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]
Slashdot Mirror
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]