Slashdot Mirror
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?"
...from when I was two years old; but actually it's more like a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory...
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
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.
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.
So how does zombieism work for you?
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
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.
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.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
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
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.
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."
256k
-
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
Maybe for "Total Recall 2". That would make this article remotely relevant to the /. crowd.
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
--
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.
Blogging because I can...
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 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.
...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
Definitely. If I wanted to know something like this I'd go and read a book or ask a psychologist, because most of the questions were probably answered at least 50 years ago by people who know a whole lot more about what they're doing than a bunch of slashdot readers.
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.
I too remember something from 2 years old. I remember a birthday party for me with a cake on a box for a table, and my family, and one of their friends over.
I found out years later that that memory was probably from the 2 year party, but maybe my memory has failed since then and it was more like my 3rd birthday.
I remember lots from 3, 4 and 5 years old. The Article is so wrong that "breathed in" oxygen is needed for memory. I don't think cells can tell the difference, duh.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
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.
I remember when people, instead of bothering the rest of us with their moaning, just used their preferences to turn off the sections they didn't want to read about.
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
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
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
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.
Yeah, because information about the formation of memories could never be of any interest to geeks.
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 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.
I got some 1MB 80ns 30 pin SIMMS.
Here's a short story about my first memory.
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
LOL exactly! My dad was at the other end of the pool and saw me jump in and then saw my swimmies on the side of the pool and he yelled to my brother.. my brother was talking to a friend and didn't hear him.. so my dad saw to my rescue.. See.. I thought that my brother was floating not actually standing on the bottom.. so when I jumped in, I assumed that I too would float there without my swimmies.. I told my dad I was sorry but he actually didn't yell at me.. he was so happy I was ok. I also ran out in front of a truck when I was 5, I got hit by this pickup and it was going about 35mph. I though the grace of god or something got STUCK to the front of the truck. My shirt got caught on the grill of the truck and some how I didn't get thrown under the truck. I tried to pull my shirt free and fall UNDER the truck thinking that i could do like Indiana Jones (just saw that movie a couple days before this happened) and i'd be ok. SOME HOW I couldn't get my shirt untagled. The people didn't know they hit me until my arm flew up and hit the top of the truck (I was pushed along on the front of the truck for over 200 yards). When they stopped they pulled me off the truck and they had no problem with my shirt being tangled around it.. they got me to the side of the road and screamed for help (since there weren't a lot of cell phones in 1987) and I got up and started walking home.. and I remember thinking "I am in SOOOOOOOO much trouble! How am I going to tell my mom I got hit by a truck!". Well they grabbed me and lay me down.. the ambulance got there and took me to the hospital... I didn't have a broken bone or any thing! Not a scratch. So my mom got there and sure enough.. I wasn't in any trouble. So this taught me that if you are injured bad enough you can get away with any thing! So any ways.. by the time I was 14 I had had stitches 13 times, and one of those was when I cut my penis really bad in a skateboarding accident! So damn... thankfully every thing works just fine now.. but hey, I get to tell girls "wanna see one of my (many) scars?" lol
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.
what was the question?
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
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 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 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.
> take a class, read a book, learn.
Taking a class is probably more important in modern neurosciences than reading textbooks.
The leading edge of knowledge in neuroscience is moving forward very quickly and in many different directions. Biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, computer science, systems biology, and the traditional subjects of brain and cognitive science are all taking their own productive directions in the areas of learning, memory, behavior, ailments, and intelligence. Lots of the neatest stuff isn't in textbooks yet, and the best way to get an understanding of the state of the art is to take classes or seminars.
If I was an undergrad having to choose my major again, I couldn't be more excited. As it is, joining the business world, the areas of neuro imaging, pharma/biotech, and neuro medical devices have so much potential and are growing such that getting into neurotechnologies is really a no-brainer.
The most common explanation for early "memories" (like pre-3 years old) is that you had heard the story when you were old enough to remember, then incorporated that into your long term memory. You eventually think you remember it because it's been told to you before, and you come up with your own visual for the story. It's not really a memory of the event, it's a memory of your imagination when you heard about the event.
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
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.
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 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.
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 ~
News or Ask Slashdot? Both generally seem to have some pretty good articles.
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.
Dream analysis is sci-fi. Didn't you get that memo?
dude!
I've had just as avtive a life as any red blooded american and have managed ton only break a toe and slice an appendage or two. have you considered just getting a big padded suit to walk around in? maybe just live in a bubble? considering your luck the bubble would just pop and you'd start to suffocate but be rescued in the nick of time or something.
-
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
Are you sure they're real memories though? I seem to remember stuff like that from when I was young (say less than 4), but then I become unsure. Could it be that I just heard someone mention the incidents and then I imagined (subconsciously) what it would have been like, and now I think that I am remembering? You can't really tell unless you are recalling something that no one ever spoke to you about, but that another person can confirm. Another thing is how do you tell which memories are the earliest? I can't distinguish memories from when I was 4 or 5 in chronological order (unless I can associate them with separate events that I can date indepedently). Maybe it's just my messed up mind.
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]
Alternatively, it could have been that the brain cells start dying at that point, except that I think they're supposed to be dying through your whole life, aren't they??? <scratches head>
Be careful! New moon tonight.
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
"Mom, that's a *lake*"
"Mom, those are *trees*"
"Mom, that's *our* house?"
I was a little older than two. I don't really remember anything before that. And I don't start remebering anything after that until I was 4. (And even then, it's just bits and pieces). My "full scale memoery" doesn't start kicking in until about 1st grade.
So, yes, here's me chiming in on "sensory events" being important to memory.
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
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 when people, instead of bothering the rest of us with their moaning, just used their preferences to turn off the sections they didn't want to read about.
I remember when articles intended to provoke philosophical discussion were not posted under inappropriate topics like "News". Ahh... those were the days.
NO CARRIER
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 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.
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 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!
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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
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 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.
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
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
Mod up. He's absolutely correct. Thats one of the problems with verifying memory. Did I actually remember the event? Or do I remember someone telling me about the event and then remembering it as if it were from my point of view.
For example, one of my "earliest" memories is learning to talk. I remember my mom trying to get me to say what I had to eat for dinner. She'd say "Chinese" and I'd say "Chi-nee". Then my mom and dad would laugh and they'd say "Apple" and I'd say "Appee".
But in reality, I don't really remember this. My mom used to record me trying to talk because it was 'cute'. I've heard those recordings so many times my brain actually thinks I remember that. It's possible my brain creates a link from a partial part of the real memory and the information supplied by tapes and 2nd party stories.. but who knows. The brain is a vastly complex organ that we will never fully understand.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Someone else mentioned reading. I told the story of seeing Alien when I was 2. I didn't learn to read until I was 5.
I think one thing is that we may remember things early in our lives, but there is nothing to connect the memory to an exact time, so we just think they happened later.
Sure everyone starts forming memories at slightly different times, just like people start to walk and talk at different times.
I also didn't start talking until I was 18 months old.
This is kinda Meta you know.. Michael is trying to justify his dupe postings.
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 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!
from abcnews:
-----
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?
"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.
Repeal the DMCA!
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.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
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
Well, the average age for starting to remember things may be three, but that doesn't mean that its the same for all people. Some people may develop things a little faster than others. Just as some kids learn to walk and talk early on, etc.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
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.
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?
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.
Oh damn.. yeah my family didn't think i'd ever make it to 14. I did of course. I also sat next to some one as they accidently blew their hand off with a shot gun.. and not long after that I had a loaded shotgun pointed at my head and the trigger was pulled and it didn't go off... the guy was cleaning it and didn't realize it was loaded until AFTER he had pulled the trigger.. then when he took it apart some more he found the round in the chamber. Ok so here is what happened.. I was across the street from my father's house at a friend's place. He built a small skateboard ramp. It was about 2.5' high... so basically you'd go up the little ramp and pivot around and come down it.. it wasn't large or any thing. Welp, I got on the board, went at the ramp, but when I got to the top, I tried to pivot too late and ended up flying OFF the end of the ramp landing on a red brick that was laying on the ground. Welp the edge of that brick hit the base of my penis and since i was only wearing thin shorts, the force of it hitting me there ripped it right open. I went inside and my dad yelled at me for using the wrong door (front was only for company) and I said "Well, it's an emergency" and I showed him what happened and he about fainted.. got me in the car and took me to the E.R. What was funny was him explaining to the nurse at the ER why it was so vital that I got put at the front of the line! lol. She didn't think it was a big deal but my dad didn't agree. So basically she didn't get it cause she doens't HAVE a penis! lol So about 2 years after that, my friend's bike got stolen and we went out to try to find out who did it since it had JUST been stolen off my porch. So I got on my roller blades and when I was about 2 miles from my house, I hit a bump and fell on a brick road and cut my left knee open. It was a gash on the right side of my knee that started at the knee cap and went down about 5" and I could see the bone, since there isn't much there but skin. So it actually wasn't bleeding at all. A woman saw it happen and stopped to give me a ride to my house.. and she said "Please don't bleed on my car". Now come on! Like I could control that???? So I bled on her car just out of spite ;)
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.
Oh here is a webcam shot of my knee scar just so that ya know i'm not full of it. http://bootleg.tv/torrey/scar.jpg I have since become less wreckless. When I was young, they said I was out of uniform if I didn't have stitches or a bruise or cut some where. Thing is, I have NEVER broken a bone. Interesting.
Ack here is a click-able link Knee Scar oh and it was 5" long when it happened... but as it healed and i grew it's now only like 3" long. It sucked cause for 6 weeks I couldn't bend my knee. Oh that was awful. I also had a hernia (sp?) when I was 12 but didn't know it till I took my physical for pop-warner. They said "didn't this hurt? I mean, how did this happen?" my response "It didn't hurt at all.. but then again I have a VERY high tolerence for pain"
Same here, I remember the rainbow wallpaper in my nursery when I was around 1. That's the only thing I remember from that long ago though. After that, my memories seem to start at about age 4.
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
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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 do not believe this is true.
At no point do I recall being told of the day when my bottle broke in a pot of hot water, but I vividly remember looking up at my worried parents who were trying to find me another bottle. I was barely walking.
There is much about our minds that is not understood by current scientific schools of thought.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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
None of the earliest things I remember are pain related. There are three distinct images I can call up, and two are closely related. They're from when my family and I went on a sea plane ride in New Hampshire when I was 2. I remember looking up at the pilot from the back seat of the plane, and I also remember my mother jumping on a trampoline that the pilot had (or which was at the place where the plane was parked, I don't remember the details, only images).
I also remember a trip to Disney World (or Land, whichever is in Florida), also from when I was 2. It was near a pool, and someone gave me a raft to use in the pool (one of those really shallow wading pools).
And thats about it. I can't remember anything else until after I was in Kindergarden.
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
Based on your model, we should be able to remember from about 6 months old. Assuming that you mean the lack of myelin is what prevents out very early and womb memories.
-psy
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. ;-)
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
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.
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 always believed that having such diverse experiences early in life has helped my education and intellectual development. This view is espoused by programs such as the Head First initiative and others that help to educate children from an early age. I firmly believe that this is the major downfall of the US educational system. Kindergartens are nothing more than daycare centers, while they should be taking advantage of the learning abilities of young children by teaching them math and science instead of how to play and fight.
The view that young children are too stupid to learn is a very damaging one. Children absorb everything they are shown; and the more things they are exposed to at this age, the better they will be able to view problems or situations from all angles later in life.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Christmas, Twin Falls, Idaho...
I remember being naked at the age of threeish in a paddling pool. Only, I remembered seeing myself naked. Hah, out of body experience, anyone? All it was was a photo in the album of me running around starkers. Most of my early memories (all?) derive from photos.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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...
... MEMORY HAS YOU.
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.
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 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)
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.
If you can't trust your own memory, then what can you trust? Kinda makes you wonder how much of what you know really is real. I remember a few glimpses of the house I lived in when I was three, but I wonder how much of that I actually remember and how much I reconstructed from stuff I heard from what other people said. Especially since I don't remember hearing anyone else talk about it.
Just as worrysome is when it goes the other way and real memories turn into immaterial dreams. I once found (when I was 6) a diamond in an alley amid some broken glass. I took it home and showed my mom. She didn't belive me for a week. But she took it to a jeweler and it was, in fact, a real diamond.
Ten years later I was absolutely convinced that it never happened until I had proof otherwise. I had been trained not to trust my memories, because memories that old can't be real.
I think there's a certain degree of imposing intrusiveness in telling a person that his memories are not real, with nothing to back it up with but the latest phychological studies and heresay.
Does a man who knows nothing but books, who has studied psychology for years but whose entire body of relevant knowledge comes from the (sometimes questionable) studies and (often contradictory) conclusions of others, have any right or excuse to impose his own beliefs on others? Particularly when those beliefs contradict the other's own reason? I say I remember something happening. A psychologist says it never actually happened, and if it did happen, I don't really remember it; I just think I do. I have my own memory to back up my claim. The psychologist? Statistics and probability. He says that for other people they don't really remember those things, so therefore I don't either.
It just seems wrong.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How true ARE our memories? When we run out, does our mind just "make" some?
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
You're right, it really does make you wonder what you can trust. The kicker is that you can easily verify that memories are not reliable. Put someone (possibly yourself) in a situation with many details and some sort of activity or storyline, then get them to tell you about it 30 minutes later. Get them to give you detail on what they remember, particularly their visual recollections. They will be clear, specific, and the subject will most likely insist on their accuracy. But they will be wrong in many details. Often so convincingly wrong that if you don't have photographic evidence of what actually happened, you will yourself have difficulty resisting the credibility of the new version!
Better yet, talk to someone who was nodding off during a movie, but didn't realize it. It's best if they clearly saw the beginning and the end. Ask them to describe the plot of the movie. You'll get a complete and (moderately) coherent summary of a plotline that gets you from beginning to end, but it won't match the actual plotline of the film!
It appears that visual memory is constructed on-the-fly as we recollect things, from whatever details are actually available plus a great deal of interpolation based on what we think is probable. Think of it as a compression method: Long-term memory only stores "factoids" that are unique or differ from regular/repeatable experience.
Once you realize that your own memories are untrustworthy, it all gets quite weird...
-Graham
I remember going to a picnic with my father and going home with my mother.
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?
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.
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
Heh. By that age, lots of boys are large enough to do serious damage to an unwary adult. You dad's just lucky your first reaction wasn't to pop him one. Probably would have served him right, too. ;)
And the brethren went away edified.
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.
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 can remember back to age 4 or so, *perhaps* some stuff from 3, the stuff i remember most is the old set of patio chairs we had, and how they were rusting in their old age (we got rid of them later on) - thats about all i remember, up to age 4, where i remember lots of stuff (i was in preschool, and i can even remember a name or two from that). my mom says i was reading basic stuff at 3, and the real interesting thing about my early childhood is that up to age 4 or so, there was something up with me (i'm still not sure), i think i was having seizures, they thought it was epilepsy, anyways they perscribed some medicine to me - now actually, i VIVIDLY remember that medicine, it tasted like bubblegum, and i drank it from a tube thingie. but anyways, i kept having seizures, which i do not remember at all, and finally for whatever reason, my parents had a quibble with the doctor (they didnt agree on something), and they stopped giving me the medicine, and the seizures stopped. i also remember taking an EEG test at age 6 or so....and...now i remember something else which i have always remembered but forgot about in this little post, i remember regularly going to some clinic type place with my dad, i remember the robotic doors (for wheelchairs), i remember sitting in a chair getting a shot, and i remember squeezing my dads arm while getting the shot. now this happened monthly or something like that, because i remember it happening at regular intervals. anyways thats what i remember from my early childhood. the seizures stopped before i ever entered school, and starting from preschool i remember alot. its also interesting that i had all of those strange problems as a young child but i've always scored as someone else said "off the charts" - that is - 99's, on standardized tests, although you could argue that the majority of people are pretty stupid so maybe that doesnt mean much. i've also always been a lazy procrastinating bastard, so all of that intelligence has been wasted a bit, although now that i'm finishing high school (2 years late), i plan on getting my ass to college, and doing something with myself, now that i've found something i'm passionate about (computers!). so there's my life story, in one big long stream of non-paragraph seperating consciousness :)
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.
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:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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 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 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.
This is a good point. Not all early memories are necessarily false ones, but false memories can happen.
:)
I have a very strong, very real recollection of playing with my brother in my Mom's blue Champ*. I was probably about two or three. My brother was playing with the release brake, and accidentally released it. We panicked and bailed out of the car, and the wheels rolled over my legs. Then my mom came running out, and discovered that I was basically uninjured. She yelled at me.
I asked her about it a couple of years ago. Of course, I had a lot of questions. Why had she let us play around in the car? How did I manage to have a car roll over my legs without breaking anything? How did the car get rolling so fast, when the driveway at the Starcrest house wasn't that steep?
My mom looked very confused for a few seconds, then explained to me that I'd never been run over. Which explains why I don't associate any pain with the memory.
My theory about the incident relates back to a memory I have about that memory. In first grade, somebody brought in a show and tell picture of some daredevil guy letting a car roll over his stomach. I told the kid who brought it in that something like that had happened to me. So that may be when I first "invented" the memory.
Or maybe Mom is just blocking it out.
* A little car from the 1970s.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
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.
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.
As for early childhood memories, I have several distinct ones from when I was 2 years old or younger, becuase they involve the house I lived in until that age. I'm pretty sure they aren't false memories. The thing is though, I've been remembering these things for almost as long as I can, um, remember. So it seems to me that the following happened: A short while after the events in question took place, something happened to trigger the memory of them, which reinforced the memory in my brain. After that, they were slightly more easy to trigger, and some were triggered and reinforced again. And so on to the present day. AS a result, there are a handful of random memories from my childhood that I can easily trigger.
But, I haven't remembered anything new from my childhood in a long time. So, either these memories are lost, or simply inaccessible. I think it's a little of both. Before I learned to talk, most of my memories were probably based on sight, or emotion. So it would probably take seeing/feeling the same things again to trigger any of those memories.
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?
Can't rememeber anything else for years and years and years...
Cheers,
Iab
How do you remember it happening? For me I can remember no sound, just the events. The events also seemed to be slowed down a little. Also, if you don't mind me asking, did you have a near death experience? I did - I didn't get the tunnel-of-light stuff, I got the feeling I was floating out of my body stuff instead. And no, I'm not religious.
Very interested to hear that this has happened to someone else so young, and that they remembered it too.
Cheers,
Ian
The other child - is he IN the fifth grade? If so, that MIGHT indicate a problem... ;)
--- http://foo.ca
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
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.
I had nightmares about it until I was 10 or 12. So long story short, years later I came to find out how I drowned was, the jacuzzi had a thick black rubber mat that was used for insulation, and I fell through a seam on the matt. So I theorize that what I remember is being held down by the matt.
I think a traumatic event like polyneuritus or drowning could make an impression on someone even if they were young :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Well, that may be the most common explanation, and I am sure it is correct in some cases, but there is another explanation: that sometimes people really do remember things from very early childhood.
The assertion that people dont remember things from earlier is obviously ridiculous. How the hell would we ever advance at all if memory did not work earlier ?
I have an early memory from being in my pram, outside, on a sunny day and being frustrated at not being able to get out and play. This is not something anybody told about [although since memory is notoriously faulty I cannot prove that I didnt invent it or even be 100% certain of that, but it I believe it is a genuine memory as firmly as I believe in any other memories.]
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
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.
Yes. The quip I make to people is that special effects fans are going to be desperately disappointed...
I had no mat, and no really dark blackness. It was more a fade-out kind of thing for me - as I said I had a near-death experience of floating, and from that floating things sort of faded out. Your comment about it being tangible mirrors my feeling of being isolated - set apart from everything else.
I'm trying hard to describe this in literal terms rather than religious or even just spiritual terms - from the description you gave, particularly about the vague sense of peace, I think you will understand what I mean.
Cheers,
Ian
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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!!
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.
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
Yeah, like live in their pop-up happy dungeons and never learn to actually program the damn things.
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.
But I might have dreamed it.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
.. was the 48K that came in my Apple ][+. Not long after I bought a 16K language card.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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!