tend to remember stuff better if they use the same language "remembering it", e.g. you can remember stuff experienced in a russian context better when you formulate it in russian. Language is then just another possible stimulus to activate memories.
My earliest memory is from when I was 2 years old. I was dancing to a song and I cracked my head open (still have the scar...I fear eventual baldness).
I can still remember the tune, and sometimes find myself humming it. It was off a record of music about math, time and currency...kind of spooky, really, considering I deal with numbers about 10 hours a day...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
...are very common, but I dunno about linking them to memories from the womb.
It is very possible to have memories from the womb. I remember knowing that I had older sisters and also the name of my familiy doctor who delivered me, even though I couldn't comprehend who or what he was even though I remember my own birth and that he was the first person to hold me after I came outside.
Dreams of flying are really wierd. I still have several flying dream themes that are recurring, and I'm in my early 40's now. Some are flying without any vehicle or aircraft... like a cartoon superhero. Others are either in a car or a small airplane and trying to take off from a country road or highway and can't because there are too many overhead wires crossing the roadway. This is the most frequent one I have. After I got my pilot's certificate and bought my own single engine airplane this one went away for a couple years, but has returned.
getting dropped on the ground repeatly. I think it may have had an afekt on me; thou I'm is not sore.
I support publik eduscatation!
I remember seeing ducks at a pond when i was three. "Duck" was my first word.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Less than 18 months old, I remember being forbidden to move (crawl? walk? I don't remember how) up the stairs. The only reason I know that this is a sub 18 month memory is that I am told at 18 months we moved to a different house that had no stairs!
Possibly earlier, I remember the smell of skunks and seeing an open-pit rock quarry. These are both things that were seen in Centerville, VA at the time. That's where the house with the stairs was.
True ongoing "sense of time and place" didn't form for me until around the time of my 4th birthday. Everything before that is "flashes and clips".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have memories going back to age two. Interestingly, that's when my mom taught me how to read. My parents only had one car, my dad worked, and my mom had two kids at home (my sister, who was an infant at the time) and myself. My mom has always said, "what do you do with a two-year-old who knows all of their letters (via alphabet blocks) and can comprehend words when you put them together into words?
So every morning, my mom would get the newspaper and we'd sit down and work through it as a reading exercise. (it was good exercise for her - she's a grade school teacher now)
We moved out of that house within ca. six months of my first "learning" steps. I've been able to draw floorplans of our house, how some of the houses in the neighborhoods we visited were located, where the school I would eventually attend was located, where the grocery was located, etc.
My suspicion is a primary reason for me to be able to remember all of these details in a good, comprehensive format is because my brain was already formatting information in order to learn to read & count, so the other information just followed much of the same imprinting.
when I was 5, my family went to Disney World, and my parents told me it was really important for me to remember where we parked. I'm 19 and I still remember "Pluto aisle 26".
In college I did a reseach paper on whether humans thought in abstract constructs or in actual words. My conclusions lead me to believe that while there are times (maybe many times) that one thinks (or rather organizes their thoughts) in words. When making a list of things to do, considering a conversation (past or future), or criticizing yourself ("you idiot, now she'll never date you"). However, I believe that the majority of thinking is done abstractly. I can't remember my examples from real doctors, but one personal was a trip to France I took about a decade ago. I am very conversant in French and was with French people the whole time, including a guy my age (learned a few new words from him ;) Anyway, upon my return I would start sentences in French to my parents and friends who would just look at me weird. I knew what I wanted to say but the language parser had to learn to go back to English. And besides, do you really think you pre-meditate every word in conversation? We'd all be stuck at morning coffee when 6:00PM came around
This might not be interesting at all, but here goes:
Naturally, I don't remember much from when I was a child (I'm 28 now), but I do remember a couple of details clearly. One of the things I remember is my grandfathers wedding ring. He showed it to me once in the livingroom, and I clearly remember this scenario. I was only 3 years old when he passed away, so I must have been 2 or 3 years old when this happened.
My mother's a psychologist, and she explained to me that I might remember this because children have a unique tendency to take note of minor and (in our eyes) unimportant details for some reason. I can also clearly remember the house we moved out of when I was four.
But I believe it's all stored up there somewhere. Ever experienced having someone say "remember this and that?" and you go all like "oh yeeeah, damn, I haven't thought about that for ages!" ? Happens to me now and then when I bump into old classmates. So the info's up there, it's just a matter of getting it back.
-skurk
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
I can remember a dream I had when I was 5. You see, for some reason, it was Christmas in mid-summer. Santa was parachuting presents from his sleigh. I had managed to gather up quite a pile, and when I looked to my left, there was this curious little talking treestump. Yep, talking treestump. Nothing Ent-like, about 2 foot high with your standard blackened holes for an eyes and a mouth. Anyway, I asked it if it wanted to see my goodie stash, and it said "Yeah yeah yeah yeah" really quickly. I started to run to the pile (which I remember was in my Grandmother's yard next door) and that's all. Nothing else comes to mind about the dream, but for some reason, I can replay it perfectly in my head 20 years later.
I have memories of being in Playschool (before there was Headstart), desk hopping with my friend Jim (that was how I met him). Then there were the sit and spins my buddy Charlie and I always played with there. Me doing a maze thing and Adelle (Charlies mom and our teacher's assistant) telling me I was touching the lines. I remember the Charlie Brown statues they had on the tiny windows (this was in the basement of a Polish Catholic church). All of that at age four.
There are other memories, including my first crush (on a girl named Jamie when I was in Kindergarten), a moment where I confused one lady for my mom (similar hair styles was the reason) at Sunday School, other sporradic stuff. Even after all the pot I've smoked since I was a teenager, I still remember all that stuff. Guess I have a decent memory.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
I can penpoint the age of my first memory well. My mother was pregnant with my brother and sister, she was in bed under a big blue quilt. She read me the book "I can count to 100" and something about swamp animals in a treehouse.
My brother and sister were born about a month before my third birthday, so this was during my late 2s.
Everything after that is pretty clear, up till about age 9 or 10. I have hundreds of vividly clear images from my early childhood. Then around middle-school life started to suck so I blocked out about three years.
And for everyone out there in their mid-teens: it gets better don't worry. wash your face and lose some weight though. yes, they all notice. and christ, don't let your parents pick out your clothing. yes, at your age stupid superficial things like this are key to happiness.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
One thing that caught my eye was the idea of needing to have a concept about self. The earliest memory I can place as the earliest chronologically is when my family was leaving Sea World and located near at the exit. I was ~2 years old at the time. I can see myself in a small blue knit baby hat, in my father's arms with a cloudy sky, misting gently. Oddly however, is that I see myself as in third person. There are no pictures of this ever happening and I have since asked my mother about this occasionally and seems to believe that my memory is correct. So this really makes me wonder what my concept of self was at the time or currently as this memory is associated not necessarily as that of my own. Anyways, back to the real subject/question. I think the brain's nerve synapses aren't complex enough to store memories that can be recalled a few (2years to 1xx years later) until around 2 years old. I think this because I have a photographic memory and a rather large memory span (remembering whole lectures from kindergarten and up until now) so that's why I base my theory on nerve synapses.
// TRiPTMiND \\
In the age of 3 I was with my parents walking and looking for a house of my uncle. At some point I told the right house. Last time I was there when I was 1. But what's more important, I told what kind of change the house experienced (they reconstructed it a lot, i.e. they've moved the entrance from one wall to onether one). Now I remember only the scene of remembering. It means it was the intermediate memory.
Less is more !
My mother (who is over 70) says that her eariest memory is of being startled by an aunt while having her diaper changed. She also reports a claim that she was "out of diapers" before her first birthday (which probably explains some other personality quirks, but I digress). She also recalls that at age three she was told that she "remembers everything", and from that point onward she would practice remembering things. Because of this, she has detailed memories of much of her early childhood.
I have heard claims that one's earliest memories deal with traumatic events. Certainly the ones that I've described fit that description. Does anyone have a non-traumatic earliest memory?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Earliest memory remembers YOU
it was probably a 4 mb chip for my old apple
that's the earliest I can remember, oh wait...
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
My earliest memory is of my 2nd birthday, which was spent in hospital having my tonsils removed. I can even remember the scale of the place - it seemed huge, as did my parents. Probably natural for a small 2 year old. Remember the birthday cake and the presents my parents brought.
Next was around the age of 3, not long after my sister was born - my mother tried to dry a blanket too close to the fire, and it caught fire. Not surprisingly, I remember it very well.Shortly after this happened, we moved, so it remains my only memory of that place.
Whole mass of memories after that point, nearly all trauma related (not the happiest of childhoods).
We moved to Canada from Belgium at the end of March, 1967, when I was just over two. I have some very vague memories of Belgium, and can still remember one of the decorations on the wall at some pub or something there.
I remember going through the tunnel under the runway to Heathrow, but nothing at all about the actual trip over. The next concrete memory I have is carrying into the house a bag of puffes wheat cereal that was bigger than I was! This would have been in May or June, because the grass was green.
Interestingly enough, I paid a visit to that particular town about 8 years ago, for the first time since '72, (when we moved again), and I was able to find my way to each and every house we lived in during the five years we were there, sans directions.
Everything else since that bag of puffed wheat has been a blur.
A couple of years ago I came across a book at a pharmacy that I was contracting for. Brain Longevity has alot of interesting facts and studies about memory and the brain in general. One of the studies that was done to prove that memory was cellular was. A group of earth worms were put in a special tray and a light would be shone on the worms and they would simultainiously recieve an electrical shock causing the worms to curl up. After a few runs of this test the worm were then ground up and fed to other worms (pretty gross eh??) now when the new worms were put in a tray and the light would shine on them (no shock this time) the worms would curl up and react just like the set of worms that would recieve the electric shock. Thus proving (in earth worms anyways) that memory is cellular. Another good quote from the book referencing the fact that we barely understood the brain of an insect. at this time if we were to know everything about our brain we would be too dumb to understand it (well, it went something like that).
Now back to the topic.. My earliest memory was from 3 years old when my uncle tried to ride his motorcycle up a set of wooden steps that went up to our front porch and colapsed the old stairs. I remember being scared that it happend which sort of leads me to why I think I remember it.
:)(smile)
My story is particularly odd for the age:
:-)
One of my earlier memories as a kid was shopping for a house with my parents... various bits and pieces that were very me-centric like toys I was playing with, etc... except for when we were in the hallway of one empty house, the realtor opened a closet and seeing a vacuum, made some joke about the vacuum cleaner coming with the house.
So, I asked my parents if they remembered such a house shopping trip, and described the memory. My dad remembered the incident: it was when they were shopping for a house when I was six months old. My mom still doesn't believe it.
I can remember visual memories as early as about 4-5 months old. I remember staring at the ceiling inside the house we lived in then and can describe it perfelctly to my parents - the shape of the room, the patterns on the trim, etc. We moved out of there when I was about 6 months old.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
A few years ago I went home to visit my parents and I happened to glance at the old chest of drawers that was in my room when I was a little kid. Somehow this awoke the sensory memory of teething on it. I could, with absolute certainly, remember exactly what the drawer handles felt like in my mouth. I have a similar sensory memory of chewing on the coffee room table.
I'm not sure what age a child stops teething at, but I'd bet these memories are pretty young.
Specific events in my life take me back to about age 5 or 6, although nothing very interesting or worth noting.
What I do find very interesting, and my mom fascinating when I proved it to her, is that I can remember the entire floor plan of the apartment we lived in when I was 2. This all came to surface a year or two ago during a conversation with my mom. I remember the color of the carpets, the style table, where the bathroom was, where the kitchen was, where my dad had his computer set up (although I can't remember what is was. This would have been 1984. I should check with him just for the heck of it) and even how the living room was arranged. I think the ONLY event I remember about that apartment was eating squid out of a tin once. But I do find it interesting that I can remember so many details of the apartment itself. I even knew it was three floors up!
After that, we moved to Belgium. And even there, I do not really have memories of events untill I was 5 or 6, I guess. But, on the other hand, I remember the entire layout of the town. Where what shops were, where the base was (Shape) and even the general layout of the base.
Is it like this for most people, or does my brain just work that way? (I do notice, I am exceptionally skilled with directions/maps/not ever getting lost).
Sig.i>
it was a very good year...
Well, I was standing the entry of my house, and my mom had purchased a new toy for me. I was really excited, then she wound it up and let it go and it freaked me out!
It was one of those UFO tops that you wind up on the plastic flower like device and it spins and makes the loud annoying noise. I was scared out of my mind!
is around post #175 or so... my memory is going
First thing is that this doesn't seem like a /.ish question (more Kuro5hin-ish.
My first memory is playing a game on a 286 with my parents (think it was Number Munchers(?))...must have been 3.
forget it.
I don't think memory has anything to do with whether or not you are capable of language. My earliest memory is from about 2 or 3 years old of my Dad and Grandpa pushing me on a little swingset in my Grandparents back yard. I don't think I was talking much at that point, maybe a little.
If I had to guess, I would say it has more to do with your neural network being sufficently developed to retain memories.
I can remember things but I can't remember how old I was when they occured. I can pin them down though. I remember when my greatgrandmother died and I was outside on the porch. I'd have to look at the obit to see when that was. I remember stuff as early as probably 5 or 6.
Around age 1, I distinctly remember a few things. And I'm positive that they are not things which other people told me about.
:-)
The first thing I remember is I remember a VERY narrow hallway with a kitchen off to the left. I also remember looking out a window. These memories I beleive are my earliest. My parents have told me that the house we lived in had very narrow halls and they think that this may be where these memories are from. They also said I was in a crib near a window in a second story room.
I also remember our living room and the laundry room off it, as well as the kitchen.
But here's something more interesting...
I remember one time my parents were in the living room, and they were doing something with some boxes. They were christmas boxes, white cardboard boxes with green symbols of ornaments and trees.
Now I distinctly remember exactly what I was thinking about then. I remember that when I saw these ornaments, I associated them with xmas sugar cookies. And I thought that these boxes had sugar cookies in them. So I asked my parents for a cookie. They don't remember this, but I remember it vividly and I'm sure it is a memory.
There are two other times I remember from living at this house, but only one is of any interest to you folks.
The other thing I remmeber is I crawled behind a lamp table, and I guess I must have wet myself, cuase the next thing I know I'm being electrocuted from the wire I was sitting on. I guess I cried about that then but I don't rememebr that part, I only remember getting a zap. My parents said they remmember this happening, but they don't rememebr the cookie incident.
Although it seems to vary amongst individuals, both our kids had a "memory block" at a certain point in their lives... about age 7 or 8.
As an example. We had our sailboat at a dock in a cove on the western coast of Vancouver Island. Our daughter, who was 2-1/2, was playing on the dock and announced to her mother, "I'm going to run as fast as I can." My wife said, "Don't forget to stop at the end of the dock."
So she ran right off the end of the dock. Of course she had her lifejacket on and it was an easy matter to pluck her from the 50 degree salt water. But this made such an impression on her that she would talk about it for years. Suddenly we noticed that she wasn't talking about it any more so we asked her if she remembered it.
The answer was no. In a 3-month span she had completely forgotten the entire incident. Something had flushed this memory from her brain and replaced it with what was probably more important information.
It was similar with our son. I started to think about what makes early childhood memories and why some of them stick I can remember some isolated incidents from my early life but most of it is gone until I was about 9.
Has anyone researched this? It seems to me that it would be an interesting path of investigation.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
That's my first memory. I remember getting my swingset, I would have been three or four. Grandpa was there, I never saw him that much, so it was a big deal. My cousin Dale came too, and I remember them lifting the swingset into the yard and tying it down... I remember we lived in the downstairs flat, the guy in the upstairs apartment had a piano and we could hear it sometimes, but I don't remember hearing it, just mom explaining it to me. I remember watching Inspector Gadget in the house on Gibson Street, and I think I had a cat, but I'm not sure. I remember the entire routine for my first preschool, but I'm pretty confident that one particular memory of one particular classmate was implanted by my relatives. I remember I always brought Shark Bites to class.
One thing I remember quite clearly, which may be older than the memory of Mann Street, is my adventure's at Uncle Bob's. Dad would always take me there, and I remember always trying to get into the dryer. One time I actually did, and I tried to spin it, but to no avail. But someone found me, I don't remember who. This memory may have been implanted.
The earliest memory that I know for sure wasn't implanted was an episode of Transformers--I was four and a half or so, and I was watching what were apparently re-runs. I remembered the Cosmic Rust episode quite clearly--it was one of my friest times watching the show... I also remembered the one where Starscream takes some Decepticon criminals and forms his own faction, but my memories of the CR ep are more clear... when I described the memory to the guys in the Transfans Guild (formerly the Triumvirate, a now dormant group of which I am a triumvir), they confirmed my suspiscion that I had not begun my love of Transformers with Beast Wars.
So, use whatever data you'd like.
As for the language thing...you may be correct. I began learning basic Spanish in the end of eighth grade, and I had no formal instruction until ninth grade. I'm currently in tenth grade, and I've completed just under three semesters of instruction in Spanish. As my third semester began, I began to.. think.. in Spanish. Basic words and phrases, thank you's and apologies, began coming to me in Spanish. But my memories are untinged by the occasional Spanish thought... I do not think I could yet describe an event that happened to me as a child in Spanish except for a basic sentence or two... even if I had yet mastered the preterite. The "de nada"s and "lo siento"s that I often say and think now don't come in my memories. There may be... some truth.. to the language concept after all.
These guys said that you can't hold ideas for which you don't have words. Maybe losing the language also lost the memories (ideas)?
I'm surprised that anybody cares about my earliest memory. Anyway, when I was barely three I remember the basement being dug out for a house that my family was having built. (We moved in later.)
The fact that the house was in the early stages of construction dates the memory. I was just past three. I remember having a conversation where my parents explained that building a house with a basement starts with a giant hole. The idea that building something could start with digging down was tough for me.
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I remember when my mom got a blue car, no idea what KIND of car it was, just that it's rims were tear droped shaped, and that we bought it from some guy at a car wash when it was dark.
... while the car was on. man my mom and uncle got mad =)
I also remember playing in the car by myself one day and shifting it into reverse from park
beyond that are some occasional birthdays that i dont know when. I remember i got a toy helicopter and some toys. i'm guessing i was around 4 or 5. also when my mom whent with her boyfriend to shop for cars and was looking at a porche. as if they could ever afford one =) but it was pretty cool with the spoiler, i immediately made my parents buy me a toy version. hehe
No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
I remember being 2 years old living in my old house (we moved out when i was 3). i remember many details about the house, including my older brothers Drum set in the basement, the stairs which i deciced to play superman on and broke my arm off jumping off the third step. i remember my room as well as my sisters and mothers, who had one of those dimmer lights in it which i found absolutly fascinating at that age.
This is a perfect slashdot item. It is a subject about which the scientific community knows very little, but the /. community will have very strong views upon. They can spend hours pontificating and arguing about a field of which they have no knowledge (sorry but Freshman Psych. doesn't count).
/.ers to begin quotes with well my memories really good and I remember this. People can also give childhood anecdotes demonstrating their intellecutal superiority over others.
As memories are so poorly understood they can all feel they are right and merely argue in logical circles on no one with any knowledge will sort them out, as the ones with knowledge will realise their complete lack of knowledge.
It will also allow many of the less secure
Personally I remember only one thing from before I was 2, that is my conception. I don't remember much, but I distinctly remember my life starting with a bang.
Don't tell me...
Long dark tunnel opening into light and feeling of well-being?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I find it interesting many people could now have their very lives entirely and instantly accessible via video. I know, many people had film cameras, but how widespread was that? With no audio? Everyone I know has a vcr and someone with a camcorder.
A psych professor once said that it has something to do with your hippocampus, which has a large part in determining what memories are stored, not being fully developed in the early years. So, you are more likely to remember events by their emotional impact or smells when you are young.
I was born July 5. I remember a Halloween party in the backyard of the house my family lived in when I was 3 years, 4 months old. I remember because I was the youngest, the older kids did a spooky fake-seance/witch dance around a big hole that the utility company had dug in the yard. Freaked me smooth out - I was too young to know anything other than how scary it was. My family confirmed that the event happened as (and when) described above. I have other memories of that house, and things that happened there. We moved out early in the summer that I turned four. I have at least 5 memories from that house. This is the earliest one I can pin down exactly to the date.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Even though i was born in 1986. My familly tells the same stories over and over.
Incidentally, my sister acquired language at a much younger age than I did (she was forming complete, gramatically correct sentences at the age of 2)
/. editors]?
Is she available for tutoring [of
Sometimes it's too easy.
"And like that
Boobies. Boobies are neat things.
They're smooshy and soft and flexible and...
Mom, stop touching me again!
I remember looking out the window at a big bright full moon. I was about 4-6 months old at the time. I only have about 10-20 memories from before I was 3 years old.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
I was three and I remember this because a fish vendor asked me how old I was and I said, amazingly enough, "three." =)
My
Limekiller
umm so how come animals can remeber things .. without language?
.. unfortunately a kid never bothered trying to remember what was in the womb. The same with a kid of 7 years old .. they dont bother remembering things of the past .. and then you lose memory of it. Try to remember things you didnt make a mental note of remembering or things you didnt remind yourself of.
Ability to communicate has nothing to do with memory.
Memory has to do with exercise
I wasn't exactly allowed to do it. I found a pistol under the front seat of our pickup truck. This was Alabama in 1963 -- everybody had a gun in their pickup truck (they probably still do.) I still remember quite clearly the smell from the hole in the back window. Shattered tempered glass has a very distinctive odor. I also remember my daddy *cautiously* running up to take the pistol out of my hands as I knelt in the truck crying. I have some earlier memories, but none quite so vivid. Funny, I've never had any desire to own a gun.
Terry Layne
Portland, OR
My earliest memory is when I was 4. It was my earliest memory at the time, and it's still my earliest memory now (32). I distinctly remember it as a sudden sentience or awareness. I suddenly became aware that I was standing in our kitchen. I didn't know why I was there, but I continued in whatever I was doing as a portion of my brain (the one responsible for memory?) looked on bemusedly and with a bit of confusion. I said "adios" to my mother and then went back downstairs to finish watching Sesame Street. At this point I realized that "adios" was the "word of the day" on Sesame Street but I still didn't have any actual memory of the moments before I came upstairs to display my new-found vocabulary to my mother.
This is my first contiguous memory. Previous to this I do recall a kind of blackness, which receeded momentarily to show me an elderly woman standing on the porch of a white house. Then the blackness returned until that day in the kitchen. Ever afterwards I was able to describe that woman, right down to the details of her dress. I learned later it was my great-grandmother, who I have only ever met when my grandparents took me to Kentucky at the age of two. At that first meeting she was dressed exactly as I "remember" her.
Years later I asked my mother about my early childhood. She said I was a very colicky baby, so much so that she left Chicago, where my father was in graduate school, and took the train to Lincoln, Nebraska so her mother could help take care of me (and so my father could get some peace and quiet!).
Near as I can tell, that locomotive surprised the bejeebers out of me! The image is still firmly implanted in my brain. I was less than a year old.
take a class, read a book, learn. Its around age three if I remember right, we cant remember those years because our long term memory isnt needed or developed.
Erm. Actually, long term memory has very little to do with it.
The reason why we cant remember things that have happened to us before the age of three or three and a half is because our self-concept usually develops around that time. Self-concept has many forms - for instance self-awareness, the ability to recognize oneself, which develops at about the age of 2. Autobiographical memory - or memories from a long time ago - are also a part of our self-concept, and they cannot exist without the "theory" or knowledge about how our mind works, how we think.
The "theory" of what our mind is and how it works develops sometime around the age of three, before that most children don't make a difference between things they have thought of themselves and things that other people have told them. You may have memories of things that happened to you at the age of one, but as you don't know that they happened to you, you can't remember them. Only after we learn how to use our brain can we actually remember things that have happened to us. Some people - the autistics for instance - never develop self-concept, and they can literally look into the mirror and not see themselves in there.
As to spazoid12's question if the memories would flood back after re-learning the languages spoken as a child, my answer would be - maybe. Self-concept is constructed through social interaction and interaction is based on language. As we use some language for thinking, it also has an influence on the way we think. Your self-concept may have changed because you stopped using these languages, and that may have caused the loss of memories. If you re-learn to speak portugese and russian, you may recover your memories, but probably not the way they were...
Towards a cleaner semiosphere!
Tanel
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I remember being a sperm, an instant before ejaculation, and hearing the Lead Sperm yelling, "Hang on guys, here we go!!!"
In which my mother told me she'd been reading something, probably some scientific journal or other, and they had that very theory; that people remember things through language. Apparently, when I was not even two, I was shown Saturn through a telescope. I had no word for 'planet', or 'Saturn', or anything of the like... but I did know the word 'eye'. I thought that saturn, with its rings open, looked like an eye. When I started talking more, I would incesantly talk about an eye in the sky. It took my mother a long time to realize what I meant. At some point, I saw a photo of Saturn looking much the same way, and reacted to it again, and she realized. I remember nothing else from that age, except for Saturn. I've always had a bizarre fascination with both Saturn, and eyes. I don't think it's coincidence. :-P
This was answered in New Scientists 'Last Word' recently.
Executive summary:
- You brain is developed enough yet
- You don't have any context by which to remember things.
- Autobigraphical memory is taught by adults, but only after language is developed.
My first memory was when I was 3, in 1975, when I rode a few miles in the back of my dad's pickup truck when we were moving house.
My second memory was on the same day, and it is of seeing a mirror at the end of the hallway in the new house.
If I had a third memory on that day, it would have been of me letting my pet bird joey fly around the new house. I don't remember this, but my mom insists it happened. It seems to be her only memory of the day. Odd that I didn't remember this.
I also remember that we had a fish tank at the top of our stairs in the old house, and I kind of remember going down into our basement. But they aren't particular events, but I supposed they are really my earliest memories since it was before we moved.
I think the reason you cant remember much back past a certain age is because you have no frame of reference to hang the memory on. I mean for example, as a fetus, your nervous system isn't very well developed and there is nothing in your brains experience to say 'this event is like that event' and therefore create any long term memory. Also from what I understand of my own kids, even at birth the human nervous system and brain are still developing, and we don't fully grow our big brains until some years after we are born, so I guess it's like we are born with the emergency boot disk kernel, and can't load the full OS until later.
Personally, I remember a couple of key events quite clearly from when I was two - like seeing my sister when she was born at the hospital. And I think i remember fragments of events before that, but I am not 100% sure I am not 'falsely' remembering because someone told me about it at a later date and I reconstructed the memory from my imagination. I guess that's the trouble with really early memories.
For many years as a child I had dreams of 'the stuff' (what else to call it), which was just this grey, tough sort of stuff that (disgusting as it sounds) seemed most like mucus on taste and smell, with a smooth rubbery tactile quality, and the property that the more you pulled or pushed it the stronger it got or pushed back.
I had almost completely forgotten about those dreams as an adult, until I was at the birth of my first son. Then, it must have been a smell of the birth fluid or a combination of things, I remembered the dreams and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps those dreams we the earliest memory from grasping or pushing at the womb from before I was born.
Weird eh.
I remember stuff from about age 2 which is so obscure and boring AND I never discussed it with
anyone that I know it is at least based on memory.
Sure, my mind may have interpolated some details
in but the basic details are the same.
This discussion came up on bottomquark.com a few
weeks ago. I asked my parents about the events and they just plain don't remember them, but they
did confirm some of the details.
So yes, some people may have implanted memories
but that doesn't mean all memories from before age
5 are fake.
If you would only realize that memories are nothing. If you are playing a game of cards, does it matter after the game is over whether the ace of spades was drawn fourth or never? What matters is the finished product - that you won. The memories are just echoes of events that guided us towards the finished product - who we are. With religion, that's even what repentance is about... forgetting!
People have a tendency to generate apocryphal memories of things they didn't remember before when shown pictures of their childhood over time. It works by the same principle as tampering with witnesses by showing them extraneous information and going over and over the events so much that they get confused. Psychological schema also play a role in filling in false details of vague or apocryphal memories. Psychologists can even evoke false memories of any traumatic childhood event that never occurred, using the proper coditioning.
Repeal the DMCA!
my first memories were when i was probably about 3 or 4, at my birthday party, and when i was crawling around on the floor looking for dust. i thought that it was impossible for anything to be smaller than a particle of dust because the smallest thing i had seen was a piece of dust. this was probably inspired by my viewing of siezure-causing shows like the Teenage mutant ninja turtles.
a framed plane of core memory from an IBM 360 mainframe....
OK, enough with that. My earliest personal memory is from when I was around 1 1/2. That was when the Navy sent my family to Butte, MT. I remember the gas station down the road from the apartments we lived in, what apartment we lived in, the field behind the apartments were full of baby's breath, the snow, and the people who lived in the apartments below us who did my hair.
The memory is not manufactured since my family never really spoke about Butte.
My TI/99 4a had 16Kb of RAM...
from abcnews:
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Thinking Back
Study Finds Infants Don't Encode Long-Term Memories Until Second Year
Chances are if you think your earliest memory dates from your first year or even early in your second year, it's not real -- or at least not one you formed from the actual experience.
Researchers have learned that the area of the brain thought to play a key role in encoding long-term memory matures in spurts. And a study published this week in the journal Nature demonstrates that a major spurt happens after a person's first year and then takes a second year to fully mature.
"Components of early memories may be accurate," says Conor Liston, a graduate student who conducted the Nature study while at Harvard University. "But memories recalled from the first or second year of life are probably not that reliable."
Cleaning Up and Making a Rattle
To test young children's ability to remember, Liston taught three groups of children sequences that were prompted by specific toys and sounds. A call for "Clean Up Time," for example, was followed by wiping a table with a paper towel and then throwing the towel into a basket. "Make a Rattle" was followed by the motion of inserting a ring into a slot in a bottle and then shaking the bottle.
Liston taught 9-, 17- and 24-month-old babies three to five different sequences so that each child could do the actions after prompting. He then waited four months and tested each child's ability to re-enact each sequence following the same prompts.
The differences between the youngest group and the two older ones were striking. Both groups of older children were quickly able to repeat the sequences while the youngest group had a near-zero score.
"We know that neurons are beginning to grow at the frontal lobe around 8, 9 months," says Jerome Kagan, a Harvard University professor of psychology, Liston's adviser and co-author of the study. "This bolsters the work of others that has shown most memories from at least the first nine months become lost."
Kagan explains that one hint that a child is starting to develop memory begins at the age of 9 months when children become less willing to leave their parent. Missing one's mother, he says, is a sign that the child has a clear memory of his or her mother just being there and so the child notices when she leaves.
"If you're 5 months old, it's out of sight, out of mind. You're less likely to cry because you just forgot that your mother was ever there, so it's not as frightening," he says.
Tests of older children reveal they can form memories, but later they don't always realize they have them.
Sweaty Recognition
Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, recently tested the ability of 11-year-olds to recognize pictures of former classmates from their preschool years. She showed them a series of pictures of 3- and 4-year-old children, including some images of children they knew seven years earlier.
Most 11-year-olds claimed not to recognize any of their former classmates. But when Newcombe wired up their hands to measure sweating -- also called a galvanic skin response -- the children showed biological signs of remembering the faces of those with whom they'd attended preschool.
As they looked at pictures of children they had never known, the instrument measured no sweating responses.
"It was like an unconscious emotional memory existed even when there is no conscious memory," says Newcombe.
Newcombe and her colleagues are now working with 3- and 4-year-old children and testing their ability to remember scenes. She's finding that most children at this age are good at remembering central figures in picture scenes, like an elephant in a jungle, but they're not adept at remembering secondary details, such as the green jungle around the elephant.
"I think what happens after nine months is a growth in the ability to form explicit, conscious memories," she says. "It's clear that this is a step by step process that takes years to develop."
Early Trauma Erased?
Endel Tulving, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, believes that children develop different forms of memory at different phases. First, he says, they encode primitive memories, such as sights and sounds. Then comes semantic memory, the accumulation of general knowledge, such as concepts and language. The final kinds of absorbed memories are episodic, or autobiographical memories, which are recollections of personal experiences.
Understanding when and how memories form has implications beyond neuroscience. Kagan points out that knowing when children start to retain long-term memories could be useful in courtroom cases where a child's memories are used as evidence. Also, knowing that children younger than 9 months are poor at retaining memories could be a comfort to some adopting parents who might worry about early traumatic experiences in their adopted children's lives.
"Some people have argued that a child's first six to seven months can have a profound influence," he says. "But if experience recorded before the frontal lobe matures can't even be retrieved later, this is unlikely."
The recent studies fill in a long-standing gap in understanding of children's brain development since until recent years, most work had focused on adult brains and memory. Liston says after finishing these studies, he started to understand why.
"Babies' schedules aren't as reliable -- it's not like working with adults," he says. "So I couldn't count on them always showing up at the lab on time. They get sick sometimes and then there's always nap time."
I'm sure that I can remember things further back than this - stuff like walking, crying, toys, butterflies, lightningbugs and so on - but my first really vivid memory was of learning to read.
:) Then, suddenly one afternoon, the letters on the page coalesced into *words*, and I was able to really *read* them!
:)
:)
Up till that point, I had memorized all the "childrens' books" that we had, and was quite able to "read" them back again, even if the book was upside-down, or if I had my eyes closed
I ran all over the house, reading the book to my mom, my dad, and anybody else I saw. It was the most amazing thing I have ever discovered, before or since
That began a life-long infatuation with books. I wore out countless batteries reading, by flashlight, under the covers at night. I read whole encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses, but my favorite books as a child were the "How and Why" books that explained science and technology. Small wonder why I grew up to be an engineer
Lemon curry?
I remember being in a crib and looking up at the lantern shaped night light on the wall over my crib. It held my interest, and I began to play with the cord hanging down below it. I felt the plug on the end of the cord and pulled it, so of course the light went out. Oops, need to put it back. My grip through the bars was not very good, so I changed position so my middle finger was between the prongs. I could then slide the plug sideways better to feel for the wall slot. It worked, but my middle finger got ALL BUZZY! Enough of that, so I pulled it out and tried again without electrocuting myself.
From album pictures later, I found I had lived there only for 6 months in 1957, putting me between 12 and 18 months old.
In 1958, again from album history, I remember watching TV (black and white, natch) and seeing a spellbinding show about a big robot, a guy in a silver suit, and some sort of space ship. I know it now as "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951).
These early memories are clear no doubt because they were so extraordinary and unique as to leave a lasting impression, but were also comprehensible to me as a child. These significant emotional events last because they were generally pleasant (the movie) or distinct (electrical shock vs other types of pain).
I suspect that events which were significant AND incomprehensible are major factors in adult phobias and other anxieties.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Being that I was born in September of '66, that makes it just over two years old. How can I be sure? Because I remembered when someone recited "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" while circling the moon. For years, I thought I'd made it up; then I read that, indeed, someone -did- do it, and it was on Christmas day. I also remember things that I believe were from around then, but the Christmas one is the only one I have a definitive timestamp for.
I was born on November 12th, 1962. JFK was assasinated on November 22, 1963, Exactly 1 year and 10 days later.
I have very vivid memories, not of knowing what happened (of course) but of both of my parents being very emotional, crying, etc. My mom moved my crib into the room with the television so she could do housework in front of it all day.
Years later, I reviewed my memories with her and she confirmed that everything had happened just as I remembered it, right down to her setting the ironing board up in front of the television.
My pet theory about memory is that new ones are formed when you go through an event that is either traumatic, or unique. That is why time goes faster for you as you get older. Less unique events == less memories made every year. This gives us the feeling that time is flowing faster and faster.
I have a memory of my grandmother watching me play before the age of two months. She passed away when I was two months old and this memory seems to pervade my mind of her watching me play. I feel fortunate for such a memory.
I personally do not believe this is a wishful thinking memory either.
Mine was probably a Commodore 64...but before that it was Atari cartridges(or same time, it was long ago)...and before that it was these stacked punched cards that held info. I was maybe 8 when we got a 286?
Many memories that I have from when I was very young are reinforced memories. By that I mean that I really don't remember the event per se, but other people telling me of the event has created the memory. I tend to not remember experiences that well, but create abstract memories. This is hard to explain, but I'm sure in the computer world there are others who are very abstract and thus have memories that work the same way.
My earliest is at 9 months or so.
My daughter can remember being born and the immediate aftermath. Her birth was at home, using the Leboyer technique, FWIW
"What if I re-learned those languages now, 30 years later? Would memories flood back?"
No. The encoding of decent memories requires mental concepts (think of it as the brain's assembly code), which obviously don't necessarily require any spoken or written language (after all, animals have memories), but the development of verbal language is probably a great facilitator to the development of a wider array of mental concepts, which would certainly aid in the ability to create memories. After all, it is nearly impossible to remember something that you can't make any meaningful sense of. If you saw a random array of dots for X seconds, the accuracy of your memory would be abysmal compared to your memory of a picture of a Castle you saw for X seconds. Mental schema are extremely importment in the memory encoding process. It's like the difference between a 2KB bitmap and a 10KB GIF. With no compression, you can't fit much in a given amount of space.
However, if the brain doesn't encode the memories at first, they are lost forever. The brain is like a seive, not a treasure chest. It filters through all the crap it recieves, and only saves the most important and meaningful stuff that it can find. Before a certain age, nothing is really meaningful, so the brain has no mechanism for encoding memories.
Learning portuguese would almost certainly not bring back real forgotten childhood memories. People are always far, far, more likely to fabricate memories based on mental schema (stereotypes) than to remember genuine repressed/long-forgotten memories.
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I know this sounds totally crazy, but I have vivid memories of being born, and the first few days in the hospital before they let me go home. According to my mom, I have always had an unusually sharp memory of my early childhood. I have lots and lots of memories of events that took place in the first two years of my life.
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I was 2 1/2 at the time, and what I find particularly amazing is I remember thinking "everyone thinks this is really special, but I can barely see anything".
My first memory is of the operating door closing on my mom as I was being secured on a gurney to be taken in for open heart surgery when I was 2. She said we'd get Taco Bell afterwards cause I used to like that.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Theoretically the limit to human memory is within 3 weeks of conception when the neural plate has formed and the first neurological pathways begin to form (interestingly the brain stem is the first recognizable organ that forms). Everything which our brain processes is processed along pathways which are formed by the neurons. Paths that are regularly used are strengthened and those that are not die off. It is this establishment and strengthening/weakening of pathways which forms our memories. Therefore memory is the only factor which governs the way in which we process the information which we glean from the world. The full-duplex hi-fidelity memory you are talking about is in fact a memory "cascade" triggered by a thought cascade. Usually these pathways are formed close together and therefore the cascade can happen quite easily and with little effort. Or with the longer term "cascades" you have either knowingly or unknowingly "through the process of dreaming" evoked a hi-fi memory cascade regularly and thus are able to recall them easily. The longer you leave a cascade "unchecked" the more neighboring neurons will be able to take hold of an under utilized neuron and a pathway will shrivel up, that part of your cascade will fade with it and parts of the cascade will remain and will have an influence on your day to day living whether you know it or not.
I could go on all day about this but I think I will stop here.
Seriously!
I had the misfortune to be born missing the uvula (the little thing that hangs down at the back of the throat). Apparently, its function is to prevent food from going into your breathing passages when you swallow. Since I didn't have one and they couldn't operate to give me one (used tissue from my inner cheek to make one) until I was two year old, I spent a lot of time choking and going blue as a child.
My first memory (as best as I can tell) was of my parents frantically trying to use this weird blue water syringe to clear my throat out when I was near death from choking. I remember it vividly enough to describe what they were wearing and the room, etc as well. I know the article says that oxygen is a requirement, but in my case I was dying from lack of it (my parents have told me I was going blue when they came in to check on me) yet I remember it very vividly and in full color and detail. I suppose in my case it was such a tramatic experience that I never really forgot it. Sometimes I'll remember it when I'm not even thinking about it, it will just kind of pop in there. A lot of old childhood memories seem to come back like that.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Those tasted pretty good, they should make their own shrink wrapped candy lol. Do they still sell those vitamins? I wouldn't mind eating them again.
No clue, I don't really know how memory works. Given that I remember seeing Les Miserables with spoken English (it's a French version, I know I saw it with subtitles, but I could speak enough French at the time to follow along), I suspect what language you know now doesn't really matter that much.
Or, I could just be an anomaly.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
Good!
I fucking hope your dad hasn't had one since, either. I don't care if it's 1963 or 2013, leaving a loaded gun where a three year old can get hold of it is just plain fucking STUPID AND IRRESPONSIBLE!
Sometimes I really wonder how you Americans are able to survive, despite all your stupidity!
Language develops independently of visual memories. Visual memories don't require any language skills. The fact that you don't remember the languages you mentioned probably means that you didn't speak them fluently and often at the age of about 12, when language memories tend to get locked in (neural pathways for language tend to get set or discarded depending on usage at the time).
My earliest memories are from 2 and 3 years old. The fact that yours are so much later is unusual, but I only have 3 or 4 real memories from this period.
I don't really know what the mechanisms are for visual memories, but I would imagine it's conceivable to have them earlier than this.
My first memory is from when we were two or three, maybe four. We were between his house and the neighbors. The ground was just dirt and weeds. We had been playing around a square hole in the ground that in the memory seemed quite deep, but when I know now to be just a few inches deep. I think I pushed him into the hole, and he threw a brick at me. It tore off one of my fingernails. I don't remember running home, but I remember standing on the front porch of my house, I remember how unusual the pain was, how ugly my finger looked. And I remember how blurry the world was through my tears.
He was my best friend for many years (20+ years).
I wish we had stayed in touch better.
Read, L
I remember christmas when I was 3, my sister would have been 10 months and I remember playing with a fisher price farmhouse with her, then I remember going outside to play in the snow and the grown ups not putting her down because she couldn't walk yet. (not that either one of us really could walk trussed up like the michelin man in our home made knit winter clothes) I also remember my fourth birthday, mainly because I was showing off pretending I was snoopy lying on top of the back of the couch, I fell and broke my collar bone. I remember the first day of kindergarden.
I remember reading somewhere that thinking is done on the surface of your brain and memories are store within, and that the more you think about thing while they are short term memories the stronger the long term memories will be. I try to reinforce memories by consiously thinking about the sights, smells, sounds, textures, other persons perspectives and how an outside observer would describe it.
These tricks seem to work, things I pay attention to like that make much more vivid memories.
The ZX-81 had 8 kilobytes of ROM. Of course (IIRC) they bragged about the ROM memory in their ads too- you got EIGHT WHOLE KILOBYTES OF READ-ONLY MEMORY! Even for 1982 it was incredible spin. Actually I'm still impressed even today that they managed to cram the entire system (including BASIC) into 8K. The BASIC implementation was so slow and lousy that if you really wanted to write a program that wasn't just embarrassing, you needed to learn machine code. So I learned Z-80 assembly. (Picking up new skills when you're young is easy!) Although program deployment on the ZX-81 was a bitch, especially with that tape recorder business. The best way to do it with machine code was to type in a huge REM statement:The "A"s started at memory address 16514 (with the 16K memory pack)- I still remember that number. You would then proceed to POKE your instructions and operands into memory one byte at a time, and the A's would start turning into pseudo-ASCII garbage:Then, you did something likeand you were off! After being used to ZX-81 BASIC (which executed at the speed of several lines per second) the speed of Z-80 machine code was just amazing. I remember writing deeply nested loops just to marvel at the speed. And it gave you so many registers! I got spoiled. A, B, C, D, E, H, and L. And you could chain them together to make fake 16-bit registers: BC, DE, HL. There were also the weird registers that you weren't supposed to mess with- I for interrupts, SP for the stack, R for the dynamic memory refresh. So what if the rest of the computer sucked? The CPU was so much fun to play with. When I got a C64 later and saw 6510 programming, I was stunned. You had to do everything with A, X, and Y! Who stole all the registers?
[Warning: I was sick and tired when I wrote this. Some sentence structure and spelling maybe screwed up.]
Everything you experience(sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, internal biological stats, and thoughts) is placed into a biological memory cache. You're not conscience that this memory cache is happening.
Your brain selectively places about 1-10% of the information from your memory into your short term memory. Your body reports so much information in just a second that your mind has to select the information to spend the cycles to commit to any kind of memory. Your body at full awareness(aka Fight or Flight mode) is estimated to report about 17 terrabytes of analog information within a second.
Next your mind selects the information from your short term memory that should be placed into your long term memory. Depending on your concentration and/or emotional levels determains the amount of information that is placed into your long term memory. Higher concentration and/or emotional levels are placed in more detailed into your memory.
Example: Concentrating on homework will let you remember it. Flying through homework will have a lower priority level and will ussually be forgot. Fun times are remembered better then dull times. Running from a guy you shooting at your may place a higher level on the running then remembering that your running.
Finally you build an index by topical association of the new information for your long term memory.
Example: Adding and subtracting are placed indexed under Math. Linux and BSD news would be indexed under the topic of Kewl for most Slashdot readers.
The reason we forget is simple:
- Something is not thought to be important enough to be placed into your long term memory. Example: A phone number you will only call once in your life.
- You are improperly indexing your information. Example: You remember a class by how boring it is, not what was actually taught in it.
Most 'Get a Great Memory' programs work by teaching you to relax and let the memories flow and re-index your old memories. Some memory programs work by teaching you ways of indexing or associating new information.
Generally you have to be 2 years olds to remember anything. Up until that age you do not have enough experience to know which information to commit into your long term and then to build a proper index. Basic biologically instilled emotionaly responses to give us the base build a usable mind.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
It was a bright sunny winter day, and I was sitting on the tiled kitchen floor playing with some toys. Bright sunlight was streaming in the glass sliding door. My mother was in the kitchen, cooking. All of a sudden, my mother got very upset, ran over and picked me up, and we went to the neighbor's house to watch TV all afternoon.
That's all I remember. It was only later that I connected this memory to the Kennedy assassination.
Kenneth J. Hendrickson
My earliest memory is from around age 2-3, going to get ice cream with my Dad in Newark Delaware. I can accurately place the memory because I remember walking there from a specific house that we only lived in until I was about 3 1/2 (when my parents divorced). I have fragments of memory associated with that time, but I don't recall enough to know if they were before or after that.
As to why that's my first memory I don't have any explanation. According to my parents I had many previous memorable (to them) events occur that I have no recollection of. It may be that I was simply going through a phase where my ability to place thoughts into a memory schema were much improved from past efforts.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
You can't trust your own brain. You may think you remember things, but you don't. Whenever you "remember" something, your brain is recreating the experience. It isn't like a computer where it's stored as an exact sequence of binary.
Here is a short blurb on memory theory.
Incidently, I have no idea what my earliest memory is. How could anybody? I have numerous memories from when I was quite young (catching a fish, swimming, riding on a train) but how can I accurately say which is my earliest memory and how do I know that my brain didn't just brew them up based on stories I heard about my youth?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I remember my father beating the shit of me when I was 18 months old. He had "issues". I remember the pink tile in the bathroom where the attack occurred.
I remember the nursery school I went to when I was 4. I remember the heavy iron fire door between the nursery school and the town library on the other side of the building. Don't know why. I remember playing "giant steps" in the nursery school, and the piles of mats we climbed over.
I remember chasing my brother up the stairs when I was 5 or 6 and sticking him in the ass with a table knife. He carried the scar until he died.
I remember watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in grainy black and white in whatever year that was.. I was born in '61 so do the math.
This is probably induced memory (not sure the exact definition), as no one has been found to remember that far back. What happens is your parents or someone else tell you tidbits of moments during your birth, etc and your mind creates the memory. This happens a lot with people that witness a crime, after they've talked with so many people about it, many times their memory can change completely.
Infantile amnesia is the result of primary repression which occurs at the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. It is the result of the reorganization of the ego that occurs as the prototypes are created that guide the rest of our choices... it is the evidence of the development of the superego, and of the integrated self. It is the movement from the Pleasure Principle to the Reality Principle, and the symbolization of the Name-of-the-Father (Lacan).
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
My earliest memory is being breastfed by my mother with my twin brother. The exact moment was when I realized that biting the nipple makes her uncomfortable or angry.. This really weirds me out and I'm too embarassed to bring it up to my mom but I'm almost sure that this event did occur. :)
My next earliest memory was when I was 3 or 4 but I don't see how it could have been implanted because my mom never mentioned anything like that. Is it possible that this is a real memory? I can't see myself asking my mother about it
It is believed by some that early childhood memories are not always real, that they come from photographs that you've been seeing over and over again throughout your childhood and even into adulthood. Sometimes, this makes sense: I can remember playing in the garden when i was young, but there's a picture that goes along with it. I remember holding the ladder for my dad while he climbed the side of the house when i was about 2 or 3... but we have a picture of that too. However, there is a picture of me and my dad sitting on the front step eating popsicles. While we have a picture for that, too, i can remember asking my dad about the words on his t-shirt ( i couldn't read yet). He said "It says: Ontarioooooooo!!" and i would always laugh. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but they cannot capture spoken word. So i guess the jury is still out on that theory.
Sometimes we suppress early memory if it is unpleasant.
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and can remember standing in an igloo that my father and his friends made at NH. I still remember how very tall it was and light was streaming through the walls. When I was in my 20's, I describe it to my father and he confirmed my age. I am now 43. About 6months later, my father took us fishing and I described the NH streams, the cooking of fish on the manifold, and he confirmed it again. What worries me is not theearly memories, but the fact that I no longer have a photographic memory (I could read a book and reguritate it word for word). I am hoping that it was lack of work on my part and not illness, or slow poisoning. Some work that was being done by an associates husband had to do with plastics shedding in the microwave. He felt that it was causing slowing of short-term -> medium-term memory. Now, that concerns me.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As for the language questions, I would be very surprised if memories of early childhood ever started to flow back. But what you will find is that you will be able to learn those languages (at least the phonology) relatively easily. That is, your psychoacoustic system has learned to make certain distinctions that get lost to most English speakers.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
The reason why we remember so few memories while we were infants is because we took many naps :)
Mad Hatter
My first memory was from between birth to 6 months in age. The only thing I remember was sitting in something that restrained me and being in a white kitchen. When I was older, like 30, I asked my mother if our family had ever lived in a house with a white kitchen. Indeed, she said that for the first 6 months I was on this planet we lived in ONLY ONE HOUSE that had a white kitchen. Of course I didn't know at the time I was in a kitchen but the memory persists to this day of which I can discuss. I also have a memory/sensation of floating is a reddish/orange/brownish light that I think is earlier than the "kitchen memory" and have never discussed with anyone for fear of being laughed at. This could be a memory of the birthing process or after (babies are supposedly born with their eyes shut), I simply don't know what to make of it. The only thing that I know for sure is that in 1994 had my I.Q. (intelligence quotient) and M.Q. (memory quotient) clocked; my visual memory was in "the very superior range" (140+) according to the Wechsler Adult Memory Scale. Unfortunately my auditory memory is in the "average range" (100-110). I suppose I'll never make a good lawyer, however, I make a pretty good scientist.
I know that from discussing my I.Q. and M.Q. results with a Psychologist that childhood memories are almost always influenced by environmental factors. From birth to age 6, I can recall almost everything. From age 7 to 10, I remember NOTHING, which is when I was stressed from my parents fighting and arguing that lead to divorce.
Incidently, I knew from about age 4 that I would pursue science as a career throughout my life. I was facisnated to hear "what scientsists were discovering". It was in high school that I learned that Chemistry was my calling. I've always been a good number cruncher, from Calculus, through Linear Algebra and Diff(icult) EQ(uations), to Numerical Analysis. Certain "professions" are born, not made. Personality definitely determines one's successful and happy career path in life, I'm sure of it.
I remember all the men lined up on the ship in their dress whites and the band playing Anchors Aweigh.
This was during the Vietnam War (1966). I don't know whether dad had come back from the war or just a voyage around the Pacific somewhere.
I have spotty memories of being 2 and 3 years old. I can remember continuously starting at about 4 years old. My mother finds it hard to believe that I can remember being so young.
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It is generally believed that memories of youth are rarely seen before age 4. It is at that age that metacognition, the ability to think about thinking, (i.e. to realize that one is capable of self-reflection) first appears in a very limited (as opposed to "normal" adult) capacity.
Apparently, once this ability surfaces, memories become more readily achieved, mainly because the individual knows they exist (if you don't know you have a memory...).
Memories that do remain salient are typically those of concrete objects, often playthings, such as the "red ball" a previous poster had mentioned that (s)he recalled, and are typically just recollections of these objects rather than the events associated with them; this correlates to the developmental stages of preoperational and concrete operational thought as outlined by Piagetian theory.
Personally, the first memory I recall is around the time of Sr. Kindergarten (~age 5) and a bright yellow, METAL, Tonka Dump-Truck I got for Xmas. <rant> Why is it toys aren't metal anymore, I mean back in the day, transformers, G.I. Joe planes, Tonka, all metal, now, crappy plastic! Those transformers that shoot sparks out now, the plastic melts. argh! </rant>. At about grade 2 (~age 6/7) I can *clearly* recall playing with other kids at recess and remember the names of kids I haven't seen in over 20 years.
I vaguely remember when I was 4, and another memory from even farter back though I don't know when. One memory might be from whne I was three(a new family moved in next door). And I remember eating tomato soup in my high chair and that my grandfather was over, that couldn't have been anytime past 2.
Clear and consistent memories- Not until 7 or 8...
My favorite things about my childhood memories thoguh were the ignorance I had- My dad was in the hosptial for a couple weeks with heart trouble. All I knew at the time was the hospital would make him better. I didn't realize how serious multiple week hospital stays really were. And since we stayed at my grandparents alot then, we got to see him all the time(they had a hole in their back fence, opened right onto the hospital parking lot). THen my mom was in a mental hospital with anorexia. All I remember are happy times when we visited and had hot chocolate. Then my grandmother had breast cancer. All I knew is the doctors made her better(her own kids didn't know till she went in for surgery- I think my grandfather was the only other person to be told sooner).
I wouldn't go back to that ignorance, but I'm glad it was there at the time so I didn't face all that pain before I could handle it.
I truely believe that my "first memory" was made by other people around me. They talked, talked and talked about the same thing that happened when you was a kid and then you would believe that. What do you guys think about it?
that used to come up in nightmares when I was young.
I was being carried (I think over my mom's shoulder) down a darkened narrow hallway that I don't recognize. The nightmare part was that the end of the hallway was my death.
Of course, it could simply have been a memory of me going for some kind of doctor's examination.
My earliest, clearest memory was it being very dark, inside my parents room, throwing up on the corner of their bed, because I swallowed one of my Dad's big rings and started to choke. I'm guessing I was around 2, because kids stop putting random stuff in their mouths by then, right? It's kind of a funny memory, because all I can remember is the actual vomiting part, nothing before (like the swallowing) or afterward (them waking up to a lovely surprise)
Just follow the day, and reach fo
I have (a few) detailed memories going back to before I was 2. The odd thing about most of my childhood memories is that I remember them in 3rd person--I see myself in the memories. In fact, pretty much all of my long-term memories are like that (and have been as far back as I can remember. I mean, as far back as I can see myself remembering :) Has anyone else ever experienced something similar/
I remember swimming at the YMCA my mother taught at. Obviously I didn't know what the hell that was at the time. I remember the room though, and being dunked undewater, which I hated cause the chlorine burns your eyes and all.
Not too many other early memories. I remember riding in the old car my parents had, watching TV with my mother when I was 2, learning to read at 2.5 (I insisted they teach me), accidentally eating a piece of chalk cause I got it confused with the cracker in my other hand around then (distraction is bad).
It's mostly bits and pieces up till about 5 or so then it gets more stable.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
All I remember is my dad chasing down a cow that got lose in my yard. I think I was 5.
Now weather or not he caught the cow, and what he did when he caught the cow, I don't remember.
The brain has two types of memory - RAM and hard disk space. The more you access a certain memory, the likely it's kept in ram and thus more easily accessible. Crap you'd rather forget or just plain don't think about (Where are those car keys?) gets swapped to disk, and thus, access times are longer.
See, everything can be explained in computer terms.
(Too bad some people have really hideous cases!)
Baby Minds: Brain-building Games Your Baby Will Love is a fascinating read, and not just for those of us breeding armies of ubernerds.
Regarding memories, I don't remember what the authors said about any specific age, but they recommended a way to strengthen the neural "muscles" used in self-memory: Basically, make it a habit to ask the child every day to retrace where they've been and what they've done in some detail, it trains their senses of spatial and sequential relationships. This can be started before they can even talk...the authors suggest teaching simple pantomimes/sign language to allow toddlers to express themselves.
Although I don't remember much of my early life I have many false memories of early childhood, most having to do with remarkably vivid dreams.
When I was young (5 or 6) I had a dream that I could jump extra high, almost as though I had double jumped, from exerting extra energy as I reached the apex. This stuck with me for a long time, and I can remember later, at age 10 or 12 or so I was playing basketball and I tried to do this. I landed on my knee and tore off most of the skin.
I also used to fantasize about a girl who lived four houses away when I young, but who I could never spend time with because her father thought I was a punk. I met her about 8 years later and while we were talking I pulled one of those 'hey, remember when I came over to your house late at night and we snuck off to the park where we hid from our parents until morning' lines, to which she replied 'when the hell was that?'. Oops.
called, "Why Things Are & Why Things Aren't: The Answers to Life's Greatest Mysteries" by Joel Achenbach that attempts to answer this and many other "unanswerable" questions.
In the book, the explanation given is that humans rarely remember things before roughly four years old because we have not developed the ability to "tell" a story. Memories to this point a just a jumble of unrelated events, some remembered, some forgotten. When we learn the ability to put events in chronological order, that is when we begin to retain these events. At least, that is explanation given in the book that was given to them by pyschologists.
I recommend this book to anyone with any sense of curiousity.
Whats the question again?
I think you first have to learn what is important to remember. That and you need to recall these memories at regular intervals in your life.
As for me I remember when we moved into a new house when I was one. I remember nothing of the previous house. One think I did note was that we got some new furniture. Of these one odd-ball chair was delivered by mistake and sent back the next day. I remember that chair--ugly b&w static pattern that was so popular in the late 60's. Everyone else in the family barely remembers it when I recount the story, and noone else has bothered mentioning it, so it cannot be a recalled story.
How the hell can you all remember that far back? I'm just 15 and my memory is HORRIBLE. I can remember short, jumbled flashes and mixed-up visuals, but I can't place most of them. And I DEFINITELY can't catalog my memories well enough to tell which happened when and what is first. Then again, my short-term memory isn't that great either (except for technical terms and the like, hehe).
Ah, well. I guess I'm just doomed to a memoriless existence
My parents were divorced when I was 5. I remember the whole family being at the house, and Dad getting in the car and driving away, and I knew he wasn't coming home. That's the most striking memory of early age. There is one other, one of those pressurized rockets. You fill the thing with H20 and then pump in air, when it's released the pressure blows the air out the back and launches the thing. I remember that as well, but the Dad driving away thing is lot clearer, and they're both from around the same time period.
ehintz
Rating the parent as flamebait is not really fair....
False memories and hypnosis are related topics, as are both rooted in social psychological research, and more specifically, in research on social influence.
First, a little background on hypnosis:
There have been two schools of thought on the matter. The first is the state theorists which views hypnotic behaviour as qualitatively different from non-hypnotic behaviour and assumes that 'real' hypnotic responses are involuntary as opposed to deliberate. The hypnotic subject is seen as passive by proponents of this school of thoght, and their responses are believed to be caused by the hypnotist's suggestions. Hypnotizability is seen as a stable trait.
The second "school" is the cognitive-social theorists. Hypnotic behaviour, by proponents of this theory, is not seen as indication of a unique, trance-like state. White (1941) probably described it best when he wrote
Basically, cognitive-social theorists see hypnotic behaviour as both goal-directed and context-dependent; affected by expectancies, attitudes, and the willingness of the subject to accept the hypnotic role. Subjects seen as active participants who strive to generate hypnotic experiences. These theorists also recognize the stability of hypnotic responsiveness by the tendency of attitudes, expectancies, and interpretations of hypnotic responding to remain stable over time.
As for false memories, if you follow the state-theorists' views, then yes, the hypnotic subject, being at the relative mercy of the hypnotist, could be set to believe in events that did not occur; whereas the the cognitive-social theorists would be more likely to believe that the subject would be inclined to agree with the suggested memories while under hypnosis, but dismiss them otherwise, as expectations of the hypnotist's level control over the subject lowers.
Which view of hypnosis the reader chooses to adopt is up to him or her, however contemporary research his typically favored the second (cognitive-social) school (eg. Pekala, Kumar, & Hand, 1993; Silva & Kirsch, 1992; Spanos, Kennedy & Gwynn, 1984 [sorry, no electronic refs.]).
Most false memories are actually implanted via misinformation. One common pardigm used in the study of such effects is to show subjects a video clip of a car crash whereby a driver fails to yield at a yield sign. A question and answer session following the clip could contain questions such as "how fast was car A travelling when it ran the stop sign?" . Given this, the subject in the future is very likely to swear up and down that there was a stop sign present, when, in fact, it was a yield sign. This tactic of memory restructuring / false memory creation is often used by lawyers in cases where witnesses are unsure of the accuracy of their memories.
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
My earliest memory is me playing with some kind of sea crab on a brown carpet. I believe I was in kindergarten because I recall the uniform. I can't remember anything before that.
that 640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody. That guy must not have been thinking about Windows...
Whatever is remembered is important so make sure you give your kids the same.
I can't remember >3 years old, not in the state of mind I am now. But a year ago I might have @21 years old.
Once knew a guy who was convinced that he could remember being in the womb. Said he couldn't describe it because it couldn't be broken down and a there wasn't a single word that was holistic enough.
I think the definition of a memory when we're an adult is so specific that sure, pre 3 years is approximately when the definition fits. At our age it has to be a specific event often. It might be thoughts that were more important but those are harder to remember.
Before we're adults memory could be seen as a wider experience, not just remembering an image or word. Because I'm adult now all I can start to recall is images such as a complicated tree pattern wallpaper my parents had that perplexed me for ages.
But if I was still childlike I would proberly be recalling things that are easier to remember from that viewpoint such as when I went for a walking holiday with my dad and after said
"My feet are singing".
Yes, I agree lanaguage helps memory. I see language as a compression of images or thought; easier to transmit to other people via shared assumptions but also easier to remember, unless you're dyslexic or similar visular thinker.
So, I think I've moved from a Visual Thinker to a Word thinker as I've got older and thus I can't remember lots of stuff.
A few of my memories:-
- running round the house with a trolley with letter blocks in it `A` `B` and `C`. Shouting ABC, ABC, ABC! Because it sounded like a police siren.
- wheelie'ing my brothers pram. Had to jump to reach it - it was 3 & 1/2 feet high.
- one of those scary photographers that uses a combination of turkey photos, sweets and references to my mothers knobley knees (3 & 1/2 years)
- school field, lying in the sun with my head on a tuft of grass thinking philosophical stuff
Yet I don't remember running into a gate with a bubble blower thing in my mouth. Thank goodness for that.
A blog I run for the wealth
Lots of anomalies in this one:
:P
6-7 months old. I fell from a bookshelf after climbing to its top under my own power (yeah, I was mobile *really* early).
I don't really remember the climb well. I remember the top face of a table, a family heirloom. Made of this wood which stained to jet black, with mother-of-pearl inlays on it. There was this glass plate which was always laid on top of the table itself in order to protect it. I remember this "redness", a blotch, spreading around the top of the glass, making the inlays underneath go reddish. This is my first visual memory.
It might be that I remember this because it necessitated a trip to the emergency room to deal with a severe impact trauma to my forehead, sustained when I fell approximately 5 feet head-first on the corner of a steel filing cabinet.
As time went on, I managed to cause even more trouble. Usually didn't hurt myself as badly though
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
What I thought was just a strange dream turned out to be one of my earliest memories. I kept having this reoccuring dream that I, my grandma and my grandpa were at a train station in the locker area sitting on a bench in front of the lockers. I was eating some potatoe chips and my grandma had a very bright orange/red coat on. After mentioning it to them, they were quite suprized that I remembered that. I was between 3 and 4 years old at the time according to what they say. The second most distant memory I can remember is the scariest. I was almost 5 when the whole family went to disney world to visit my aunt. Mr. Toads cars scared the hell outta me. I would turn left, the car would go right... heading straight towards the wall then the wall would fly open!! (I was 5 gimme a break) :) Oh, and I almost drowned in the 5 foot pool after going down the water slide. My mom picked me out in just enough time for my aunt, who was sitting on some sort of tiger or lion thingy on the side of the pool, to squirt me in the mouth with water. (The water shot out of the lions mouth). I didn't enjoy myself too much there I believe. LOL
I remember it quite vividly : a gas mask coming out at me, and a nurse singing a little child song.
My mother told me that I was three when it happened as it was the only time I was ever put under general anesthesia.
The question didn't ask for everyone to post their earliest childhood recollection. It asked for some scientific explaination of why we don't remember things when we are younger than a certain age. So why have 5 pages of "I remember blah blah blah when I was 2.5 years old" been modded as if they were on topic?
Same house: my father is showing me a breadbag with mouse turds in it. (I wonder if it's the same mouse?)
.nosig
Well i have always had a great memmory. I never really though about myfirst memmory, but I can clearly remember going to the prom with my dad and coming home with my mom.
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My earliest memory is from around 1 to 1 1/2 years old. Say what you will about it, but I have them. And they're not repeating things that people said. "Do you remember...?" was not something we did. In fact, I did that to my parents. Growing up in the Army, we moved a great deal. I once described a room I had a memory of to my parents. My parents were shocked because I was describing a room from a house that we moved from before I was 2.
The oxygen part intrigues me because when I was born, there were complications. I was put on a very pure oxygen immediately following my birth. I'm curious if there's a relation. Anyone know anything else about this?
Because it's easy for me to mark the time. I lived in a house which I later called my "tiny baby house" until right around my 2nd birthday. I remember a few things from within this house. But some of them are just insanely weird. Gives you some insight into the mind of early childhood maybe.
I remember that my parents had told me that God caused everything to happen. In the house we had this slightly shaggy white carpet with which I was intimately familiar being so short. One night I had what I believe must have been a piece of food stuck in my teeth but to me it felt just like a piece of that carpet, an individual strand. I remember well trying to explain to my Dad that God had put a piece of carpet in my mouth but it was no good. He, incidentally, has no memory of this event but I can distinctly recall why I thought it was true. I remember running my tongue over the piece of food and thinking "this is exactly the same shape as the strands of the white carpet."
I remember staring up at the pink doorbell-box in the corner of the ceiling and realizing what it did for the first time.
I remember when my parents actually hired a male babysitter instead of the usual girl, this kid from down the street, and I remember fleeing from him when he attempted to put a diaper on me for bedtime. Apparently I had some idea that only women were allowed to do that. I do distinctly remember staring at his feet from underneath the bed, and I remember waking up with my mother pulling me out and laughing.
I also remember a recurring nightmare I had. It always started with Gene Shallit (the movie dude from the Today Show) turning into the Incredible Hulk (really Lou Ferigno I guess) and chasing me down the street, and if I couldn't run all the way to the end of the street fast enough this 18 wheeler would come zooming by and then I would be trapped, naked and floating through space in my carseat while the Days of Our Lives themesong played over and over. I don't know what to tell you, I guess I watched a lot of TV.
My younger brother has clear memories of things that happened when he was still crawling. And I can back him up because I was there. Hell I still remember all of my parents friends from before I was 3. Nina, Mary-Pat, Bill the guy who could juggle pool-balls (that guy was always cool), Clarkie, Miss Mary-Lou, Kathy and Kayla. I'm telling you it's all there if you just dwell on it. And it can give you insight into the foundations of your eventual consciousness.
It was 4mb of RAM in a PackardBell 4x86 66mhz.
i read somewhere (scientific american i think) that smell is more closely linked to memory than any other sense, and evokes the most potent memory breakthroughs of any of the senses.
so if you were to somehow recreate the smells of your youth, theoretically you might have the strongest recollections.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's dark in there you know.
... I'm not sure when or where it was, but there were definately two legs on either side of me... and it was really dark for a long time... then suddenly very bright... then I was crying a lot.
The story about your dad had me LMAO.
When I was a kid, we moved into a new house. The first night that we were there, my dad evidently found a rubber halloween monster mask in the top of a closet. I was asleep, and he came into my room, leaned over me, and started howling. This was not a fun way to wake up...he scared the heck out of me.
I was probably in tenth grade when this happened, so it doesn't count as an early memory, but the parent post reminded me of this.
I remember too much. It was, and still is, the family joke. I remember whole conversations (and let me tell you, this can really freak someone out who you have only recently met, they think you're some kind of a monster if you can make reference to some obscure thing they said in passing six months before). I can remember expressions on people faces as we talked. Without going into detail, I will say I did not have a happy childhood, but I remember every grueling detail of it. Luckily, I can remember the good times too, but often, I think memories are scars.
I tend to disagree.
Memories of important (or traumatic events) can be collected as early as 2 or 3.
I, for example, got hospitalized at age 2.5, and I distinctly remember what happened at the hospital. Noone could have told me, because I was in there alone.
The memories are admittedly spotty -- I remember what happened that evening when I was admitted, but completely nothing of the next morning when I was supposedly being treated..
informative, interesting, whatever,.... I'm glad I read it
let's take the parent of your parent to be true (titled physyc or some other misspelling)
:)) remember when my dad bought me a soccerball and when my uncle dropped it into some pond. But i personally do know that no one reminded me as I did the reminding to them. My parents forgot both events long ago and i haven't talked to that uncle except in brief phone conversatiosn for a long time.
Then all you have to do is re-think those old thoughts when your still a child to remember them. Even if long term memory doesn't stick with you, merely thinking of those old memories while your still let's 3 should bring them back up.
I clearly (as clear as mud
Hmmm... Pie...
I can't remember most of the specifics. But we learned in Human Phys that a child's mind restructures itself to become ready for adult life. For the average human that restructuring starts at the age of 3. It can last into adolescence or later depending on how fast the person matures. I'm not certain if that has any effect on the whole thing... but it would correlate.
I'm 21 now and I have a distinct memory of when I started potty training. I didn't understand what was going on at the time, but I remember that every so often my mom would put me on the changing table, and change my diaper (this was a pleasant sensation), then one day, she didn't. I guess it was just something I had gotten used to, because I remeber distinctly thinking that something was different, and missing the feeling of being changed. I didn't have any concept of a time at that point, but I started potty training at 18 months, so it must have been then.
I think that's my earliest memory, though I have surprisingly several from when I was 2, and a plethora of memories from age 5 and below. At 5 1/2 we moved to a different house, so everything from the first house is dated. I remember a reoccouring nightmare I had when I was three, about a man ringing the door bell, then when the door opened, he growled like a cat. I distinctly remember it because it confused me, I didn't understand what was scarry about the dream when I was awake, yet it scared me when I was asleep. I also remember Mommy-And-Me classes, from when I was 2, and TONS of memories from pre-school, when my mom changed jobs, playing hide and go seek, getting my first Garbage Pail Kid card, trying to walk on water with swimmies on my feet, He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe, hailey's commet...the list goes on and on. There's probably some relationship to my strong memory as a child and the fact that I was diagnosed as gifted at a young age. Do other gifted people have very early memories?
What is really interesting is that I have far fewer memories from age 9 to about 15. We moved to a really small town in a different state at 9 an I HATED it. I wonder how drastically mood effects long term memory.
Years later, Mom showed me a picture from that day, and I remembered it. When she flipped it over, the date on the back showed that I was one year old at the time.
Other memories from the 2-3 year range include the death of our pet bird, and when I was swinging and accidentally hit my friend's sister in the head.
But 7 years old, man? What happened to the entire first grade? Well, it was probably public school; you didn't miss much. ;-)
When I was 5 I was seriously burnt in a fire caused by a BBQ and accelerants. I sustained 3rd degree burns essentially down one side of my body. :)
I had to deal with various issues growing up which had a lot to do with becoming a geek but that's a whole other story...
I've found that I can remember almost the entire incident. Running up the back, lawn, my father smothering me, my brother calling the ambulance and so on. The odd thing is that I cannot remember anything before that happened. Zip. It's almost as if that point of trauma scrubbed my memory clean.
With this limited information, and from what I recall from my college psychology classes, if you do relearn a forgotten language, you should be able to recall more of your past. Additionally, if you speak to someone who knew you back then, they can quite often trigger memories that you thought you'd long forgotten.
A second tenet of memory is pictures and images. If I say the word "Carrot" your mind recalls a carrot, you may picture the orange carrot with the green top, and that image may be linked to something like Bugs Bunny, and so on...
With this type of memory, you cannot remember anything you do not know. What I mean is you cannot remember a Carrot if you don't know what a carrot is. So, when you are young - say a toddler, you have no basis for memory. That is why toddlers (12mos - 3yrs old) will walk around and put everything in their mouths. This is to familiarize themselves with their surroundings and as they learn the language, map the name to the object they have handled.
Once you have associated the name of an object with that object - such as the word Carrot with an orange vegetable, you can then recall those items as they have been stored together in your mind.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
my first memory is of looking at a beautiful bird (parrot or macaw) and wanting to grab it. I was born in Ecuador, and moved from the house where we had the bird when I was one. so I know that I was younger than a year, and probably younger than 8 months since i remember reaching for it even though it was definately out of my grasp.
Another memory comes from getting on a bus or jeep with my mother, and feeling relief and comfort when we sat down - me on my mother's lap. this is a memory I've asked my mother about, and she can't recall any significant time this happened. so I was never TOLD about getting on a bus/jeep. i also remember sucking on a pacifier for the first time (after I was one, probably) and wondering where the liquid (saliva) came from since there was no source.
I remember looking at a magazine or something and seeing that it was 1970 (when I was 6). I can remember stuff from 3 or so but that's the first date that I can remember registering as such.
Obligatory nerdy answer: 8K RAM in my PET computer... That was a fun machine to hack on.
omg right now im so high...
aha i cant really remember anything ever. im kind of a stoner...hm...
but its fun!
My own theory (with nothing to back it up) is that language is required.
Honestly I don't think this has anything to do with it. Language only comes into play when you play back spoken (or read) memories. Actions or events are not remembered by a textual description -- you remember sights, sounds, smells, and other data. Sometimes you remember more details, sometimes less. For example, you may remember spoken words, or you may only remember hearing a soft voice (but not remember what was said).
Early memories are difficult because during that time your brain isn't fully developed. As seems to be established elsewhere in the comments, painful (physically) memories are more likely to stick, even at an early age, but likely this applies to any valuable learning experience.
My earliest memory is probably when I was 3 or 4, taking an empty toilet paper roll and putting it into the circular hole on a Domino sugar box, pretending that the assembly was a camera. I'm not sure why I remember that specifically.
Another interesting note: replaying that memory I can clearly see the word "Domino" on the box -- even though obviously at the time I couldn't read it, nor do I believe I actually stored the information (shapes of letters I have yet to learn, etc). Rather, memories become distorted later, as we tend to fill in missing gaps. I always remember remembering the memory that way (that's a mouth full), but I'm sure at some point it must've been just a "box with hole in front", later recognized for what I later knew it to be.
Deep stuff... but I think my example is similar to the language thing. Certainly you could have remembered some event, without necessarily remembering (or understanding) what may have been spoken at the time. If you (re)learn the language, it's possible that memories may pop up, but I would believe this to be the result of hearing a word/phraze that has a memory associated with it -- NOT the result of your brain suddenly understanding certain data that it has stored.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
my son is three, he can remember things from when he was 6 months old.
i try to re-enforce those memories so they last a long time, he can rant on about the memories constantly.
he surprises other two, if he hasn't seen someone in 6 months, he can tell them where he saw them and everything. i reinforce what he reinforces also.
i think he'll thank me later in life.
Runnin' On Empty
The government has your memories!
I think between 2-3 years of age. I can't imagine being scared or crying over this at an older age. And I can't remember using words or knowing how to talk, only crying. I've never described this memory except to my brother just recently. And I doubt my parents would remembed such an inane thing and tell me about it.
Basically, pop got a new black recliner. The big box was sitting in the kitchen floor. I was sitting on the kitchen table up out of the way. They carried off the recliner and set it up in the living room. I didn't like being left high up on the table all alone and so I got worried and started to cry. My dad came walking back in rather upset and carried me in and set me down in the room near where they were working.
I also have some memories of my brother and his older friends playing "fuel station fill up" or something like that. I was VERY young, but I remember they took me into the basement where they had built a fort with blankets or sheets or something. I've never described this memory to ANYONE but it's hazy on some details but I remember parts of it rather clearly.. again I think I was in the 2-3 year range... I'll leave it up to your imagination who were the fuel station "pumps" and who was getting "filled up" bleh... sickos. But I was too young to know any better, they were older, bigger, I did what I was told.
I know this sounds totally crazy, but I have vivid memories of being born
...everyone's had that experience -- being inside your mother, I mean.
:-D
Bah, that's nothing! I remember going to a company picnic with my father and coming home with my mother! I got you beat by 9 months!
Sorry, couldn't pass that up
why run from Vincenzo?
my parents divorced in August 1977, when I was 3 years and 1 month old. I have one distinct memory of them living together: I got up out of my bed walked into the room where my mom was; she said "Hi, twerp" (her pet name for me). I then turned and saw my dad at the top of the stairs; he had just come out of the shower and had a towel around his waist. He said "Hi bozo!"
I have to suspect that this memory is real because it's not the sort of anecdote that a grownup would tell a child later (I recently mentioned it to both parents and they don't have any memory of it). Maybe the immediate juxtaposition of the two nicknames made it memorable to me at the time.
jf
Explain how I remember things nobody else does until I carefully lay them out then. I can describe people, places, toys, events from before my first birthday that nobody else remembers until I describe them. I can remember sitting in a baby seat watching my parents make out at a drive in theature in a car they sold when I was about six months old. I can remember a certain birthmark my mother was quite upset to know I remembered so vividly given it's location. I've even had relatives dig through old photos and movies I'd never have had a chance to see in order to verify what I described to them. For me such memories are always images. I don't rememeber sounds or sensations or anything like that before I was maybe five. I have a mostly visual memory though so maybe that explains why my visual memories start a lot earlier than other memories.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I've given it much thought over the years, and it's odd, because although I moved from my apartment in the city when I was not yet 5, to the suburbs on Long Island, I can recall tons of memories of my pre-Long Island childhood, from the mundane to not so mundane, as well as many of my thoughts behind them. For instance, I used to sneak out of my room at about 3 or 4 (years old) to watch Star Trek from the hallway when my aunt used to babysit me. Plan in mind and all for being caught (which I actually recollect using), namely "got up for a drink of water and just got there" rubbing my eyes from the brightness they hadnt already adjusted to (20 minutes ago, but they didnt know).
I've even verified many of my early memories with my older relatives (for the ones where they played a part in the event that created the memory).
I dont know how much of it has to do with intelligence or the way certain people's brains' memory functions work, but if it's relevant, I have an IQ of 170, registered. I found that out by accident (my parents did their best to keep it from me so I didnt feel I had something to live up to, their knowledge of it though, does explain many of their expectations of me that seemed to have a mussing explanation, but that's a different story I'll save for the next ridiculous /. post ;-). Glad I didnt know growing up... and still tell no one now that I do (hence the anonymous post) - to me it's just a number.
So, whether it is the way a person is raised, memory, intelligence or some combination thereof, I dunno. It doesnt seem specific to any of those... perhaps it's kind of how you can have different fuels to power the same type of motor (ie: manny combustion engines with virtually no changes can run off propane, natural gas or gasoline... the differences being in exhaust output, and slight differences in power output).
Maybe a memory center that works a certain way, combined with how parents taught a kid contribute to earlier memories... or maybe it's "intelligence" (IQ type), or various combinations creating the same results.
Me
I'm 27 and my earliest memory is from 3.5 years old of my mom bringing my little brother home from the hospital and me holding him for the first time. I do have some other hospital related memories from that time period, but the holding my brother one is the only one that has sufficient details for me to be sure it's not made up based on what I know now.
Christmas, Twin Falls, Idaho...
Talk to them about their memories, so they start traversing those paths. It'll strengthen them. Then if they grow up and start caring about their early history, they'll have more to go on.
..." - but I'm weird that way.
I'll turn 25 soon, and recently I've started a personal project to map certain free-floating events in my head to various dates. I've been done this with the help of people that knew me in the early days, along with various events - dates TV shows ran, when movies were released, you name it.
One of the most annoying things is that I'm losing things I know I once remembered. The data is still there someplace, but my pointer to it is too weak to come up by itself. My mom was telling me about a story where I fell into a hot tub when I was 3 or so. At that point, I remembered talking about it a few years later - around 6 or 7, maybe.
Yeah, I remember remembering things sometimes - "I was here, with so and so, and we talked about that time
The trouble is, 6-7 year olds generally don't get introspective and lay down notes about their own past. It took a long time for me to dig it up again, and without her input I would still be "missing".
Heck, use technology. Put them on camera, use an audio recorder, or have them dictate to you. Make a couple of copies and keep them in a safe place until the kid grows up and starts caring about such things.
This entire thing sounds like bullshit.
If it were true it is a shame the round was either a dud or already fired.
You sound like the shallow end of the gene pool buddy.
I remember going into setup on an old 386, hitting random buttons, then suddenly 3.1 wouldnt boot. Maybe it had something to do with all those scrolling filenames a minute ago?
:)
Subconcious is the swap file and to prove my theory, remember back really hard. Do you feel standard logical thoughts of happenings, or do you feel random distorted emotional fragments such as pain, and hate ( the most common in young young children ). The day to day mind is what we know, study, and in itself is a great feat of biological and chemical machinery. The subconcious, since it holds more power, is like black matter. Sucking things in, a huge density, and its known to exist but you cant plop some down on the kitchen table.
seriously, the reason why we cant remember such long ago occurences except in rare quantities is that a brain is like a window$ computer (dont flame me read on) after your ram is eaten up, stuff dumps into the swap file, and ram is eaten up fast with all those processes.
random ramblings whatever, im tired im going for coffee, if i dont fall asleep and wake up with qwerty embedded in my skull
-dooberdragon
If its not broken dont fix it... break it then fix it.
I remember a few minor traumatic incidents at
age 2.
Rolling down a hill backwards on my tricycle.
Getting sand thrown in my face.
These are fleeting glimpses - very blurry, but have been confirmed by my mom.
My long term memory probably started around 5, I remember tons of stuff from then onwards.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
i don't really remember much from my early childhood, but i never was good at remembering anything other than numbers.
but i do vaguely remember what happened a few months from now....
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
I also have vague memories of hating being weighed in a baby scale at the hospital, but in that case, I may simply remember the memory of being glad not to be weighed in it when I saw it when I was grown up enough to be weighed in a "adult" scale...
From reading some of the responses, it appears as if many people (the majority) here can recall very early periods in their lives. If you were to gather demographical data about all of the slashdot users, would you find that a majority of us are involved in one particular field or type of job? Did we all have similar experiences at birth or during gestation that could explain the ability to recall such early memories?
I have talked to some people about their earliest memories and most cannot remember anything before they were five years old.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
During our time in the womb and in the few years after birth the brain literally explodes with new connections. Millions are produced that will never be used. As we learn and develop something on the order or 90% of all connections we have when we are two are eliminated through disuse. The pathways that we use are reinforced and the pathways that are not used go away.
The ability to remember is contingent upon a working memory system, but the basics of the memory system are not readily implemented until years after we are born. There is also a tradeoff between neural plasticity and memory. Our brains can either be very flexible or hold a lot of memories, but not both. This is why we can get brain injuries and adapt when we are young, but brain injuries when we are older are harder to recover from.
Or so I am told.
I remember being taken to the babysitter on
the other side of the courtyard and not being
happy about it.
I'm 43.
memory is always the first thing to go.
Did I tell that joke right?
I was very sick nad remember mom, grandma and aunt all worried. I asked later and found out that I was 11 months old.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
... MEMORY HAS YOU.
I remeber having to take a nap. I still hate naps.
4 megs of RAM on my first computer a 486DX/33, fall of 1990. Still have some of the documentation so I know it's not a false memory. Hope this helps.
My first memory is from when I was about 14 months old. I was in the baby carriage. I remember my father telling me it was the fourth of July (would have been 1963). I got a blue gum ball from a gum ball machine. I just played with it. It wasn't food and I did not have the teeth to chew it. What I probably did not have were any molars. I could talk because I had some front teeth. I had been talking since I was nine months old.
I cut teeth very late. I preferred soft foods for a long time as a little kid because I became self-aware before I had all my teeth.
The other thing I was very aware of was that everything was just way too big for me. I could not get beyond the first bar on the monkey bars (I can still feel how this hurts today). I fell in the toilet at the world's fair (1964) when I was two.
Most of my early memories are about language. I remember lacking words for a lot of things and naming everything I could name. B&M baked beans were "little brown beans." My mother's patchwork woolen cap was the "ef-fou-fa-tah" (It looked like an ef-fou-fa-tah). The stuffed polygonal ball with polka dots was called the "rag-a-buff ball." I still have my rag-a-buff ball.
I can remember a great argument with my father about the old Mobile gas signs. They were of a red pegasus. I called Mobile gas "flying red dragon." My father said the animal in question was not a horse. I said that it had to be a dragon because horses did not fly.
I think I was at a loss for words until I was about eight years old. No matter how many of them I learned, it was always hard to describe things that were important.
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your earliest memory is YOU!
I don't buy that theory, but it is similar to another theory. There is a similar theory about prescient dreams. Throughout my life I have experienced dreams that have later "come true". That is, I have dreamed of events and later (weeks, to months to years) have witnessed the events that I dreamt about so long ago.
I never think about these dreams between when I experience them and when the event actually occurs. Nothing sets the dreams apart from "normal" dreams and I go on with life oblivious to the possiblity that I may know a small part of my future. There is no knowledge after I wake up that what I dreamt actually will come true.
What has been proposed as one theory to explain this "deja vu" is that the signals being received by the brain at the moment of the "deja vu" get mis-routed or routed twice. That is, the signals are perceived as a memory AND as a current event AT THE SAME TIME.
As I have grown older (now 33), this happens very infrequently and I wonder if now that my brain has grown and matured, maybe my brain doesn't get "confused" as easily and all the signals get properly routed.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
You Americans? Well, well, well, ole Anonymous Coward likes a good stereotype. Keep up the good work and keep your mind closed or life will just confuse you. All Americans own guns and are irresponsible owners and think life is a movie, etc, etc, etc, who else do you stereo type?
Well here are a few of my earliest.
At about 2 years old, my mom tried to make me eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (This is how I found out that I am allergic to peanuts). I almost died, and she insists that this happened at a much later time and it wasn't her, but my grandparents that made me eat it. What I do remember is that my mother was not obese, and I did not have a sister at the time. All this talk about the brain not being developed enough... well I disagree. If something is traumatic enough, you'll have memories about it. Maybe not birth, I assume that that's always traumatic for a baby and I don't remember that at all. I'm just pissed that my parents continue to lie about it. My dad wasn't even there, and he's trying to convince me what happened. Why can't they just admit it, and be like... yeah we didn't know... sorry. But NO, they have to fucking lie about it. They deny that my claims that the smell was making me sick didn't stop them. My mom claims that she never forced me to eat anything. YEAH AFTER THAT! I remember not being able to breathe, and going to the hospital. That's it.
Next comes picking weeds in the yard with my mom. She was really fat wearing a yellow jacket. I now know that she must have been pregnant, but I didn't think that at the time. I must have been about 2.75. I didn't know a damn thing about what pregnant was at the time.
I then remember being at the hospital when my sister was born, and getting a special pair of hospital pants. I remember my dad holding up my little sister from a distance... maybe 15 feet away. Down a hallway. I was told later on that the special pants were because I had pissed in my own pants. Apparently I was pretty excited about having a little sister.
She was born 2 weeks before my third birthday.
I don't have good memories until I'm maybe 4 or so. The weed picking thing is a weird one to have in there, but it's the only one that wasn't from a traumatic experience.
~D
My earliest memories are of an easter-egg race the week of my second birthday and according to my mom, a slightly earlier trip to the snow when I was almost 2. I remember the larger children having a much easier time finding the easter eggs and running, and being frustrated that I couldn't run very fast. I also remember the trip to the snow, which my mother insists was before my second birthday, because it was a trip with my father whom she soon divorced. The snow trip was a subject that I brought up with my mother, and I described the red snow disc that we went sledding on. That memory is quite vivid still (now 33 years later).
What I've always found is astonishing is my memory from when I was about 3. (I'm not 100% sure about this age but it was certainly not later than 3-4 years).
I remember lying in a crib and my mom gave me a doll . I threw it out every time because I felt very strongly that dolls were only for girls and I didn't want my brother and sister to think I was a girl.
It always seemed weird to me how I could have feelings like that having never experienced taunting or anything of that sort.
There used to be a wall between in my parents' house between the living room and the dining room. In '78 or '79 (probably during the summer) my dad removed that wall. I remember him getting ready to remove the wall, and then after it was knocked out, I drove my Big Wheel back and forth through it, in order to test the hole as it were.
This (the wall removal, not the hole testing) was part of larger project of adding an addition to the house. I remember him plastering over nails in the plaster board in the living room, and painting my parents' bedroom.
I guess I remember it because it was dramatic. The house in which I lived my entire life was changed forever.
I have a split: I have vague recollections of earlier times, but they were third-person: I could see myself, so I suspect they are apocryphal. My earliest memory of me-being-me, from behind my own eyes, was of a dark and stormy night. I was sitting in the car with the mother of a friend of mine, and we were 'just chatting' about nothing in particular. She was the first person to talk to 'me', the person I was becoming: not as a student, or another schoolkid, or as someone's son, but she was speaking to me. I came to appreciate this memory a few years later, and it has heartened me ever since. I have learned to interact with people the same way as she interacted with me.
I as born in January 1972. I remember the morning my younger sister was born (when I was 2 years old), and I with my brothers and sister going to see the new born baby. Some one commented about the baby and someone else replied. There was this neighbour lady visiting us.
:-)
For a long time I was under the impression that the new baby was brought in by the neighbour lady and given to my mother, untill one day my elder brother corrected me
yAthum UrE yAvarum kELir All the places are our place, everybody is our kin. (A Tamil Poet - 2000 years ago)
Some of the folks who study language development argue that in acquiring language skills, our brains radically modify the way in which we encode our memories -- thus the connection between lost memories and the onset of speech. Those early memories may still be there; we just don't remember how to remember them.
Of course, you don't need language to have a memory -- some episode from your life, a smell, a feel, a sound: none of those need to be put into language until you want to tell someone else about them ... and then, quite often, you can't find adequate words.
The toughest thing about it all is that until we develop some technology (and the scientific know-how behind it) to "read" memories directly from someone's gray matter, there is little anyone can do to provide any direct evidence on any of this. If anything is "true" about our current knowledge of the nervous system, its that science continually underestimates what our brains are capable of doing. This holds both physiologically (as with the belief that nerve cells stop growing after a certain age) and psychologically (it seems that the greatest limit to the level of intelligence an infant can demonstrate is the imagination of the experimenter in finding a way to measure intelligence appropriately).
So, those memories may still be there. Others who claim to remember further back than you may be responding to suggestive learning, or they may have an "abnormal" ability to recall preverbal memories, just as some people have abnormal "photographic" memories or can memorize pi to a zillion places.
...are of Mommas mammaries :P
"It is essential that justice be done
I have a strange memory which I'm sure stretches right back to when I was still in the womb.
It's not a memory of any event, just a tactile sense accompanied by a very low level of lighting and warmth.
I can recall this "memory" being quite vivid until the age of 8 or 9 and since then it has gradually weakened with time -- but on some very rare occasions it all comes flooding back for a brief instant -- just a second or two.
It's weird -- but incredibly comforting and soothing.
Other than that, my earliest recollection is from before I was walking. I can recall sitting on the driveway looking up at an old two story house. I never told my parents about this until I was about 13 and they told me that it must have been a house they rented for just a couple of months about 9 months after I was born. They'd never mentioned it to me and once again it wasn't a particularly memorable event that would have been recounted by them for any reason so I suspect it's a real memory.
Oh, great, 657 posts ahead of me!
The big question (for me) goes unanswered: Why do we consider it normal to have blacked out (a sign of trauma or psychosis) not a weekend but our entire childhood before about three years?
Having had a near-death experience and being reborn afterward, I found my entire childhood laid out before me once again. I can even remember my grandmother teaching my mother how to change my diaper. I felt very secure with her holding me upside down by the ankles while she shook baby powder on my rear. I wanted to be able to see her to recognize her next time....(Infants cannot see for the first few days/weeks.)
I remember seeing red as a color first, and wondered why hot things were not uniformly colored this shade to warn us.
I remember sore knees and hands from crawling on the rough rugs of our home.
And I can remember remembering what it was like before I was born -- a little like remembering you dreamt this morning, but not being able to remember the CONTENTS of the dream....
"I am constantly awaiting a renaissance of wonder." -- Ferlinghetti
Memories Forget You!
You can only remember what you understand. Even if you don't understand something you can remember understanding that you didn't understand what a big red circle was, for example.
There was a study that started in the early 80's about "flash bulb" memories. These are the kind of memories that seem burned into ones mind after a terrible tragedy like the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, or the Challenger Explosion.
The researchers polled an entire undergraduate class of several hundred students the day after the Challenger Explosion for details on how they learned of the Challenger disaster. The modal response was "someone told me in the dorm" (or some such). They called as many as they could find of these students a few years later to see what they now gave for an answer to the question.
It turns out that many many people now recalled vivid, highly confident, flashbuld type memories of when they heard about the Challenge explosion that contradicted what they had said the day after the incident. Many were difficult to convince that there memory had been changed.
discuss...
In Back To The Future, in the theaters, did it end with "To Be Continued"?
:(
I know a lot of people, including myself, who truly remember seeing it in the theaters but others who don't. The writer claims that the "To Be Continued" was added in the video. It was taken out of the dvds.
However, I truly remember seeing it and remember about being excited about the sequel after exiting the theater due to seeing the "To Be Continued." Does anyone distinctly remember this as well?
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Ever since I was young, I've had a wierd ability to remember almost everything, very well... a photographic memory (I dont know anyone that doesnt remember like that.. If I say "elephant" you'll get a picture of one in your head, not a picture of the word)... anyhow, I dont know this sounds wierd, but I remember crawling across the floor when I was about 8 months old (I was walking by 9-10 months), all my aunts were there. I also remember my mother rocking me to sleep beside my crib. I watched a program on discovery channel a few years back that said that they can only theorize how old you must be to have a memory, and by these psychologists (I can't remember where they were from) figure around 5 months of age... everything prior is instinct... An interesting subject either way...
It might sound very weird, and actually is pretty freaky, but all my memories are in the 3rd person, ie, when i remember taking a trip with my family at the age of 7, I look back on it not through first person of me sitting in the car, but as a 3rd person looking at myself and the rest of the scene. Is this common?
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It is commonly accepted, today, that Deja Vu is an instance of one side of the brain being out of synch with the other. Thats all I can remember from my Psych series. In a way we have two brains. If from an early age a child loses half their brain they can still function and even lead a normal life, and I mean completely normal. There have been cases of people with one missing being doctors, pianists, etc. just fyi, the cavity will fill with fluid or depending on the circumstances of injury or illness, it can be concave.
How true ARE our memories? When we run out, does our mind just "make" some?
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I was 9 years old when the Challenger disaster occoured. I look at it as one of those "Where were you when" events you listed above. Even though that's a cloudy time in my life (blame the pot if you want), that moment sticks in my head like my earlier post about a dream.
At the exact moment the Challenger exploded, none of us kids knew what was going on. We were oblivious to the day being anything but normal, sitting in lunch. It was pizzeria day, with green beans and one of those "something suspended in gelatine" deals. It was the year they finally gave us a choice with chocolate milk versus white milk (and the first year I had to wear glasses on a permanent basis). Yep, an exact memory of the menu we had that day, even though I packed my lunch that day. Imagine that.
Before we could all finish, our teacher (who was a lunch monitor on the other side of the cafeteria) Mrs. Kitchen said for all of us to take our trays (or in my case, paper bag) to the trash cans. We had no clue why, as none of us were finished. We took our stuff up to the cans (there were three for a lunch room of about 200 kids) in one large mass instead of in orderly lines like usual, and I remember sticking a pudding cup and spoon I had in my hoodie pocket. There was no way I was tossing that. After we had done that, we were quickly lined up as usual and filed out of the cafeteria in order of grade. Since there was a split lunch period (early for 1-3 (I was in grade 2), later for 4-6), it went from 3 to 1.
By this point, noone had told us why.
Mrs. Kitchen led us back to our classroom, where we first noticed the worried look on her face. She began to fiddle with the TV (being an underfunded small-town school, we had crappy boob tubes), bitching at it to warm up and give us a picture. She tuned it to CBS (channel 10 here at the time), and what we saw took a minute or two to digest. There was the cloud of smoke and two smokey serpents emerging from it as they hung in the sky, what was left of the Shuttle Challenger and her crew. After a few minutes of Dan Rather saying what had happened and how horrible a tragedy it was, they finally showed the full replay from liftoff to the final "go for throttle up" message. By then, we were all in complete shock. We watched as the Shuttle exploded in a huge ball of fire, and close-up, no less.
Now granted, at 9 years old, a kid most likely has a pretty good memory structure in place, so it's no surprise that I remember that. But to have such detail fused into your head and be able to recall it plain as day 16 years later is pretty remarkable. To be able to remember the lunch menu, even though I bagged it that day, and to remember the chaos of the lunch room, the shock of the images being shown to us...
When a person's mind is able to comprehend the historical significance of an event and have memories like that, one has to assume that the sheer shock of the whole event has alot to do with the memory process at that moment. Like today's children will remember the horror of 9-11, like my parents still recall the day JFK was shot, and the way my grandfather used to tell me how he remembered the dropping of bombs on Japan in '45 - Events like that bore themselves their own detailed niche in someone's grey matter. And those memories never go away. Everything immediately before, during, and immediately after the event in question is associated right along with it by default, letting you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when the event happened.
I'm no neurological scientist (I'm a humble digital designer), so that's the best I can come up with. Anyone have any other thoughts on the matter?
While I'm at it, I might as well recount where I was when 9-11 hit. When the first tower was hit, I was walking out the door to go down to my car and head to a job interview. By the time all the planes had run their courses, I was arriving at the interview. When I walked in, my then would-be boss came in and simply said he'd heard that a plane went down near the Pentagon. Nothing unusual, I thought, since accidents do happen, and a few nuts had crashed planes near government buildings before. The interview went fine, and I got the job. I was driving home, jamming out to some Classic Rock tunes on the CD player (I do remember hearing Pink Floyd's "Money" in there somewhere), and didn't give a second thought to the news that my boss had given me.
When I walked in the front door of my house, my Mom was as white as a ghost, and had the door open before I was even on the front porch. "Eric," she said, "you know the World Trade Towers?" "Yeah Mom, what about them?" "Eric, they're gone." "Say that again?" "They're gone." From there, I was glued to the Fox News Channel for the next few days, not to mention extremely pissed off. Any details of the rest of that day were forever lost to that anger. I was more concerned with wanting heads to roll than I was remembering petty details about my own life.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
The discussion in this thread just goes to show the group mentality of the slashdot crowd... "I remember being born" ... "I remember when I was 1!" ... "I'm a genius, but society doesn't recognize it!" ... All lame excuses.
i've been told the story by my parents of how, when i was 1 or 2, i made a bridge between our couch and rocking chair out of a blanket, and how i tried to crawl across it only to fall to my doom and bust my face open on the end table. I dont remember ever constructing this bridge but i do remember vividly being in the emergency room, bright lights, people restraining me and eventualy covering my face with a cloth of some sort (like in ER or something where they cover up everything but the wound?). Its not like i remember when it happened exactly, it has no 'time stamp' to speak of in my mind, it exits though for whatever reason. beyond the memories i can remember in full are in preschool (3 or 4 years old).
while i was self aware and all that during that time, at age 6 or 7 i was playing at my god parents house, and all of a sudden, it was as if a different state of consciousness was atained. not like enlightenment, but i remember standing there and suddenly feeling strange and sort of disoriented. it all passed sort of quickly but i remember having alot of questions as far as current events and what not after that.
i duno, its late and i could very well be talking out of my ass
I remember a similar experience. All of us learned to swim at an early age so I must have been very young. I remember sitting on the edge of the pool and being dared by one of my brothers (this was the beginning of a trend) to leeeeeen a little farther forward. The next thing I remember is a lot of bubbles. I am surprised still at how long it seemed while I was sitting on the bottom. I rember sitting on the bottom of the pool and wondering what to do next. There was not an opportunity to panic since my father must have immediately followed me in (fully clothed) and pulled me out. I remember his face (angry/worried) as he was swimming down to me. The event must have occured in the space of a minute but seemed much longer. This is definitely a memory of the actual event. lol
memory is of the hospital in which I was born. I have heard of people who claim to remember before they were born.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I remember going to a picnic with my father and going home with my mother.
I remember one thing from what I guess to be before I was one year old. I stuck my toung in a wall socket. Its all I remember from that far back but I remember it pretty vividley. Maybe for obvious reasions? Anyway, My earliest memories after that start at about age 4.
I can remember things from before I was one year old. No specific memories from way back then, but I remember where I lived and many details about it. I am now 24 and recently I was wondering if I actually remembered that stuff. I described it to my mom and she confirmed that I was correct. We moved when I was under a year old, so that puts a timestamp on that.
I do have specific memories starting before age two though. I can remember my dad preparing a bottle for me and I can remember doing many typical silly things.
I have a woman and money. Life is good.
...I was actually talking to my family about this several years ago. One of first memories was seeing a man in scuba gear in a tank with an octopus. When my mother heard the story she was amazed and told me that when I was about 6 months old my parents went to such a place.
my brother arriving on the scene. i remember seeing him in his incubator, next to my mum, in hospital. i recall looking suspiciously at this little pink thing in a box and wondering who/what it was...
most of my other memories from then until about 5 are either hazy impressions or plain non-existent, but i have a good recollection of the things in my life from thn on...
Anyone arrogant enough to suggest that someone else's memory is false while maintaining confidence in their own perception truly has my pity. All memory consists of dynamic processes that are extremely variant from person to person. Your 'now' is a product of your consciousness alone. Invalidating the process of someone else's consciousness is ultimately equivalent to questioning the authenticity of your own. In this lies the way to madness.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Also, a child's sense of time is really out of whack - remember how long summer seemed to be?
As I have gotten older, I have noticed that days, weeks and months all seem shorter and shorter. However, I don't think it's "out of whack" at all. I have a theory about this (and I'm pretty sure I didn't just hear it somewhere.) It's all about frame of reference:
Assume you were born at the very end of summer. When you turn 1, your first summer has just ended. That summer was 25% of your total life up to that point. When you turn 10, another summer has just ended. That summer was 2.5% of your life. When you turn 20, the preceding summer was only 1.25% of your life. When you turn 40, the summer that just ended was only 0.75% of your whole life up to that point.
Based upon this, we can see that summer when you're 10 seems four times longer than summer when you're 40.
As time goes by and you get older and older, any given period of time is a smaller percentage of your life (to that point) than any equal-length period of time that came before it. Your frame of reference is the only tool you have to judge how long a summer should be, how long it should "feel". Therefore, as you age, summers seem shorter, days go faster, etc.
I don't know if I explained it very well, but it makes sense to me.
Mr. Spleen
E.g., I can remember a fair amount of what I did today. I can remember a fair amount for yesterday. However, if I try to go back day by day...I can only get back a week or so, and then I'm out of the realm of actual memory, and more into the realm of deducing....that is, I don't recall doing anything unusual two weeks ago, so I deduce I must have done my normal stuff.
So, I've only got, it seems, a week or two of memory going back. Or, at least, I've only got a week or two organized so that it can be placed in sequence.
How about the rest of you?
Finally an informed post. 400 of the 500 posts seem to be about how so-and-so "remembers" how they are able to recall their first steps with details down to the brand of shoes. Wait, it's definatly not the anecdotes they've heard from ages 3-8, it's definatly the fact that their brains are incorporating a story into their long term brains.
GET IT STRAIGHT: Brains are not like computers. We don't just have a download directory that archives all of our memories. Our memories are colored by the 1's and 0's that we've recieved from every other input from age 0 to whatever.
Not much to do with the subject directly, but dextromethorphan makes me feel like ive lost my age. The higher the dose I take, the younger and free-er i feel. It probably has to do with the fact that it separates your mind from your body. I suggest you check it out. www.dextroverse.org
Psychologists have often wondered about whether there is a relationship between childhood memories and language, noting that people rarely have memories before acquiring the ability to use language.
The thinking was that language helps the child to structure the memory thought and also to store it into permanent memory more fully.
On another note, childhood memories are often influenced by memories of adults and memory aids such as videos and photographs. An individual may not have memories about a specific event, but when showed a photograph might be able to link the photograph to a certain vague sensation which resulted from the memory. Or when told by an adult about a certain dramatic incident, might convince himself that he actually remembers the incident.
A few interesting conclusion about the language/memory thing. First, children under 3 or 4 are unlikely to remember anything. Second, people will special disabilities that impair language development might also suffer from significant gaps in memory (this would be a good hypothesis for a linguistic experiment), that human thought process is intimately linked to language and without language, there is no thought.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
From the next couple of years I've got some sequential memories which I'm really sure are genuine personal memories (i.e. they're not things I've been told about and no-one else would have remembered them to be able to tell me about them).
I've discussed early memory with a number of people and I think it's very variable. Some people remember stuff from much earlier than others.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
PS I remember my 3rd birthday party (significant event) very clearly (or so I believe).
I think one of my very earliest, and it really is only more of a still picture than an entire event, is the pram that my mum used to push me and my sister around in. I am almsot exactly 2 years older than her, and it had some weird seat contraption where should be in the pram, and I sat on this seat that went above it - rather an old fashioned design from what I remeber.
I must have been about 2 or 2 and a 1/2 years, and my sister had just been born.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I'm 15, and my earliest memory was in my 'old house' where I lived before my family moved a few blocks away, I think I was about 2 at the time of my earliest memories.
I experienced a similar situation.
Eliminate the tunnel idea. It's what happens when your vision isn't there (dark) then suddenly you just give up and let the situation wash over you, relax, and more often than not, open your eyes.
Not that I spent the entire time documenting what happened to myself consciously.
Well I don't wanna point myself as a wonderchild but my earliest memory record is one of the Moon landings being shown on TV. Somehow this got fixed in my memory. As I recorded the room where this occured, later my father told me that this was the old home where we lived. We moved from that house when I was nearly on my two years. A little later I remember the night before my second birthday when a paper plant blowed up and my village was covered by a chlorine cloud. I remember my father holding me up, lots of shadows around, probably people and a terrible lack of air. Of course I didn't give a hint about what was going on. But later I discovered that my asthma crisis were due to that story.
In general I have a good picture of my childhood since my three years old.
It is curious to note that, among my brothers, the record varies a lot. My sister has also some good records of events that have happened before she was 4 years old. Another brother has some fantastic memory, bu he does not remember of things that happened before he was 5-6 years old. Another one carries some very fragmentary records of his life before he was 7-8 years, but one of them is surely before he was two.
As far as I know,based upon on my brother's and personal records, memory in the whole remains "alive" due to some critical, radical or traumatic circumstances. But it also can vanish. Till now I have a very fragmentary record of what have happened to me somewhere in the end of 1988. It was a very hard time and it was a terrible stress to me physically and psychologically. Frankly, I am sure that I have a whole month wiped out of my brain.
Among several of my friends, I have seen also wonderful things. One guy remembered his stay in the Red Sea when he was in his 4-5 years. Another one can't remember details of 5-6 years ago, bu he his terribly detailed on something that happened yesterday. Another can remember things to the very detail, as he recorded every important event as a picture.
Sincerly, I believe that the brain is a terrible wonder machine that still has lots of things to tell us.
I have exactly the right kind of memories for the kind of person I am, which is a computer programmer.
Funny, though, seems like I'm a crack shot and a kung fu expert having had no training whatsoever. And I get these headaches!
All things in moderation; including moderation
My experience is that people's earliest memories tend to usually be traumatic ones. My first memory is of the sheer pain of discovering just how hot the clothes iron was at the age of three. I reached up and touched it when my mother put it down for a moment. I am suspicious of any further details that I "remember", but I clearly remember the exact appearance of that iron. I hated and feared that thing for the rest of the time my family owned it.
Similarly, the few people whom I have spoken to about their early memories tend to recall traumatic memories, specifically intense pain. Like the first time they fell down and scraped a knee.
Since pain is a sensation that cannot be sensed by others, memories of the nature of the pain felt are less likely to have been implanted by subsequent descriptions of the event. If someone can describe that the pain they felt was piercing, throbbing, or came in waves, it is (to me) more likely to be real rather than the result of incorporating later experiences into memory.
I study adults who have been adopted from a foreign country at an average age of 5.5. Both behavioral and brain imaging data suggest that they have indeed completely forgotten their first language.For more info, one can read the paper (to be published in Cerebral Cortex) at: http://www.unicog.org/publications/Pallier_forgott enlanguage.pdf
Though I don't have any hard data about odors and smell, anecdotal evidence suggests that the adoptees who go back to their country of origin recognize some of them.
Christophe Pallier
I was standing up in my crib (with the help of the side rales)and my Mother was across on the other side of the front room. She just came out from (some other room I guess) and about half way across the room I seen her fall, she had broken something, I think it was her nose. You see my Mother had an elergic reaction to a bee sting and when she was young she was stong on the bottom of her left foot and from then on most of her left side just did not work. I am 45 years old now and I still remember that.. Shock does wonders to a memory..
In the first place the hippocampus (instrumental in the deposition of long-term memory) is not properly formed until about three years of age so it's thought that this will prevent formation of long-term episodic memory (memory of events) as is it understood in adults.
Secondly, both episodic memory and declarative memory (memory of things) depend upon having a cognitive framework within which they can be placed. It takes time and experience for that framework to get assembled and of course you can only remember things that you can understand (either properly or improperly) in some way. Things you can't make any sense out of at all will be remembered only vaguely, if at all.
I often joke that I was rebooted when I was 6. All volatile memory from before that is gone.
See subject
My earliest memory is of running away from my mom on a visit to the stately home of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, England.
I sneaked through a door and threw myself into a chair and started sulking over something trivial, as small children do. Anyway I wasn't alone in the room and distinctly remember this man saying "Well hello there young man! What can I do for you today?" and smiling at me.
It was many years down the line that my mom told me I had actually wandered into the private residence and that the man was actually the Duke of Devonshire.
I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast.. :s (don't ask)
Other from that I think my earliest memory would be when I was 5 or something and fell through the roof of a green house
The earliest things I can remember were around the time when my mom was pregnant with my little brother, so I was about 7 then. I remember my dad bought me the lego space shuttle set and he bought my older brother Space Quest 3. Man, that game kicked ass.
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and when the oil age ends it will not be for lack of oil. --Bjorn Lomberg
This really is a fascinating discussion, but I'm not so sure we can say what about our memories is real and what's...exaggerated (wrong word).
Personally, I can't remember anything about childhood when people ask me. "what's your earliest memory" doesn't pull anything. However, I could be driving around my hometown and see a house where I used to play with a friend who later moved to Cincinatti, a house with a HUGE dog, a box of toys and a dead VW bug on blocks in the yard. It's not the earliest, it's just the most relevant to the setting.
I agree with a previous poster who said that memory is like history - what's true can only be discerned in hindsight and it keeps changing as we gather new input (new memories). Whenever you remember something it's always jaded by the fact that you're not then, you're now thinking about then. Mentally-speaking you're a generation or three removed from the event and despite how vividly you remember, it's filtered.
I should also mention that I have an amazingly accurate but equally flighty memory - I can remember song lyrics with one listen but can't memorize tezt at all. I can remember the order of colors of my elementary school's jungle-gym dome but can't remember how I know I love pecan pie.
mmm. That made little sense. All i'm saying is that as fascinating a concept as first memories are I think the principle is flawed - you're having the memory NOW, which means it can't possibly be exactly as it was THEN.
Triv
I recall my dad holding me in his arms -still I couldn't walk- in our kitchen while warming milk in a saucepan (presumably for me to drink but I don't know that for sure.) To be extra convincing I have to add that my dad died when I was two years old so the recollection is in any way "early".
Short after birth I got hit by a severe pneumonia that -as my mom says- almost killed me. I was fed pure oxygen -of which we had plenty as our family used to have an industrial gas redistribution company- for a month so here's an instance of oxygen/early memory.
I also recall having diner with the complete family (damned good chicken my mom used to make.)
I still know fairly accurate how the furniture in our house used to look like I lived mostly with my grandparents and my mom sold the house when I was five years of age.) I could draw a map.
Personally, I remember numerous incidents before my second birthday. As I am told that I acquired language at an extremely early age, I guess - in my case at least - the model holds true. However, what happens to those unfortunate persons who never fully acquire language ?
/nga E 28 03 S 25 57
and the earliest i can get is about 2 years old.
how can i be sure? I know when I busted a toy.this was in a new house we shifted to. I also remember playing with the intact toy on a linoleum-like patterned surface, which my parents confirmed we had in our house.
Funny thing about memories--I too thought I didn't have any early memories. When my son was born, each stage of his development after infancy has brought back a flood of memories from my early childhood. And they weren't related to language--they were sensory memories. The visions, smells, sounds, tastes, even some of the textures of my childhood. The strongest seem to be visual.
About language-I'm good with French, German, and Old English (think Beowulf). My personal experience and other's research suggests that the way a person thinks is dependent partly on what language they speak. Language my have something to do with memory as well, who knows.
...and I remember the year was 1966, because we received a telephone call that we had a new cousin. I remember this because I was still upset about seeing a movie called "They Saved Hitler's Brain" and I spoke at my new cousin's eighteenth birthday party in 1984 and my parents were embarrassed that they had ever seen such a movie, much less taken my five year old ass there.
This is interesting. I remember my first birthday too. I had an accident, I fell down the strais. But I remember the whole day! Because none I know have such early memories I have started to believe it was because of the accident I can remember this day. When I thought of it later I knew it was my birthday because I remembered the gifts I got, and the guests. But I did not know until my mother told me later that it was on my first birthday I fell down the stairs. Other than good memory, I have no injuries from the event.
Nah, that's garbage. I can clearly remember being in preschool. I just did calculations based on what years I was in what grades and traced my age at the time to be three years of age. I remember details about doing things in preschool that my parents would not have known about. I remember being shown an objet d'art I created when I was two, and not recognizing it or remembering that I'd done it. I remember having toys, but at the time I couldn't remember receiving them - I only knew they were familiar. I remember a trip to a ski lodge and a number of details of the trip that no one would have mentioned, such as the color of the panelling in the staircase.
See, it's like this. Psychologists used to claim that people couldn't really recall smells, and that everyone dreams in black and white. I can recall smells and I have several recollections of dreams about vividly colorful objects. These people are really just projecting their own personal deficiencies onto everyone else.
Is there an issue here? Don't get angry, we all know NH is full of fat, toothless, balding wonders like yourself. So please refrain from threatening responses, you could get yourself in a whole lot of trouble. I am feeling threatened.
I remember, when I was about three, discovering an instance of Epimenides' lying-paradox.
Epimenides, being a Cretan himself, said: "Cretans always lie". But is he speaking the truth? In that case, Cretans don't always lie, and the statement is false, and he is lying. It is similar to Russell's paradox with sets, or to Cantor's diagonal argument.
So I was only three, a little brat, but a morally conscious brat. And then and there, I made a decision never to lie ever in my life (haven't been able to keep that decision completely, though). And I say to my Dad, who is standing nearby, "I will never lie in my life." And then I add hastily - "I didn't lie just now".
I remember then feeling like I had to corroborate that statement denying any falsehood, which statement would then also have to be corroborated, and I felt - as only a three year-old's little brain can feel it - the weight of an infinite regression. It had to be curtailed somehow.
Apart from Epimenides' paradox, it was basically discovering one of the most fundamental things necessary for social interaction, namely trust. I couldn't prove that I didn't just lie, but I hoped my Dad would trust me.
Ulrik Petersen
Database engine for analyzed or annotated text
One hundred years ago, the psychological/medical authorities "knew" that masturbation caused insanity, to name only its least unpleasant consequence.
Fifty years ago, the authorities "knew" that healthy women had orgasms after brief bouts of missionary-position intercourse--and that autism was caused by cold, rejecting parents.
Twenty-five years ago, the authorities "knew" that smallpox would never again be a threat and it was a great idea to stop vaccinating kids against it. American doctors also "knew" that kids should all sleep on their stomachs to prevent inhaling their own spit, a brilliant scheme that resulted in an unprecedented toll of crib deaths by smothering.
Who knows which of the many things authorities now "know" are going to look equally outrageous in the future? I'm not saying all or even most textbook ideas are dumb--just that human error and arrogance can sometimes sabotage even the smartest of us.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
... just not in any sensible order.
I can remember when I was probably about two climing up some steps at the back of the house. Our house at the time was originally two flats, one above the other, but we joined them together and blocked off the upstairs door, turning what used to be the hall of the upstairs flat into a bathroom. Anyway, I remember talking to my Mum through the door, and getting a row for climbing the steps - there wasn't a handrail and they were about 10 feet high at the top.
I can also remember moving stuff out of the house, while the new family were moving in - they were desperate to get moved in as soon as possible, and we'd had a lot of problems getting stuff moved into our new house. What else...? Oh, I remember going to visit a friend of my parents, possibly called "Jim" but I'm not sure. He had a really cool house with polished wooden floors and pine stairs from the living room - very 70s (strange that... this is ~1975). My Dad had gone over to fix his car, and I was sitting in the living room playing with a toy helicopter.
I remember seeing a bright light, and then somebody slapped me.
My first memory is from about 2 years of age. Exactly 2 give or take a few weeks. There was a giant hailstorm. I remember asking my father if the windows were going to break and whether we were going to be ok... I was pretty scared.
I like the idea that language is required. This would fit nicely with the theories of the Russian psycologist, Vygotsky. He suggested roughly that all thought is mediated through language. People have even argued that purely visual memory is linguistic in nature, but I have not really read that literature at all. I would suggest you are onto something here. I skimmed through the posts. There does not seem to be anyone who has clearly pre spoken language memories.
As for my first memories, I only have fragments of when I was one. I remember Christmas, and handling some of the gifts. I remember climbing on the cabinet and finding my mom's watch on the fridge - she was at the door with a delivery-person. I do NOT remember climbing up and eating a bottle of aspirins or getting my stomach pumped. I remember sitting in front of the TV. I don't think I remember some of these things due to stories or pictures - some of the fragments are very insignificant and do not make up a story.
As for the ties between memory and language - that's interesting. I've studied French off and on for several years, and this summer, finally got to go to France. I talked with several people - in French - in fact, a couple people I talked to didn't speak English. Yet, as I recall the events, I can see the people's faces clearly, but in my head, the conversations are in English. I can quickly recount them in English, but I would have to work at translating them into French.
So, even though I conversed in French, my brain seemed to have done me the favor of storing it in English so I coulc remember it later!
Jumping on some scisors when I was young, splitting my knee right open. All I remember about it was being in the ER getting 5 stiches and my dad passing out. He needed 5 stiches in his forhead.
-nite
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It is obvoius why he thinks that language is needed. Without any, you couldn't know what year it is. How can one be sure to be chronologically if he doesn't know the dates? Or, let's say, how old one was. Try to take birthdays as markers. But do you remember your last 5 birthday parties? If there was something special with one of them, can you bring it in the right order without any link to the age/year? Probably not.
I think that time simply doesn't have a real mean. Think about evolution. What advance could an early hunter have if he could order his memories chronologically? It might have even hindered him, effective thinking has to go beyond the borders of the time and order in which the experiences have been made.
You can also see this if you have in mind that we have a bad imagination of time / can hardly estimate durations. Without references to values measured by "devices" like clocks & calendars it's almost impossible to maintain a chronological order. But one needs language / math for it. This is in contrast to remembering pictures, sounds, places, situations, infomation, so the experience itself. You can always remember such things, without knowledge of time or language. If you want to order multiple experiences without time references, one would need to link them directly. But that would be too much, you would have to remember everything that happened to you in the year between your 17th and 18th birthday, for example.
If you can link the number 17 and 18 to the birthday (party), you will surely know which one came first, by math: 17 < 18. This is abstract thinking, you just know it was one whole year between it and you know it without any details about what happend during the year. When we are young, we don't have that understanding, no language, no math. So time has no meaning and it's hard to reconstruct things later (in chronological order).
i can remember events,places,people and their expressions from when i was 2 and 3.i described the room of my birth to mom and she verified it.
(course mom is a lil nuts anyway) but most amazing to me is that i can remember things well and yet i been smokin "frop" for more than half my life.I guess this is my informed two cents into drug research.(lol,but then again,lemme get gonged and ask me "what were we just talking about?" or hide the tv remote on me for maximum entertainment.)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
My earlier memory is of big "things" shadowing the light over me and taking me out of something white (bed). It was really really "un-sharp" , unfocused like being extremly myope (shortsighted). I guess I was really really young. No color or nearly none either.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Let me preface this by saying: My memory as a child is surprisingly good. I have 2 destinct memories of being in a craddle (one when all my extended family was around me, another when I fell down trying to get out), my first trip to the ocean when I was 2,and very vivid and detailed memories (as any other memory I have as an adult) starting at age 3.
But at age 3 there are disturbing blanks.
1) The first time I was slapped. (My parents didn't believe in corporal punishment, and it was my grandmother who slapped me at the age of 3) This was the very first time in my life I experienced violence, and I remember being stunned for a long while there, everything after the initial shock is a blank. (While this is not a traumatic event in comparison to mothers drowning their babies, it was an extremely traumatic event for a 3y/o who trusted and loved everyone, especially grandma who brought me toys!)
2) When I was 3 I was also placed in a pre-preschool. It was some sort of advanced new age yuppie kid program designed to get kids acclimated to school life early so that they would excell later in school life. I have a great deal of memories about this place because I had a lot of fun, imagination was encouraged and mine ran wild... but there are distubing blanks whenever we were taken into a special room (which my mind associates today with a church.) I can honestly remember the whole walk leading up the room, and infact one of the walls in the room (there were old fashion candle holders on the walls for light) but everything after that just blanks out. Now I seem to remember walking to the room very frequently, but only remember seeing that wall once... and never the other contents of the room like a church.
So for someone who can remember as early back as the craddle, and can vividly describe what it was like to hold my new born baby brother at age 3; but suddenly there are huge blanks... suggests that the mind is trying to block out very specific events that it didn't want to bother copeing with.
I'm sure it seems real, but your claim that you knew someone's name from before you were born (let's not get into the development of a concept of self vs other, let alone sister vs. mother in the PREnatal brain...) pretty much discredits this completely.
He didn't claim that. Read again. He merely recognized the voice from an earlier encounter. At least, that's how I understand it.
But of course, it could still be a false memory or something.
I don't really remember much before I was about 6 years old. However, according to my parents, I was able to speak well before that, and I'd learned to read at about age 3, so my language abilities were already developed well before age 6.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Hellen Keller had a hard time describing life before language, check out her biography.. the moment she understood the hand-sign for water she described like waking from a dream.
Also, siblings and major upheavals can block out memories... our son could remember quite a bit of his very early childhood (he was signing from 18 months), but within 6 months of his sister being born - and having to deal with shared affection - he had blocked out everything. He isn't able to remember anything from the time before his sister... I guess to make his life easier "she was always here" in his mind now.
meh
I remember being 3 and being told that I would not remember anything that happened to me at this age. So I picked my nursery school, some things I did and elements of it and thought about them every day. During this 3rd year of my life I started to include more and more details in this memory. Went I went on to kindergarten I kept up with my daily excersize and I still remember very much about my days in the nursery school at 3 years old.
I distinctly remember my 3rd and 4th birthday parties, but nothing in between. I recall my older brother trying to explain the numerical concept of being three years old, and how he was seven.
In the movie "Stand by Me" the kids debate who would win in a fight, Superman or Mighty Mouse: "Mighty Mouse is just a cartoon; Superman is a real guy!" (based, of course, on the television series from the 1950s). I recall, at a very early age, having the sme debate with some friends on my block and arriving at the exact same conclusion.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I'm not sure if this is completely off-topic, but I believe memory seems related to a common internal "logic" and "language" of the brain--which makes memory completely unreliable.
For example, a few months ago my wife and I went to England, where we rented a car and drove around. What's odd is that my memories of driving in England includes the signs, the places where we went and the like, my memory of driving and passing other drives places me on the right side of the road--even though I know damned good and well in England you drive on the left.
I believe that's because I'm so used to driving on the right side of the road that my memories of England are related to that experience--that is, in my brain's internal "language", people drive on the right--so I must have driven on the right when I was in England.
It's a strange experience, knowing full well that I'm mis-remembering something fairly recent.
It may be related to your early childhood memories: as those memories are not related to experiences you are having now as an adult, they are being either "misfiled" (under things like feeling there was a God and Goddess in your early life--which were simply your parents), or just completely dropped or made obscured.
Just my two cents on this...
I think your thoeory about language is right because I don't remember anything before 3y and I started speaking at that age.
I was born in Alaska, and moved to Washington when I was 2.5 years of age. A couple of things that I can specifically remember about Alaska was the Townhouse we lived in:
-The window in the living room overlooking the Gastenau Channel.
-The bookshelf next to that brown recliner that had all the Time-Life World War II books with black and white photographic colors.
-My brother and I zipping down the stairs, riding in cardboard boxes.
-My favorite toy, a green 'jack-in-the-box' style toaster with the plastic bread that popped out that I used to play with when my mom was doing laundry.
Now, I know I have heard more stories about stuff like the rides in boxes, but I specifically remember the toy, and the window. All at the tender age of two. Digging up much more than this has seemed quite impossible.
false memory syndrome.
...but now I've forgotten it.
5..4..3..2...1
this is such a typical bullshit american self-analyzing self-important "I remember when I was blah years old blah pearl of wisdom blah funny anecdote"
SHUT UP
NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR IT
I think you have all watched too many episodes of Ally McBeal or beverly hills or what ever the fuck such disgusting pigs watch all day..
FUCK YOU
btw
all your memories of early childhood and in the womb and regressed and hypnotized ARE LIES
your ego-inflated subconcious made them up yourself you stupid FUCKS
Memory retention is proportional to how much a past event meant to oneself. imho.
This is freaking weird - the age, the timing, everything kind of parallels somewhat with my experience as well. I've even wondered the exact same thing - why most people remember further back than I do when most of my earliest memories are when I was 6 or 7.
I'm currently 33 years old - I was born in the US and at about 4 years old, went with my parents to go live in Japan. I started learning to speak Japanese and it actually started becoming my primary language for me before we moved back to the states when I was 6 or 7 and encountered a culture shock that I don't think I ever really got over until later on in high school. I never felt at home anywhere, I never mixed in with the crowd, and was generally ostracised. I remember getting picked on and beat up all the time because I came from Japan with all kinds of toys, clothes, etc that no one had seen before, and boy, was I out of place.
My sister, who's 5 years older than I, didn't have this issue and managed to keep her ability to speak Japanese. I have the impression that she went through a little bit of a similar culture problem because back when she was in Junior High, she had all of this "Hello Kitty" stuff years and years before it was even introduced into the states. Her comment was that people would say, "what's all this Hello Kitty crap?" and she thinks its funny that they have entire stores dedicated to this stuff now.
Anyhow, I think this poster may be on to something. Before 6 or 7 years old, I only really remember vague shards of impressions, feelings and memories, but nothing really cohesive... I dunno... maybe it's a combination of language change and culture shock...
mod up...LOL...good thing I have the Karma to waste to get a +1 bonus...
:)
My earliest memory is of me on a couch in Whitefish, MT, acting like I was being the weather man..I have very distinct memories of certain things...(like trying to crawl into the TV at 4 yrs. old) cause the Price is Right was on, and I wanted to be in the box/window Bob Barker was on...LOL
I remember at the same home seeing people climb up a ladder and being so mad cause the concept of climbing a ladder was SO foreign to me...LOL - might have been 3 at the time...
and as a super young boy of 2-3, I remember Whitefish, a basement of toys...cinder blocks and planks of 1" by 12" boards for shelves...
and wood paneling that looked like the weather map on TV...so I'd walk on the couch and point to wood paneling like it was a weather map...
somewhere in there...I jumped on the couch too much, bounced off, and split my head on the coffee table...since then, I've had a grey streak on the back of my head....
I got stitches, went to the hospital and all....funny how I don't remember that....
HEY...wait...that currently explains my whole life...He hit his head as a baby....that's why he's like that
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Pondering this, I think most of my real memories revolve around a traumatic or exciting event. I remember being 4 and a half or just turned 5 and in kindergarten and having a policeman come into class and passing around his baton and handcuffs. I remember locking myself in the one handcuff and pulling, yanking, and crying until he found his key and let me out. I also remember some of the nightmares that I used to have as a child (right around the same age of 4 or 5). We had a fan in the hallway with a noisy motor and I remember being startled by strange nightmares of roaring oncoming trains until that fan would be removed around September and then the nightmares would go away. My entire youth was spent in the same house, so there of static memories of the home and how rooms and walls were added or changed. I remember other implements of my childhood, but they are associative memories because I have seen the stroller, crib, bed rails since my childhood and I can't remember any specific interaction with them (but I am sure that they exist). So, as of right now, I can remember that far back, and I'm 27 years old.
I can remember my little brother being born when I was three years old. I remember being an only child, then having a new baby in the house. This was 25 years ago.
i nvestiture_june_26_e.asp
I hope that others will remember Don as he left us rather abruptly. Info at http://www.gg.ca/media/appointments/archive-2000/
I'll always remember you brother.
I was about 3 1/2. My brother was still in the womb. Mom was sitting in a chair in the kitchen balling while dad paced around. I came out of my room and new that something was wrong.
Great first memory, huh?
Had she reminded you of some incident or another that you had forgotten then that would better demonstrate your point. For example, if she described that jumper your wife just loved dressing her in when she was 3 months old.
If you decide to quiz her on said jumper or some such, be on guard against Clever Hans syndrome.
Somehow, I wound up with a free trial subscription to "Nature", which recently contained a salient abstract:
Nature 419, 896 (2002); doi:10.1038/419896a
Brain development: Memory enhancement in early childhood
CONORLISTON AND JEROMEKAGAN
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
e-mail: cliston _GUESS_ post.harvard.edu
Regions of the brain's frontal lobe that are associated with memory retention and retrieval begin to mature during the last quarter of the first year in humans. This implies that infants younger than 8 or 9 months should have difficulty in registering an experience and retrieving it after a long delay. Here we show that 13-month-old children are unable to recall a sequence of actions performed in front of them when they were 9 months old, whereas 21- and 28-month-olds are able to retrieve representations of the same acts when these were witnessed at 17 and 24 months. Our findings indicate that long-term retention increases during the second year and support the idea that maturation of the frontal lobe at the end of the first year contributes to memory enhancement during this period.
Check any of the recent research on hypnosis, and you'll find that there is no way whatsoever to tell the difference between a recovered memory and an implanted memory produced while under hypnosis. While you are in a state of hypnosis, you are in a state where you have two things working against you - one, you are open to suggestion, and two, the mechanism for tagging the difference between things you remember and things you imagined stops working properly.
For a quick read-up, check this link from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's website.
A quick read of almost any post-mortem on the whole "multiple personality disorder" craze of several years ago should also raise your skepticism. My roommate's own mother had her shrink succeed in giving her a case of dissociative identity disorder that she did not have before she started seeing this 'doctor' through a combination of hypnosis and directed questioning.
And don't think the professional hypnotists are going to give you an entirely truthful explanation of the benefits and risks of what they do - the fact of the matter is, if they admitted the truth, they would not only be jobless, but would be opening themselves to all sorts of malpractise suits. Asking a hypnotist if hypnotism works is a bit like asking a door-to-door vaccum cleaner salesman if his product really works.
... it's not the whole story. I suspect that if you were exposed to Portuguese and Russian again it would make it more likely that you would recall your childhood (the presence of contextual cues can influence recall - think for example how a long-forgotten smell or image can recall times long past), but appropriate context is not enough. The memories of your childhood may no longer exist or may be inaccessible.
The ability to recall one's early childhood seems to vary hugely between individuals. Having read many of the posts on this topic I wouldn't write any of them off out of hand - I think we are all different. I don't remember much before I was about 2 or 3 years old, although I was successfully able to recall and judge the compass orientation of my room while a toddler.
From a biological perspective, someone mentioned myelination (insulation - which helps nerve impulses travel more quickly along the neuron - cats, for example, have about the most heavily-myelinated neurones which accounts for their quick reflexes, about ten times faster than those of humans). If this happens at around 6 months then this would enable the beginnings of conscious thought, without which memory cannot be encoded or stored. So I'd guess that is the lower limit (but see below).
Developmental psychology holds that before the age of around 1 year, infants have no 'sense of self' - everything that is happening to them IS them. After this they begin to be able to separate what happens to them from what is happening in the world - although it is a few years before they are really able to see things from other people's perspective. Think of the rows toddlers have over toys - they have not yet acquired a sense of 'other'-ness.
In terms of recalling things from around birth (or before), it IS easy to 'acquire' memories of early life events from people around you (parents, older siblings etc). I believe this has been shown in 'false memory syndrome' studies. However, I don't mean to suggest that those posters who described memories of early events are lying. My boyfriend's former stepfather took him through past-life regression, where he experienced nearly being strangled by his own umbilical cord. His mother confirmed afterwards that this was exactly what had happened. As scientists we find this hard to explain but important not to discount.
Mod early, mod often.
When we think about the term "memory" we all think in brain-terms : We want to remember facts like "was it day if my my mother gave me birth".
;)
Of course we cant remember facts. In our first years of living we are still dominated by emotions and so our memory for this time will be merely consist of feeling than facts.
I'm 32 and sometime I'm still afraid of the dark or I feel very lonesome and wish to hide and be protected by a big loving beeing.
On the other side sometimes its still great fun to play with mud or sing meaningless songs.
Theses all are memories and they are still part of our lifes. (many of us are still dominated by these emotional memories)
best,
peter
ps: no : I'm not in psychotherapy-business : I never had a therapy and I never gave one
i was about 2 days old and fluctuating above me.
i can't check whether the place (room) etc are real because i am phiysically very far from where it was.
but itself it felt like the other times i was about to die.
One of the objectives of Zen meditation is to be able to turn off unnecessary senses, to allow the mind the freedom to explore itself... so it is quite possible to exert volitional control over the senses... Makes one wonder...
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
I am 35 now (DOB July 1967). I still remember some patches from the late Fall of 1969. My sister bought candy and I lost them, I cried bitterly, I remember my dad taking me to a photographer. I remember snow banks in Winter, a street light. I remember building a garden for bunnies in the snow, remember the house layout, the cat, bird food outside. I remember early Spring of 1970, when my sister lifter me to a corner of a well. I was scared witless.
The memories are definitely attributed to that year beacause in the Summer of 1970 my dad got a new job and we moved to another town. Which I remember quite well too.
The theory of relation between language and memory holds in my case. I was told that I started talking clearly when I 15 months old.
Quite right in my observation, and all too easily reinforced.
My own earliest memory -- I must be about 3, and I'm walking across a bridge (I think in Williston ND) with my mom, who is singing "Que Sera Sera". Since that song was released about 1957, and I was born in 1955, that tends to confirm the approx. date.
I have two distinct memories from when I was maybe 3.5 to 4 -- one playing in autumn leaves, the other (actually several of the same sort, probably from the following summer) playing with my cardboard barn (big enough to crawl into). That's ALL I remember of life in that house, rather like having snapshots of a place I'd never otherwise seen.
My *functional* memory starts shortly after we moved to the next house, when I was about 4.5 years -- and after that (while it's naturally spotty as trivial everyday life gets forgotten), there are no really major gaps.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I remember many things from my early childhood. I just do not know at where to place them in time. Some of it is more vague - I remember danish yoghurt, sand dunes, falling into an ant hill - and I remember getting my first glasses; rather vividly, actually, because that evening when I got home with my mother, I saw the stars for the first time in my life. All this and more happened way before I got to school, so I guess that makes the age of four or five the latest.
I vividly remember a trip to Disneyland when I was 2 years old. When I was 20 my family went again and told my mom I remembered much of the previous trip. She didn't believe me.
Then I recounted many conversations between my mother and grandmother from the age 2 trip. My mom flipped.
Aside from that I remember a handful of stuff before age 4. I remember far more things from early school settings than anything else.
Can't rememeber anything else for years and years and years...
Cheers,
Iab
One thing that makes memories much more vivid is the presence of emotion during the events.
Moreover, you can generally tell a true memory from a made up one because it includes emotional, as well as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, and olfactory components -- i.e. that the person remembers sights, sounds, motions, feels, and smells.
When people attempt to tell a story that's untrue, they usually leave out these aspects to it, which is one of the ways people have for determining whether a person is lying or not.
I remember being given a Football player doll. I still have him. I remember teething and chewing on his nose made me feel better. He still has the marks. I also remember sucking on the football during this time, but not being satisfied because my teeth kept slipping off it. There is paint off the ball where I did this.
I could theorize that those memories were first triggered in my adult life, by the fact the doll is still around. Much like a smell will remind you of a place or a person. I think we store more than we are able to recall, and it is the ability to recall things that we think of when we discuss our earliest memories.
Have you done any research on hypnosis and memory recall?
I was told, cause I didn't witness the whole act
In and out was the movement of the ballsac
It was hot and sweaty and lots of pushin
Then the nut came gushin
And it was hell tryin to bail to the ovary
With nuttin but the Lord lookin over me
I was white with a tail
But when I reached the finish line, young black male!
One cell made two, and two cells made four
and so on, so now I'm a embryo
Then I got a hunch
that I'm a be on lockdown, for nine months
Chillin, with my mother to guide me
And nuttin but a stomach to hide me
from all that worry and bullshit
Nine months later, I elbow pull and kick
cause my time is up and I don't care
With one big push, I'm outta there
June 15th, it's just my luck
In 1969, a nigga is the product
honestly this is my earliest one, at least that i can date. i was about 3 at the time.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
My earliest specific visual memory was of falling off a small plastic tricycle in the back yard, and i cut my knee on these concrete stepping stone things, at the time it seemed like a lot of blood. I can vividly recall the garden and my dad digging something.
loply.com
According to my mother,I can remember back to when I was 2 years old.
And no, it wasn't stuff that was planted in my head, as others have suggested, because I vividly remember:
the apartment we lived in,
the fact that the laundry room was behind the apartment,
that I slept on the couch and was scared of the TV (you know how TVs look when they're turned off in a dark room; they seem to have a glow).
Lots of other little things... like puking in the bathtub :-)
I have several distinct scenes in my mind from age 3, I talked to my mom about them once, she confirmed (and explained) them. They were pretty random, nothing earth-shattering. My memory from age 5 up is pretty intact, or so I think.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
This is one of the things I remember being discussed in one of my intro psychology classes. The part of your brain that stores long term memory doesn't fully develop until about the age of 3, so most people's earliest memories are from about that time, and it's usually a traumatic experience.
My earliest memory falling in a swimming pool at about 3. I certanly don't remember it really clearly, I just have the image of the tiles on the side of the pool bobbing up and down before my uncle hauled me out.
When I was 3 and a half years old... at the dog pound, choosing out a puppy with my dad, and then the afternoon chasing after it as it ran down the hill to greet my brothers and sister as they got off the school bus. I can also remember naptime quite vividly from that time... the baking of cookies with my mom before she went to work... checking the bananas to see if they had ripened yet, and being amazed by the Nazi helmet my dad had gotten from his father and kept under his bed... Interestingly enough, my most vivid of memories are of dreams I had as a young child... most of them were of things I did not know of (including one very vivid dream that has stuck with me all my life, one of a field that was rife with various people, impaled on spears, and a portrait of a man, whom I later recognized on a Discovery Channel special to be Vladimir Teppes). I also remember the forest behind our house... not as much as what it looked like, but I remember the emotions it individually brought on so well... My mothers oldest memory used to be when she was 7 years old, and believed she saw the ghost of her grandfather... however back in '95 when pregnant with my younger brother, she started to see even older memories, just coming back, of her as a very young child... she remembers walking, barely, ackwardly, through her childhood home, in a circular pattern through the rooms coming back around to where she started, greeting her father, who was much younger at the time, ecstatic to see her walking so well... I find that interesting considering those memories did not rise back up until she was pregnant for the 5th time. Draw your own conclusions... memory certainly is a funny thing.
I was about 4 and it seemed like a good idea. I remember Herfy my dog picking it up and running away with eat until he ate it.
I also remember watching the Vietnam war on teevee, but I thought it was just a teevee show so it wasn't happening in real life.
I remember kindengarden really well, but after that my memory isn't so good. I must've used it all up. Wait, where are my pants and what universe is this?
I remember I was born in 1970.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Most people cannot remember before the age of 5. There are a few who seem to be able to...but I would think 3 would be a very generous theoretical cutoff.
No, you probably would not remember any more of those languages than you do right now. You might, however, find that they come a bit easier to you than another person if you had had enough exposure to them to begin mimicing their sounds as an infant. There are several human sounds that simply cannot be reproduced if they were not first tried in the 'babbling' stages (the imitating of some even cause physical shaping in the vocal apparatus which cannot later be added to) (they grill you in French class about doing that 'nasal rrr' sound which you will never get right unless you mimiced french as a baby).
Anyway, those are just a couple of things I remember from Psych 101 and Linguistics 101...so if these things interest you, why not try liberal arts?
I don't know if it is the same thing as your earliest memory, but do you know what's the first thing you know?
The first thing you know... old Jed's a millionare!
Ha! I kill me.
I remember when my older brother (13 years older) threw me up in the air many times, indoors, and didn't stop until I had (accidently?) hit the ceiling. The ceiling is 3 meters up at that place.
(This is not a joke. No, I didn't do a lot of drugs.)
I have no trouble with phone numbers or short term stuff, but the past is dim.
Example: I don't remember the names of some of my college roommates. (Note: roommates, not friends.)
Another example: About 10 years back, I went to a lot of weddings in a 2 or 3 year time period. I have some generic wedding & reception memories, but I can't relate most of them to specific weddings.
Does this describe a particular type of memory problem? Could anything regain past memories, once they're forgotten?
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
I have a memory, mostly just an image, of a man sitting at my grandmother's house, with his elbow sticking out of a a window. The window as it exists in the actual house doesn't open. I figured out from other cues that this memory is of my grandmother's house being built (in November, 1966). I was born in May, 1965. My mother tells me that we did indeed visit my grandmother while her house was being built, so I'm pretty sure this memory is accurate. I have lots of memories like these, but unfortunately no others with enough clues in them to pinpoint my age.
I have a very distinct memory from when I was about four and a half. I woke up one morning and had no previous memories...that is to say I knew who and where I was, who my friends were, who my family was, and all sorts of current events like that but I had no memory of the past.
Now some people might say that they don't remember what they did yesterday but this is rather different. This is almost as if I didn't exist the day before, I didn't have even vauge memories of there being a day before...it was a very odd feeling.
My psychiatrist thinks I might have had some sort of traumatic event the night/day before. I really have no idea.
At 11 months, Jack (a child I babysit who lives downstairs from me) was walking frequently. His sister, a year older, did not really walk much until 15 months, but he was much faster. He was walking at 10 months, running a month later, climbing stairs a month after that and jumping all over the place (never falling) a month after that. It is not that uncommon.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
...and two rather specific memories.. one is sitting on the lap of my grandfather, but I have no recollection of time. But he died when I was three, so must have been before that. The other one is the kitchen where we used to live up till I was three. I could remember the color (though I've now forgotten), but I really doubt my parents bothered to tell me that, so I think that's a memory of my own. Certain other things I know I "remember" not from real memories, but from imagination and stories. Apart from those two memories though, it's pretty blank up till I'm about 5.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I remember my mom giving me a bath in the kitchen sink. I remember playing in the water coming from a faucet. Her going into the bathroom to get a camera, coming out then snapping a picture of me. I remember being blinded and a little intrigued by the Kodak InstaMatic or whatever it was.
I had the resulting photograph in a photo album until I was a teenager. Judging how I looked, I could be no older than a year and a half.
No date/age/time reference, but I remember lying on my back, looking up a bright light bulb suspended on a cord from the ceiling (think early 50's electrical wiring), with a moth flying around it. In my peripheral vision I see the vertical bars of a crib or playpen. That's it, just the movement of the moth...
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
I use to think my earliest memory was that of me going outside in my underwear and being cold...when I was about 2 years old. Then I found a picture my dad took of me doing just that. Now I think I had seen the photo and filled in the details myself.
I am of the opinion that long term memories aren't exactly memories of actual events, but memories of memories. You remember somthing, you bring it into your consious mind and think about it for a while. Then, the next time something triggers that "same" memory, instead of remembering the original you remember what was in your head the last time you were thinking about the event. So instead of memories of events, we have memories of memories of memories of memories of events. And each time we re-remember, we color the facts with whatever else is going on in our heads at the time. And of course if we don't keep bringing old memories to mind they tend to decay away until we can no longer retrieve them at all. Kind of a lose-lose situation. It think I read this theory of memory somewhere, but honestly, I don't remember for sure. Incidentally, my oldest memory is of a recurring nightmare I began having some time after my family moved out of the city just as I turned four. I dreamed of being crushed under dried leaves in a gutter alongside a road. As I was being crushed a strange machine would round the corner and head down the road after me. At the time I didn't know what in the world the strange machine was. A few years later though I was visiting the city and saw a street cleaning machine and it clicked--that was what was in my dream. So my dream contained something that I almost certainly had to have originally seen before I turned four. So here's the interesting question: since the experience of seing a street cleaner managed to stick inside my head, does it count as a memory, even though it took my subconsious to access it? Which is technically the oldest memory, the street cleaner or the nightmare?
When I saw "earliest memory" on the front page I was expecting a completely different kind of article.
My first computer was a CoCo ("-D" board) that came with 16K RAM in the form of 8x4116. I was one of the first kids in my block to do memory upgrades, first to 32k (piggyback method) and then to 64K using 4164 chips.
Since you were borth in the US in the 60's you were probably circumcised. Since that is a very painful event for an infant and quite traumatic -- surely you remember that as well. What was that like?
Just curious.
I don't seem to remember much (if anything_ from before I was 8 or so. I guess it's just that I've always had a bad memory and never cared to think about the past. Nothing traumatic happened to me to block out memories, and I never moved or anything. Hell, I've only broken one bone in my body (a finger in High School).
So why is it that people claim to remember things at one year old, and I can (honestly) barely remember anything from grade school. I've met people who were old teachers of mine, or neighbors, etc. and I could swear that I had never seen them before in my life.
All this talk about memories that some people find hard to believe reminds me of Gir (Zim's little robot) being interviewed in the Zim episode "mysterious mysteries":
Anchor: Now, what can you tell us about Dib?
GIR: He's so mean to my master! He not like the Zim! I seen it! Dib is bad! Yeeheeheehe!
Anchor: And about the night in question?
The screen fades to the black screen that says 'dramatic reenactment.' The screen cuts to the set where the actors are. The Zim actor climbs down the ladder.
GIR (voice over): I was the chubby lady hiding in the bushes!
A camera zooms in on a woman hiding behind a cardboard bush. Her face is blurred out.
Anchor (voice over): Uh huh... And what about Dib?
GIR (voice over): I'm on TV!
Up in the tree, the GIR actor uses the flashlight to make a shadow puppet with his claw.
Anchor (voice over): Yes, then what happened?
GIR (voice over): That's when the giant squirrel showed up!
An actor in a squirrel suit walks out from behind the tree.
Zim (voice over): GIR!
Anchor (voice over): Let her talk!
The GIR actor shines the light on the squirrel.
Anchor (voice over): Can't you see she's upset? Now, don't you mean Dib showed up?
The GIR actor shines the flashlight up at the sky.
GIR (voice over): No! The squirrel showed up first, then Dib showed up.
The Dib and Gaz actors walk into view. The Dib actor spots the squirrel and starts screaming. He throws the camera down.
Dib actor: Whoa man! What is that thing!?!
GIR (voice over): And then the squirrel ate Dib's greasy head!
The squirrel actor leaps on the Dib actor and pretends to eat his head. The Dib actor kicks his legs, screaming. The Zim actor lifts up his mask. The squirrel actor then gets up.
GIR (voice over): And then the squirrel flew away!
Two cables lower down and attach to the squirrel, one to his head and one to his tail. They start to lift him up. The cable on his head rips through the costume so that only the one on his tail is attached. It pulls the squirrel into the air and through the set. The squirrel then appear against a blue screen background of outer space.
GIR (voice over): After that, he went back to his home planet to fight all the bad guys.
The tail of the squirrel costume rips off and the squirrel actor plummets down. Two guys dressed, one dressed as a bird creature and the other as an axe-wielding beetle/turtle monster, sit in a sandbox with the space background behind them. The squirrel actor crashes down on the bird actor and then bounces back and hits the beetle actor, knocking him down and sending the axe flying. The screen fades and cuts back to the set where everyone is sitting.
Anchor: What does that have to do with anything?
GIR: Me and the squirrel are friends!
Zim episode transcript from
http://www.thescarymonkeyshow.com
My earliest memory is of floating around in some strange kind of liquid. I have this bizarre sort of tube coming out of my tummy. It's very odd, but suprisingly relaxing.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I have done some investigation in this myself, as the question of memory is of interest to me as well.
first of all, memory is not tied stricty to language. (ideas are pre-symbolic) but memory and Self are strictly linked. without memory one can have no conception of ones own existence. Thus your first memory is essentially your first day of existence -- your actual Brithday.
my fist memory, my birthday, occured when i was around 2 or 3 and i recall looking at a small blue flame --a furnace pilot light. i stuck my hand in that furnace and burnt the hell out of myself. i still have a scare. thus for me it was pain that triggered the neural dynamics to reflect upon my own being: Self as something seperate from Other.
i wonder how much this particular trigger carries on into the rest of our life. in my case, the trigger being by pain, i wonder if pain is therefore my modus operandi in relating to the world.
for you, it had something to do with moving and a new language. it would be interesting to know how those aspects have played out in the rest of your life.
-transami
:T:R:A:N:S:
in my teens and early twenties, I didn't really have any memories I could clearly identify from before age 10, 11, 12, around there, it seemed to just be a few confusing images.
As I got into my late 20's and early 30's, some of those early memories started to come back more clearly, including an episode where I clearly remember sitting on my grandmother's lap, and her giving me a shiny new penny, and showing me the date on the penny, 1970, which would have made me 3. I remember not being able to tell what the numbers meant, and her showing me and explaining it to me, and I can see the shapes in my memory, and I still feel the newness of looking at them and not knowing what they meant, but I know what they mean now. I also have a memory involving reading, where I was 4 years old, and I was in the back seat of mom's car, she was driving down a highway, and I was reading the road signs to her. (back then, we didn't wear seatbelts in the back of cars, and we even used to stand up, walk around, etc.). Far from being concerned with my safety, she was praising me for being so smart at 4 years old.
I did not have any memory of these events when I was a teenager.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And I learned to walk at a normal age. I'm guessing that this memory is from right before or right after my first birthday. I remember it pretty clearly, though I can't quite describe the memory, because my perspective was so different then. The closest thing I can I can think of to discribe my feelings was awe. Looking up at the doorway and feeling awe. That's my earliest memory that I remember remembering.
He merely recognized the voice from an earlier encounter.
That is correct. Of course at that point in my existance I had no way to really comprehend what people were but I did associate the sound of the doctor's soothingly deep southern voice with the sound of the name "Doctor Knight", and it was a sound that was familiar to me and part of my world along with the sounds of my mother's and sisters' voices. Sounds and voices are pretty much all the sensory input you get at that stage of development.
I don't care if any of you believe me or not. I know for certain what I remember, it's my oldest memory and although faded after 40 years, I still remember enough to know what it was and that it has always been something that made me different from most everybody else. I've only personally met one other person in my entire life who also remembers their birth, and the descriptions of our experiences are rather similar.
It really is, and sorry, I couldn't resist.
Why, people that stereotype ACs, of course!
Why do Americans get stereotyped like that? Because that's the face you present to the rest of the world, especially that fucktard of a president your Supreme Court thrust upon you.
Some lady screaming "GET IT OUT! Get it out!!!!"
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
I was whacked on the head by a window by mistake.
Hurt quite a bit.
Next memory I have, I was three.
(Boy, this is sure a stupid post.)
In the industralized nations, being circumcised leaves you at a GREATER risks of HIV infection. The Amercan Cancer Society wrote a scathing report on the AAPs circumcision position saying that the complications from circumcision are far greater than cancer, and as for the UTIs, you are right there is a greater chance for UTIs. But circumcisions have bacterial infection problems that have resulted in death, as well as a host of problems such as too much skin being removed. There are more of these type of problems in cirucmcisions then in UTIs.(BTW females have a larger UTI problem then even uncircumcised males, should we have girls circumcised?)
Also keep in mind that the foreskin is equivelant to the clitoral hood. In that sense, the AAPs policy on female circumcision should be extended to males because according to the AAP female circumcision should NOT be done under any circumcstance even religous or cultural.
By the way, my being fat, bald, and unattractive has nothing to do with the validity of my points. I am all of the above, but that doesn't change the fact the neonatal circumcision is wrong. If you want to have it done as an adult, that is YOUR choise because people can do what the want when they reach the age of majority. Otherwise you are just like the chinese who bound children's feet or the female type 1 circumcisers(ie. where only the clitoral hood is removed).
I think the first thing I remember was the stars on a bottle of soda - cream soda I do believe - these were 4-point stars, I distinctly remember that. I remember them as white paint on a clear glass bottle.
As a programmer I would say that was when I was instantiated. (As a "child" process. Pun intentional!)
As a philosopher I would say that's when I remember coming into existence, because while people tell me about things I did and said before that, I have no recollection of them.
A friend of mine, whom I have never met, who lives about 1,000 miles away, says that she can remember things as an infant. That amazes me.
I thimk I had to be 5 or 6 as far as when my earliest memories occurred (middle 1960s) because some time later, which was long enough for me to have memories of being in the city where that first memory happened for some time, so I would say it was probably at least a year or more later, our family moved from Wisconsin to Miami and I remember living in a trailer park there. At the time I was there I was about 7 so that's how I date the first memory I ever had.
I remember how there was a little kid there in the trailer park, a neighbor at another trailer - little kid meaning he was younger than I was, probably no more than 4 or 5 - and how I would make him laugh by using swear words. The thing was, he knew they were swear words, which is why he would laugh at them, and while I kind of knew that they were classed as such, it would not be until some time later - maybe years, I'm not sure - that I would be able to "feel" that they were and recognize them as such.
So knowing that event happened when I was 7 allows me to date the first memory of my existence at least a year or two before that.
Paul Robinson <postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
http://paul.washington.dc.us
Among other things, "A Philosopher, Computer Programmer, and Notary Public in and for the Commonwealth of Virginia."
"Above all else... We shall go on..."
"And continue!"
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
My earliest memory's very clear, but it relates to a slightly traumatic experience and I can't remember other things from the same time period.
...because of contextual clues.
I also know that I considered my "earliest" memory when I was much younger - my mom asked me the question when I was five or so and it was the earliest "event" I could remember then too. I remember that when I was five and trying to answer the question, I thought there were probably things I remembered from earlier but I couldn't really fix an order to them, so this one was the only one I could be certain was from a given time period - why this one?
The memory was of being in my baby bed - one of those elevated rectangular things like a play pen, with sides that could be raised to convert it into a playpen but which normally was used as a bed. I didn't want to get out of bed and my mom and dad were telling me to get up. I was faking being asleep and they knew it. My dad said he'd dump cold water on me if I didn't get up - he'd never done that before, didn't believe him.
When he actually got water from the faucet and dumped it on me, I was shocked. I remember being so amazingly hurt and surprised...just didn't think he'd do it. I'm sure it wasn't all that cold in reality, it was just the shock of him actually doing it.
The bed in question was sold before I turned three. I can remember the room, the sun streaming in, the navy blue cup in his hand (blue cups still bring this memory back and make me think of dad), mom being surprised too that he'd do that (but not overly upset, thank goodness, or I would latched onto mom=good, dad=bad immediately). I know I was walking and talking by then. I don't remember many other details.
Plenty of memories from when I was 3. My parents moved to a new home and neighborhood before I turned 4, so I know these memories predate that. They include walks in the neighborhood, the arrival of the ice-cream truck, some very detailed memories of the architecture of the house, etc.
Perhaps the earliest was waking up in the night, and bugging my parents about "when will it be daytime again?". Their answer, "tomorrow", didn't make sense for a few minutes, but then I understood for the first time the concept of a succession of days alternating with nights, and the words "yesterday", "today" and "tomorrow" stared to gel meaningfully in my vocabluary.
That memory seems much earlier than the others I mentioned, so perhaps it predates 3. Perhaps I was 2, I dunno.
Earliest memory I'm sure is a real memory (as opposed to memories constructed from family members' stories about my early life):
Riding on a train from Colorado to Kansas toward the end of WW II; I was around 2.5 years old. I'm on the observation platform at the end of the train and a man in uniform helps me stand on his suitcase so I can see over the railing. I have a vivid memory of his wool uniform.
Associated with this memory--perhaps not the same trip--a small, rural railroad station, clapboard one-story building, a hot night, june bugs swarming around the lights on the platform.
A slightly later memory of Union Station in Kansas City, catching a train with my mother to go to Minnesota. I have to go to the toilet; she sends me into the men's alone (was I four?) and warns me not to let my "pilots" touch the seat. I had not a clue in the world what she meant. Only in recent years have I realized that she said "privates" but I heard the nearest word that was meaningful (sort of!) to me. I don't recall her otherwise using "privates" to refer to genitalia. Perhaps it was the more or less public setting--there were a lot of people around--that lead her to that locution.
I'd like to claim earlier memories, but I'm suspicious that they are artifacts of hearing certain stories of my very early childhood told over and over, reinforced by photographs from the period. A year or so before the train memory, I ran away from home (rural Colorado) and was lost overnight. I had my dog with me and a neighbor's dog found us although adult searchers couldn't. But I can't say I genuinely remember that.
On a farm in Kansas--about 4 years old--I was dressed up in a suit to go to church and intended to sit on the rim of a slop pail. I sat instead in the pail. The slop pail was a five-gallon bucket into which kitchen scraps were put to be fed to the hogs, very wet and smelly. And this memory is genuine and tactile to boot.
Years later I described this memory to my mother, and she informed me that every time I was taken to the doctor, I'd cry once we reached a certain point.
Fabrication? Did I overhear this story and incorporate it? No way to prove it to you, I can only inform you that I know it's a genuine memory.
And sadly, all issues of "earliest memory" really can't be proven, I know people who have incredibly early memories, and some who have nothing coherent (no thread of continuity) before very late ages (10, in this case).
But how to establish the difference between an early memory and overhearing the story and generating a memory? I don't think it can be established without question with our current techniques.
I'm 17, and the earliest thing I remember is the Loma Prieta (California) earthquake in 1989 (almost 4 years old at the time). I also remember playing on a Macintosh (Plus?) sometime before 1990, but I can't remember when.
I think you probably have memories from before the age of 7... it's just that you don't remember the age you were in those memories so you can't put them in chronological order. I have many random memories from very young childhood, including nap time with my sisters in our cribs (I have twin sisters who are 20 months older). Were weren't BABIES in our cribs and we were probably in cribs longer than we needed to be, but I do remember it.
I consider my youngest VERIFIED memory to be when I woke up on my fourth birthday. I say "verified" only because that's the earliest memory in which I absolutely remember my age. I know I must also be able to remember the days preceeding that day, which means I have memories as far back as age 3, but there was nothing as memorable as that morning that is automatically associated with an age.
Remember the PBS TV show "The Electric Company" and how they would feature a specific letter or number with all kinds of psychedelic colors and patterns? That was what I saw in my head the moment I woke up on my fourth birthday. I had the number 4 in my head and was absolutely thrilled to finally be 4. I was fortunate to be in that state of mind on that morning, because it has given me a "verified" early memory, and without that I would be unable to do anything but guess about other memories.
RP
Everything was black, then it came into being. I was in a movie theater, watching a scary movie with my parents. On the screen was an [almost?] naked lady in a dark cave with a big snake crawling over her body. I wasn't quite sure why, but I thought, "This feels like an important moment. I should remember it." Perhaps my Mom thought the movie was getting too scary for me, or perhaps she was uncomfortable with the naked lady on the screen, because she asked me if I wanted to leave the theater. I told her "yes," then the three of us we left.
:)
:). But I'm pretty sure I was around 4 or 5 years old.
::shrug::
I kept the memory for a while without quite realizing why I thought that moment was important and I had to remember it. Later, I realized it was the earliest memory I have, maybe even the moment I gained self-awareness. I believed it really was the moment I gained self-awareness for a long time but I'm not so sure any more; now I think I was just waking up from a sleep at that moment, hence the initial blackness then things coming into being, and it just happens to be the earliest memory I have. But who knows?
I've asked my mother a couple times to see if she can recall which movie that was, what theater, or even the approximate date we saw the movie. She's never been able to remember, and she doesn't even remember watching any such movie (but it is quite difficult to remember a movie just by one scene, I suppose, though I'd remember any movie I walked out of, which to date is zero... as far as I remember, anyway
If any of you know what movie this is, I'd greately appreciate it if you let me know. This was when I was in Korea but I'm pretty sure it was a foreign film (either European or American). I'd like to watch the movie again just to see if any memory comes back, or at least to verify I wasn't dreaming the whole event. I do remember the cave scene fairly well so I'd be able to recognize it.
Oh, in regards to the poster's theory -- I spoke Korean then, and I still speak Korean now (and I didn't speak English then, but I do speak English now.) I don't think that neither helps nor disproves your theory. But I thought you'd wanna know
I can remember before I was 2. My family moved into a new house right after I turned 2 (within 2 mos.) but I still remember the old house. shortly there after it burned down and i hadn't been there since we moved out, but i remember being there and smelling the woodstove and the way it looked. i haven't seen pictures inside that place since either, even tho a few do exist.
No sig for you!!
All this psyco-bable and no mention of the Matix? Come on people! You are geeks. Act like it.
Someone hates these cans.
The first distict memory I have was of a dam bursting in Washington D.C. It turned out to be the President's fault, and people were calling for his resignation. The guy who invented the automobile came in to take his place.
Then there were tanks destroying the Olympic Stadium in some foreign country. I thought it was odd that they used tanks instead of wrecking balls, but...
Now I have problems following the rationale some newscasters use to explain things. A typical CNN Money segment has the phrase, "Due to m, the price of n is {up|down} sharply," where m and n have absolutely no obvious ralationship to each other. News hasn't gotten any clearer now than it was when I was five.
Surely some kind of memory is required for learning to speak?
----
Some people are good with words, others,
My clearest earliest memory involves watching my 1 and two months brother running naked on Jones Beach on Long Island. But I've had flashbacks to memory where I remember nothing visual. Just audio and touch. You may think thats possible, but can you share a memory that does not have something visual in it? I have an incredible eyesight, but even with that, I accept that I can have senses telling me something independent of my visuals. I'm a very open-minded individual and I tell you, I think I remember being in the womb.
Reductio Ad Adsurdium David
Earliest I remember is about age 5 and a fairly traumatic event (for a 5yo anyhoo) - maybe it's the impact of the event that decides how long it's held in storage which would make each person different. One thing that does interest me is when the senses are working. I spent the better part of 2000 in hospital, one month of that in intensive care being held unconcious so the body could repair itself. Yet although all my friends thought I was out of it, I still remember them (touch and hearing anyway). Any medicos out there care to explain this?
Sonce you asked, I have a number of memories from long before I could speak, or even had a concept of language, and I can remember having thoughts that I can now put into words, so I don't buy the tripe that many psycologists spout that language is necessary for cognition.
My earliest involves lying in my crib looking up at a crib toy my mother had made for me. It was made from wooden spools she had colored with crayons, and strung through a long shoelace like thing. In retrospect it could not have been a shoelace, since it would have had to been at least four feet long, but it was long and flat like an older style shoelace, it had shoelace ends on it, and it was red. She tied it across the top rails of my crib.
I can remember being bored, and looking for something to do. I remember wanting to play with a different toy but it wasn't there right then. I have an impression that it was to the left of my head, but I couldn't get to it, which would make it likely that I wasn't rolling over, or wasn't mobile enough to find it. I believe the toy may have been a rattle. I can clearly remember reaching up to play with it, but changing my mind because it wasn't that interesting of a toy. I also have the impression that other people were watching me, and commmenting on my actions.
I later confirmed the existence and particulars of the toy my mother created for me, and the fact that I never seemed interested in playing with it. This corroborated my memory that the toy was boring, and that I had other much more interesting toys. Strangely, I don't remember those.
I can also remember learning to walk using one of those baby walkers. The kind you generally put a kid into, so they can't fall down. It lets their feet touch the ground, and they can move around. However I don't remember being in it, I remember grabbing on to it, and walking behind it as I pushed it around.
I tend to think that the memories are there, but are not indexed well. There has been some research into hypnotic regression that can access some of these memories, however if the memory isn't there or isn't accessible, the human mind will 'remember' things that never happened, and these will be as real as any other memory. The only real way to tell them apart is by confirming them with surrounding facts, such as the 'shoelace' and spools toy my mother made. It was gone before I could ever sit up alone, but I was later able to describe it to her in detail.
Memory is a tricky thing. At a guess, I would say that the brain learns how to index what it expierences. Very early memories would be from a few pointers that made possibly by mere chance.
For myself, I have pretty much consistent memories since about four. Obviously I've forgotten a lot, but I can easily remember most major events from about four years old on.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
My earliest memory (of this lifetime) is when I was getting diapered by my oldest sister. I couldn't have been more than 9 months old, as I couldn't verbalize much at all--or at all...I remmeber the powder, too...It was back in the days of cloth diapers, and I was a squirmy worm, so she stabbed me with the safety pin. She did not look like a happy camper (as if I was?). My first lucid thought that I can remember (from that experience) was: "What did I do wrong?" Now, how's that for a basis of a neurotic life? Usually, as I've read, the earlier the memories you have, the higher your IQ but in my opinion it's what you do with your IQ that matters. Earlier memories may have to do with whether one is a visual learner (I am) versus a verbal or kinesthetic one. Major life changes (such as you described) can either trigger memory or suppress it, as can traumatic experiences such as abuse. The mind is a tricky place to live, as I'm sure we all are aware.
I would say, also three years. I remember stuff like when my brother was born and he is three years and two months yougner than me.
However, a lot of friends of mine do not remember some stuff from holidays from three years ago, while back then they weren't dronk all they the time.
The portion of the brain responsible for episodic memory is, according to something I read somewhere, not fully "myelinated" until about the age of three. Myelin is a fatty insulating material that wraps the nerve cells and connectors and is necessary for proper function. Long term memory becomes possible around that age. If I can find *where* I read this, I'll post a link.
Interesting idea, michael. In a three-day period, when I was about four, I: (on the first day) tried to stick a dime up my nose, and my mother scolded me in Spanish. Then, remembering that I didn't know Spanish, she just grabbed it out of my hand, tossed it in the garbage, and sent me to my room; (on the second day) found a cockroach on the floor, running away from my parents, who had their shoes in hand, ready to smash it. It slipped under the door of my room, and when they opened the door to chase it, I had already eaten half of it, the other half still squirming!; (on the third day) tried to stick a paper clip in an electrical outlet. My mother slapped my hand away, I sucked my thumb, then, slowly, tried to do that again, got slapped again, etc. I didn't catch on quickly back then. Now, about three years ago, when I was nine, my mother told me about the cockroach event, and memories flooded back. I then cut her off before she could finish and told her about the paper clip/outlet incident, reminding her how close the events were. That was before she told me, proving that I remembered, that the second memory was not "implanted". However, I did not remember the dime incident even when she told me, possibly because she scolded me in Spanish, which I did not know at that time.
Ultimatum479!!!!
I, personally, don't agree with that one. I'm not sure why, though, maybe partially just because...well...I just don't! Which brings me to a question. If our body is running low on something -- say oxygen, someone is being suffocated -- does it try to use the little it has where it is most needed (ie. the brain and/or heart)? If so, is it specific to certain parts of the brain? I am wondering why people who have experienced drowning, suffocation, etc. remember the event, if the little oxygen they have left is needed in more important parts of the brain then memory -- ie. keeping up with standard body functions, like pumping blood through the body.
Ultimatum479!!!!
You might even submit a work unit before the eliens invade.
At age 4 your memories are systematically removed from your brain and replaced with images of the state giving birth to you.
In one of Terry Pratchett's books -can't remember which one- there is a guy with an absolute memory. When asked for his earliest memory, he says : there was a big light and somebody hit me.
Actually I think some people remember their own births... But it's messy.
They then think they have been abducted by aliens.
Abduction recollections parallel how one is born. I won't expand here, it's in details at:
http://village.glaine.net/~teebo/aliens.html
interesting theory... this happens a lot to me too, but I can't say how far it's true... for example
:)
my cousin calls me up last week and asked me if I wanted to go paintballing (it was my first time), so I said yeah, on the day we get there, I go into the house where they keep the guns and stuff and I looked at the window and it had big brown metal bars, I entered the room and I saw a small window with no glass near the ceiling with big bars too, also the table in the middle of the room seemed very familiar... that was freaky... I could swear I was in that room weeks ago except I don't remember seeing anything inside the room (now they had guns, and beer, and food)... that's just one that came to mind...
but often it's more of a speech thing, not so much a visual thing... like I am talking to someone and it seems like I've had that conversation days ago. I guess it's just a glitch in the matrix
I'm 15, and I can remember stuff from when I was about 1 yr old; however, almost every memory I have before the age of five is from outside my body. I remember watching myself do something. to this day I can still "see" all of my memories from either my point of view(my eyes) or any other point of view (other people, animals, random points in space). This is akin to watching a demo in Q3A in third person view, even though it was recorded by someone in 1st person view. People tell me this is weird :-)
My first birthday party. I kid you not. I can't remember much from it though...The only real memory was that my parents had bought me a large, metal spinning top for it, and I can remember sitting on the floor with it, trying to get my hands around it, and (presumably in baby talk, since I can't remember the exact thought) basically wondering what the hell it was.
My other memories from childhood mostly consist of images from different events...there are also things which have become stereotypes, in the sense that I can't remember whether they happened several times or only once.
I've smoked cannabis several times over the last two years, and I've noticed that my very long term memory has genuinely deteriorated since then, so I can't remember my childhood as well as a could prior to having done that.
I have several memories from around age 2-3. Mainly things like my bedroom's blue fuzzy curtains, being at the bottom of the basement steps, when my parakeet died, etc. The other big thing is that my dad and sister died when I was three (same week, different causes) and I remember the room with all the caskets and one part of dad's funeral. I'm pretty sure I remember mom taking me to the bedroom to tell me about dad being gone, but know nothing of what she said. I would guess those stick with me because they were somewhat tramatic. Many of these memories were not told to me, but that I questioned my mom about later to see if I was accurate. There's just one memory that I have from a time with my dad that my mom cannot confirm whether happened or not. Of course for each memory like this I have, I have 3 dozen other associated memories that are most likely based on things I've been told or seen in pictures.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I distinctly remember crawling, from a hallway, into an open area with a kitchen/dining room on the right, and a living room on the left. There was a girl my age there too. I described it to my mother once, when I was a late teenager. She had NEVER told me about the house I was in when that old, in fact she was genuinely surprised that I remembered it. We didn't live there very long, only until I was a year old or so. I also have a phobia regarding stairs. I hate all stairs, particularly those that are open between the stairs (like those commonly used outdoors). I was dropped down stairs of that type when I was only about 3 months old. No permanent damage, but I still hate stairs at 26 years old.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
What I'm assuming is my earliest memory is when I was put on a cold metal baby scale (the kind with sides that are bent up to hold the baby in). I remember I started crying and wanted off.
An interesting memory was,
I was watching the star at the top of the christmas blink. I remember it was an eternety between blinks. A couple years ago my mom pulled out the same ornament. I plugged it in to see the interval between blinks, and it was only about 5 seconds. Kinda strange how time seemed so stretched at that age.
My first memory was from when I was 16 months old in 1984: using an Apple Macintosh, first edition :) I can remember moving the mouse cursor around on the screen.
To answer your question, they usually say your first memory is related to intelligence. Somehow I suspect it's more complicated than that. It probably has more to do with when certain parts of the brain become active. Since I'm a bit autistic, the said parts of my brain probably became active at an earlier age than normal in order to compensate for what wasn't working properly. My mother can remember before she could walk.
I remember sitting in a high chair waiting for my mom to come back in the room. She and my dad were talking and I thought to myself how great I was because I could understand everything they said. Then I remember thinking/feeling how aweful it was that I couldn't talk to them.
I don't know my age but I guess I must have been around 1 since I was still getting feed baby food.
Not a specially interesting memory except for the fact that "Ribena" proves this was not an image instilled by later parental narration, because of the Ribena: a parent would naturally say "blood", but at that age I interpreted the red fluid as the red fluid I knew best.
Listen, I am sure in your mind you have convinced yourself that you remember all this. And I'm sure the tales your mom and sisters told you as a child helped "develop" these memories in you.
Hold on to your delusions all you want, pal. Your story is so full of holes, it's ridiculous. ....to the point that I suspect you're making it all up.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Yup. The vacuum salesman who shows me a machine that sucks more than the one I already own is gonna get a sale. Right now I'm pulling up dirt that was on the floor BEFORE the carpet was installed. Thats powerful suckage there!
What Would Satan Do?
But I might have dreamed it.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
My father's side of the family is a particularly long-memoried lot. It was not unusual for us to hear stories of the memories they had going back to when they were infants or toddlers. My own first memory goes back to the time before I learned to walk. I'm wearing diapers sitting in the grass in the side yard at my grandparents' house in North Carolina. My cousin is playing with something, and I want to see what it is. He puts it down, and begins to play with something else. I pick up what he's put down. It's an old bone. Suddenly, he's screaming because he wants the bone back. He's pointing at me and really throwing a fit. I'm not sure if I said "he didn't want it any more," or thought it, but I remember thinking, he's so selfish, doesn't he know how to share? Of course, I was made to give the bone back to him, whereupon, he quickly threw it down. There are snapshots of this event in the family album, but I'm the only one who remembers the details. I began asking my mother at about age 5 if she didn't recall the event, but she never could. I asked my cousin's mother (my father's sister), and she somewhat recalled what happened, but no one besides me recalls the specifics of that first fracas.
wags
.. was the 48K that came in my Apple ][+. Not long after I bought a 16K language card.
Trolling is a art,
My earliest memories are of being carried around Disneyland on my grandfather's shoulders at the age of about 2. I remember how high up I was (he was about 6'4") and how much I enjoyed being with him. He died when I was about 7, but to this day (now 40), I still remember him and Disneyland.
Trauma may also play a part. Remember "Rainman"? That may be a bad example, but my earliest occurance is burnt into my psyche: I was in daycare when I was two and stepped behind a swinging metal horse to see it coming at my face (i was a stupid kid) and the space between the fence post and the backend of the horse was smaller then my head. I can remember vividly all of the thirty or seconds before and after the (head) trauma. I had two black eyes and a busted nose. I'm sure I wouldn't be able to remember that time period if that event had not occurred. And I have read about memories and one of the previous posts is correct about the brain function not "ripe" for long-term memory until at least two. I have very smart friends who don't remember before seven and interesting enough English was not the language used in her house so she like the original poster started English learning (submersion probably) when their memory recall kicks in. So, a new question--Does a shift in primary language when starting school effect how long range memories are accessed? Do you lose 'access' if your main language changes? Heady stuff for a cognitive scientist or early childhood psychologist possibly. Somebody need a PhD thesis for a dissertation?
"Infantile amnesia" is the clinical term for peoples' lack of memory prior to 2-3 years of age. It's been studied quite a bit but the mechanism is not understood.
A loss of early memories seems to occur at some point; many two and three year olds seem to recall memories from when they were only a few months old. However, it's difficult to verify such memories since kids of that age often have a hard time articulating, and any external prompting or suggestion will taint the results.
I have about 5 memories from when I was 3 years old:
"painting" the side of our old house with water, thus changing the wood from dry to a darker wet color.
riding my pedal tractor in our new house, still being built (and getting in trouble for it. I was so proud to have gotten it up the 2 foot step, not knowing right inside the next doorway was a stairwell with no railing and an 8' drop onto cement)
running from my house to a couple houses down, tripping on a driveway and scraping myself up.
riding my big wheel down the steep driveway across the street.
Someone doing the stipling on the ceiling of the new house pointing the brush at me as if he was gonna get me instead. Still think of this when I see those type of ceilings!
I also have a VERY vague memory of watching the Wizard of Oz at that old house and not liking the witch...for some reason I think I also had an earache, though that could be two memories combined. I also remember us having lots of cats (parents feeding the strays) and one being run over (I remember thinking the cat would have been stuck to the tire like on cartoons), but those are just vague recollections, not as vivid as the prior ones.
I know I was three because we moved into the new house right as I turned 4, so all the memories of the old house were when I was 3ish.
Before age 3, I lived in a different house and my sister had not been born yet. I have clear memories of waking up with daylight shining through the window while parents were asleep, calling out to them, and then deciding they were asleep and to go back to sleep myself. I remember glueing my fingers together because none of my dolls had fingers. I remeber mom sitting me besider her as she played piano. And I can draw the rooms of the old house VERY specifically but for some reason, they end up mirror image often.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
I'll share my own experience on these issues. My earliest memories date from when I was four.
I remember distinctly playing in a bathtub with a kid who was usually not very nice and whom my mother had warned me to stay away from. While I know this memory is true (my mother confirmed it), I've never heard anyone else tell me about it unless I specifically prodded them.
I also remember, vaguely, being chased by the neighbors' dogs (Doberman Pinschers) when I was about the same age. This memory has almost no details attached to it, other than the feeling of panic at being unable to find my mother (who was down the street at the time). I "recall" a few details, but these were almost wholly created afterwards.
The reason I trust these memories is that I remember remembering them, throughout my life. I have also noted the development of false details along the way, so I have some idea of what parts to trusts and which not.
I also have a false memory of a hurricane which swept through where lived at that time; I'm fairly sure that memory was created by my parents telling stories. As for summer's length, I'd argue that the perceived length was longer. I am convinced that our perception of time is relative, depending on how much time we have experienced. In other words, time seems to pass more quickly when you get older. I once read a calculation suggesting that if this supposition is true, the life of an eighty-year-old is half-over (measured by perceived time) by age seven (IIRC). Depressing, ne?
I was born in 1979, but my earliest memory is from 1970. My PDP-11/20 (similar to this one) has two core memories that combine for a whopping 16KB of memory! If you think that's cool, well, I can actually modify my memories with a Teletype! Indeed, "ttys" have quite a large effect upon me.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Sincerely,
the metamoderator of your moderator
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
There was a bright light and then someone hit me...
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
Alot can be going on just out of reach of the conscious mind. Dissociative performance of the unconscious is certainly responsible for your inability to source memories from early childhood. Here is a good piece on dissociation. http://www.sidran.org/didbr.html , Chris