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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?"
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.
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.
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.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
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 can remember when I was 1 year old. Not a LOT of things, but I remember one thing, and that was a big red ball that I got from my mom. Of course it wasn't actually that big, according to my mom it was a tiny plush ball that was red and I loved it but my older brother took it and lost it outside just a short while after I got it. I also remember taking my first step. I had remembered it for a while but wasn't sure how acurate my memory was.. as in.. if it really was my first steps.. but sure enough.. I told my dad the story and he was floored that I could recall all the details. But it didn't suprise me because when I took my first step I stood up and I was under the kitchen table.. and I hit my head.. then I fell down, crawled out from under the table.. stood up and walked 3 steps towards my dad who was on the phone.. I was holding my head and crying. I remember my older brother was up on the counter getting the oat meal out of the cubbord. I remember when I was 3 and took off my swimmies and jumped in the pool thinking I could swim.. and then I sunk to the bottom of the pool and sat there thinking that I was really screwed... and then my father grabbed me outta the water and yelled at me. So I dunno what it is.. but maybe some people's long term memory develops quicker? I know that at age 3 I freaked my parents out when I said that I wanted to be an explorer.. my mom said "like Christopher Columbus?" thinking that she'd now teach me about him.. but I said "Well there isn't any thing left here to explore.. so I think I should die and then go explore there". lol
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...
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.
From my own experiences that trauma plays a key factor in people remembering things from early-childhood. I know that I myself can remember things that happened in-utero. For example; I remember driving a large white car in my home town as a child. I asked my mother when it was that she let me drive that car. She then told me that she only had that car for a little while when she was pregenant with me and that the car was sold shortly before my birth! Explain that one! I also know that my mother was going through a lot with my father at the time. So does that mean that her trauma caused me to remember things that happened while still in the womb?
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.
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.
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!
The prompting thing I think, is a pretty likely thing. It helps, if nothing else. After I was born, my parents and I lived in a house along a river, one which we moved out of when I was 2 and a half, and into the house we lived in for the next 20 years or so.
:).
I never would have said I remembered the old house, until I went to visit it as the whole old street/riverscape it was in was being re-landscaped. Most of the houses in the street were empty having already been bought out by the local council, and my parents took the chance to take a look through. I can't say I noticed anything about the front exterior of the place, but once inside I knew it intimately - where the kitchen was, the bricked up doorway in one of the bedrooms, the sun room and the two steps that led down into it, it all came flooding back in general terms like that. The backyard was also familiar, in its curious shape (thirty feet wide and hundreds long), the drain underneath blackberry bushes right up the back... the way it sloped off to one side...
Everything -fit- immediately, in the way that it usually takes me a few weeks to feel I know where everything is in a new place. It was an experience
Apart from that I can barely remember yesterday!
a grrl & her server
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]
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 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!
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)
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.
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!
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.
Okay, I have an weird example that contradicts the "my parents told me" explanation. It concerns my daughter.
Every year I make elaborate Halloween costumes for my children. When my daughter was 7, I was fitting her costume, a cat beanie baby suit. I was reminiscing to her about previous costumes. Our conversation went like this:
Me: You were a cat before, you know....
Her: I know, I was!
Me: When you were three, I think, you had a black --
Her: *cutting me off* I was a cat before and I liked being a cat. And then I was the baby inside, and I could hear daddy singing to me. Then I was born, and I couldn't figure out, why is everyone talking to me and calling me by a different name? Then I realized it was because you didn't know I was a cat, I was a girl to you, and now I'm a girl, but I was a cat before.
Me: *weirded out* Errr, I meant, when you were three, you had a black cat suit for Halloween...
Yes, my daughter randomly spewed forth some kind of past life / womb memory. While I can believe that she had at some point been told that her father used to sing to her before she was born, none of us *ever* said anything about a past life, or the idea of past lives, or cats. She also has quite vivid memories of things that happened when she was a toddler, including things that happened to her when she was alone.
My other child, on the other hand, steadfastly maintains he has no memory of anything before fifth grade.
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.