I find the distinction between “semantic memories” (of facts), “procedural memories” (how to do something) and “autobiographical memories” (stories from the past) very helpful when thinking about memories.
"semantic memories" (of facts in objective reality), "procedural memories" (how to do something) and "autobiographical memories" (of subjective experience).
I think in order to recall something, you need to have some internalized understanding of it. In those very early formative years, you're still trying to understand 3D vision, and haven't yet learned to apply the shapes and colours you see to the crayons your using to scribble on the wall.
In the same way that if you fail a high school math test based on material you covered in class already, it is because you were unable to recall the bits you don't yet understand. You've seen it before the test, but since you didn't understand it, you can't recall and apply it.
I have only two clear memories from when I was around 2.5 years old. I think they stuck because of an unusual connection. There was a guy who used to come to our door and sell eggs, in huge 24-egg cartons (I didn't count them, I just remember the big square size). And then one day we took a long drive in my father's old car, along wet dirt roads, and ended up at a country house where my mother bought a sewing machine. And it was the same guy selling that one. So he was clearly some kind of peddler of various diverse items (and his farm house explained where he got the eggs from, but that's my much later reasoning).
(the sewing machine is still around, btw, a lifetime later).
For other memories I don't have any clear ones until I'm a bit more than three years old. But I have lots of them.
Edit: Oh, and of course the memory from when I was exactly three.. I fell on my head from quite high, landed on ice.. I probably fainted, but I remember a guy came and carried me home. I got a concussion from that.
Most strong memories are either linked to a strong emotional event or can be linked to a lot of other memories/ideas.
If I get a new piece of information, I'm much more likely to remember it if I can relate it to things I already know. The things that don't relate to anything else are difficult to remember, or at least difficult to recall.
My theory is that when you're first born you have no basis to relate anything to. Eventually you experience enough things that your brain starts making connections to make it easier to start remembering things. Those early memories, if they exist, are orphaned and lost to time without a clear path to recall them.
Except when you're born you've been around for a few months already, likely felt one thing or another shared with your mother.
You're right in another way, though: when you are born your body is still not physically wired up completely yet, a process which starts in the womb but we're not in there long enough to allow it to complete.
This is part of the reasons newborns flail around so much -- they're learning what's connected to what, and that takes lots of repetition.
I would be surprised if this didn't affect the physical wiring of the brain, too.
Also keep in mind that in the body, connectedness is not a binary idea. It's really the strength of connections in relation to each other that make up how we respond to things.
> Except when you're born you've been around for a few months already
With the same level of stimulation that you get from a sensory deprivation tank (by design.) Without memories and associations to get lost in, lying in a sensory deprivation tank would probably be a completely timeless thing, no different than being dead. There's very little you're going to learn in the womb that will help you to interpret what's happening outside, other than you may get some experience with the sounds of your mother's language. [edit: Feelings of acceleration? A sense of one's own mass?]
More like being conceived is, but at the moment we likely weren't conscious. From then on it is a long and slow process of becoming aware. Birth is only one of many steps on the way, it's more special for the mother and others than the person itself.
Compared to many other species except marsupials, human babies aren't close to fully developed. It has to do with evolutionarily with infant brain size and the size of a woman's pelvis. Few other animals have such as a high mortality rate. Sheep, which are domesticated animals, are close in infant mortality rate to humans.
Among the different takes on consciousness one goes that we become conscious when our minds begin to model humans close to us. As you model others in your mind continuously over time, you end up modeling their minds, which leads to creating a model of yourself embedded in them; consciousness as a sort of feedback loop.
Yes, it implies that we are essentially conscious through others and no man is truly an island.
As the article mentions, it might explain the lack of autobiographical memories in early years.
It also explains how treating a person as if they were X results in them eventually behaving as if they are X, especially if you are of consequence to them (a parent, a teacher) or if this treatment is persistent in their life. Since their model of themselves is partly your model of them, it adjusts correspondingly to whatever label they are assigned.
There's very little in a baby's head to hang those memories on. Not only can we not remember birth, but I'd bet that the baby doesn't remember it after five minutes or so (after the fear that it might happen again dies down.)
The only reason I can recall anything is because the words that I use to try to recall it ("what did I do yesterday morning?") take me down a chain of associations that hopefully will spit me out yesterday morning sometime, and that thing I remembered (maybe that I dropped one of my shoes when I was putting them on, or that one of my teeth hurt when I brushed it) can be a conduit to remember the rest of my morning.
The memory experiment just seems like spaced repetition to me [edit:which you can use to teach a cockroach, or a worm.] They show a baby a unique object with a particular use. The next time they show the baby that unique object, they either recall the particular use, or the experimenter demonstrates it again. As these periods grow longer and longer, the memories grow longer. The intuitive reason it would be less effective earlier in life than later is because babies can't see properly, or understand the positions of things in space, so they don't care when a mobile or a train moves; they don't recognize it as interesting.
Note: I can never remember what I did yesterday morning, because with the way I process the world, there's usually nothing in the sentence "What did you do yesterday morning?" that would associate with a particular day; every morning is yesterday morning. If I'm celebrating having done something significant "yesterday," however, I can start with that thing and work backwards to how I prepared for that thing. Some people are journalers/diarists, or heavily scheduled, and knowing what they have to do today, or maybe the last thing they wrote in their journal, would bring up almost immediately the memories that I have a huge difficulty recalling.
We have done some interesting studies on infant memories. At first, you are correct that they basically can't remember anything.
Even then, though. At a very early age, they will recognize their mother. This comes well before "object permanence," which happens at about 8 months.
(Object Permanence is the ability to remember a thing even after you can't see it anymore, and to recognize it as the same, rather than a new one, when it returns. It is the ability to mentally follow an object when it "goes away" and to understand that it still exists)
> At a very early age, they will recognize their mother.
If there's any stimulus that gets worked over and over, it's your mother's face. Surely in a traditional mother-child relationship you use your mother's face to learn how faces work, probably even your own face.
I'm not sure what you're trying to explain to me. I'm aware of object permanence.
My memories are not connected to the calendar. Things I remember are free floating in time, except if they are in a particular place I remember when I was in that place, but that isn't part of my memory of the place.
I've lived in the same house for 20 years now, and don't have anchors to connect memories to dates because of that. I have memories that could be 5 years old or 15, I couldn't say.
I also do this thing, where when I read about something that was some time ago with a specific year, I try to see it in the context of what I was doing back then, and what situation I was in. For example "ah, this was my last year of university, so I was living in that apartment, meeting so and so...".
Again all those things are "free floating" with no feeling of calendar in my mind, but factually knowing what I was doing during some time frame and using other specific "anchor dates" of important events in my life and the world, it's fun to read about something old and reconstructing it in the context of my life back then.
It does not work very well the other way around. There are a lot of memories similar to: "Oh, I remember that party... wonder when that was. I definitely was in university then, but that's not narrowing it down." (Especially because "pre-PhD" university studying lasted much longer in Germany back then than it is nowadays.) If I really wanted to know the exact year, it would be detective work.
I've kept all my emails going back over 20 years now, that helps a lot. I've also been experimenting with keeping a journal, I'm curious how that will work for my future self.
My dad kept a journal of his WW2 experience. He told me some years ago that he read it, and was shocked that it didn't jibe with his recollections.
Sometimes I wonder how people who write autobiographies can possibly remember things in such detail.
I've lost the visual memories, but I remember having memories from an early time, short glimpses. Things like trying to repeat words and the grownups not being patient enough and moving onto the next word before I could attempt to speak. Faint memories of my first steps, walking from my father to my mother, being proud, stuff like that. I remember a particular new year's eve, the grownups were dancing and I was in a crib alone, feeling left out. I remember not liking to wake up in the dark, being scared and crying for mom to get in, or the sensation of having a soiled diaper. People don't believe that I remember. My brother is the same, we still hold onto some distinct memories from really early on, although the specifics are getting muddled and eroded.
Wow, I always thought I had abnormally early memories, but nothing like this. Do you have these memories only from being very young? Or are the glimpses there from infant up to now?
Unfortunately, I'd forgotten a lot from my school years. There are of course moments, some more vivid than others, but I can't really remember my classmates, teachers, school activities and such anymore. I don't really reminisce a lot, maybe I could dig up the memories if I had someone else from that period to talk to.
During a psychedelic trip, I had similar memories of how difficult speaking was in early childhood. It made me quite proud afterwards that I had finally managed to master speaking.
During the same trip, I also heard my mother as if my mental dictionary of sounds was made of her voice.
I remember being carried around, having diapers changed on some table in a bathroom. "Oh back here again", I started to think. I am not kidding, of course I did not think that in words, but just the familiarity of it happening over and over. I believe those are true memories.
Interestingly language shapes memory. There was a study I read years ago (digging up that citation would be next to impossible) that revolved around psychologists asking adults to recall memories from their childhood. And what was curious about the study is that all of the participants reverted to using simpler, more child like vocabulary to describe the memories, because the memories formed at the time were formed along with the level of language they had.
I have observed this in myself when discussing certain computing concepts, talking about projects I undertook 20 and 30+ years ago, and describing in language those concepts that today we would simply say "oh, that's this data structure" or a particular technique or algorithm or concept.
You observe the same thing in certain cultures that do not have the words to describe certain concepts, e.g. complex familial relationships in English. And you observe certain things in gendered and non-gendered Romance languages.
I grew up before there were camcorders and video recording in every phone or even instamatic polaroid cameras in every hand at every point in life, and I have "core memories", very distinct events in my life, where I describe them as "riding a bicycle" moment. One day you cannot ride a bicycle, and then something clicks inside you, and then you can. Learning to swim, learning to read, learning to ride a bicycle, learning to wire up a circuit, learning to stand up in my crib, learning to take my first steps, learning to get out of the pushchair. I have a recurring nightmare, that has lessened over the years, as I've gotten older, but still holds the same terror, that forms part of my earliest memories, I would say I have had that nightmare before I could even speak coherently. It's like a movie that plays in my head, the exact same way, the exact same sounds, the exact same feelings of dread.
I also log a lot of my life, so I don't recall "yesterday" but I can tell you a lot of what was going on in my life on any particular day, from deaths of pets and family members, to changes to my workshop, to code I wrote, to algorithms I was pondering, to new stuff I learnt.
I'm surprised my brain remembers a lot of weird dreams I had along the years. Most often completely imaginary, psychedelic ones with no relation with reality.
I also have a lot of dreams which I remember time to time and it makes me feel confused because why my brain thinks about things which is not even real.
Also, sometimes when I wake up I need a little bit of time to understand if it was real life or just a dream
> And what was curious about the study is that all of the participants reverted to using simpler, more child like vocabulary to describe the memories
This correlates well with the study on toddlers I described here[1]. I guess it's not terribly surprising that words are being used to encode events, they're pretty darn good at compressing details.
I remember waking up and walking around the house until I ran into one of my parents. My father was complaining about something that apparantly I had done, he wanted me to say a phrase that obviously pointed to me and I remember thinking that it was dumb since that was the same as a confession.
Notheless I repeated it to him since more than anything it seemed he just wanted me to say it for his own amusement. Shortly after while I was under this fog of confussion I was given photographs of me with some cousins at some nearby park, the event had happened a week earlier and I was very intrigued by these photos and spent a long time looking at them trying to recall the event in some way
but no matter how much I tried I never did, to me it was the same as looking at a stranger's photos.
That's my first memory, since then its been an uninterrupted stream. By my calculations I must have been older than 3 and younger than 5 since I remember when my sister was born who is the youngest but not my younger brothers. If someone ever mentions a past event all I ever need is a few pieces and then I will eventually recall without problems and with many more details than they themselves remember, same thing with any photograph that includes others. I've never experience anything similar to that initial event.
Weirdly enough, I have a distinct memory when I was "young". Young was in my case, 1.5 years old.
I met my great grandmother, whom was nearing her death. She knew that we were making one last visit and that I was coming. I remember meeting her, being in the old 80's hospital room with the upper white and lower green tiles. I remember how frail her hands were, like delicate paper. I remember getting out of my stroller and laying my head on her hand, carefully.
I could feel this was my last and only moment with her, and that somehow a continuation or some completion was right then and there.
I have other memories that become more 'solid' later. My memories really start around when I was 3 onwards, along when I was able to read. I never was taught... I just knew how to. My mom even still has my first alphabet I wrote down when I was 2.5y old.
Direction was important to me somehow. I can remember the orientation of every house we've lived in. And it's coarse, like north, west, etc...
The very earliest one is of being in my crib, bouncing the little spring that is wound around one of the shafts that hold the crib together. I would lay there and lift it up, and it would bounce. Boing, boing, boing... Lift higher, more bounces. Slamming it down worked too. A related one, a bit later was flicking the little springy door stop and realizing they were the same kind of thing! And that realization is probably why I remember.
I can remember my crib, parts of the house, and the porch with little walk leading to the fence and the little gate that could open to the sidewalk, out of our yard, into the world.
One day, my parents set me down, opened that gate and walked next door, across the street! And there was this other little kid. A little older than me, his name was "cash" and I had associated "cash" with money, and why would someone name a person like money? I thought about that a lot while we met, and I have a set of photos from that day in my head. The walkway, being set down to walk. The gate opening, or open. Walking up to Cash, my parents on my left, us talking while they talked, and then the best:
Cash said, "you want to play downstairs?" I said, "yeah" because I had been downstairs in our house a time or two and people had all manner of interesting stuff in the downstairs! Parts, equipment, things, and all sorts of smells, and the walls are usually not finished, can see stuff we don't always see.
We walked in the door, Cash opened the door leading downstairs and flicked a light switch, and the light came on. He said, "Two way switch" and that it just worked when you needed it to. I remember being super impressed! Like that was some high tech our house did not have. Their house was much bigger than ours...
I need to cut this short. Bottom line is those people were thieves. They had way more stuff downstairs than I had seen and it solidified in my mind. Tires, radios, stuff..
Years later, age 17'ish, I mentioned all this to my mother, who said they moved after finding out!
The people in this discussion saying that memory is about connections are on the right path. The earliest ones I have also have a basis, a connection of sort, a place to be.
Am I the only one who remembers the "black void"? Before my first visual memory I was feeling something and nothing at the same time, it was like a black void that lasted a moment.
My ex-girlfriend told a similar story. Her mum had chosen a "natural" home birth without anaesthetic.
Years later, soon after learning to speak, the baby girl (my ex) kept talking about going back into the warm, dark, safe room.
By the time she and I were in a relationship, it was unclear whether it was her own memory, or just what her mother had repeated back to her over the years. But the story has stuck, and it does make me think deeply about life.
I don't know what you refer to. But I have some kind of memory that I think may be from the womb. It is very hard to put into words, but something similar to waking up from sleep. Just a memory of consciousness.
Even if this memory may not be real, just "remembering" it makes me dizzy, because it feels like it is a memory from when the light was turned on inside me, so to say. A very strange feeling.
I remember several times putting my eldest son to bed when he was a few months old and having this intrusive thought that maybe the reason why he was yelling was because he knew he wouldn’t remember today when he woke up the next day and that every day was like being reborn! Darker than a Black Mirror episode for sure! It only went away when he started developing more of his own personality
(This stuff + sleep deprivation is a heady cocktail!)
Better yet: do not feel as bad because kids won't remember. If you are sleep-training them and they cry for hours, they won't remember the next day anyway.
Edit: this is what a pediatrician said to help console a parent who was hesitant to try sleep training
This is some approximation of what half the globe already believes to occur with reincarnation, but it is not felt exclusively as a dark terror. More like the setting and rising of the sun. The nights are dark and full of terror, but it is cast away with the coming rays.
Another thing is how can we date when a memory is?
I have a collection of memories from when I was 22 months old, but I can date those in retrospect. I also have various memories of being fairly young, but have no idea if they were before or after 22 months as there is nothing to date them by. It's not that different than more modern memories - I can remember something happened about a decade back, but often have no idea if it happened eight years ago or twelve years ago, unless I can date and contextualize it by some means.
I see a lot of claims like this. I believe you believe it's true. The scientific evidence is to the contrary however.
Memory at this age is extremely malleable. And I mean "malleable" even years later. I mean "malleable" as in you can create false memories. Consider this experiment [1]. Participants were told about meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney. A significant number of participants then added their own stories of the same thing happening. Bugs Bunny isn't at Disney. He's a Warner Brothers character.
What I suspect happens is that you're told about these events at various points, enough that you start to fill in the details.
Dating memories from childhood is even more difficult. It's easy to be years off the mark. Often it's only successfully dated by corroborating details eg you remember a dog that died when you were 4 or you remember your room in a house that you moved out of.
> The scientific evidence is to the contrary however
The scientific evidence? Scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons moves to the left or the right, how can a scientist determine that I don't remember what I remember?
I can confirm this happens to me. Several occasions I have a “memory” of something. A house we lived in, a late relative, etc. Things that have an oral history since before most my normal memory begins. I have an image in my head of what that memory was to me. (My normal memory is rather image recall based, even for facts I remember/see the books/movie/website where I saw it as a reference for the memory.) Except on a handful of these early memories, I’ve later, sometimes much later, found an old photo in one of the family albums that IS my memory. Leaves me somewhat in a minor existential crisis each time I realize my memory is a sham.
Given the date of the study, I think there’s something they didn’t consider. Bugs Bunny may not have been there, but Roger Rabbit was! For the bulk of the 90s a child could have met a character that was essentially a Bugs Bunny parody/homage without the appropriate context.
It's anecdotal, but I have memories from when I was an infant. The only reason I know is because my parents relocated a lot when I was young. I have spacial recall of the layout of their apartments. I have specific vivid memories in a kitchen playing with a train. I can describe the layout of my parents apartments and the furniture they had. There are few pictures from that time period, and none showing the layout. A few years ago, I asked my mom about the layout of two of the apartments and described in very good detail the layout and furniture. She said I was correct. We moved out of those apartments by the time I was 2 years old. These are all mundane memories, a clock radio playing "Eye of the Tiger" across from my crib. Playing in a kitchen and dining area. The layout of my bedroom including the fact that there was a brick wall in the room. No pictures of this room and yet my parents remember these details as well. These are mundane spacial details.
There is further a memory I have of being outside of an apartment being carried inside the apartment and to the left of the entry way was a mirrored wall with an orange couch in front of it. My parents have no pictures from this time period, and we moved out of that apartment when I was a little over a month old, because it was, according to my mother, a childless apartment complex, so they had to leave.
I have a lot of memories that pre-date me being 4 which many people I know have no or only one or two memories from their lives that young.
I just find it hard to believe that I manufactured all these memories.
I don't believe that everyone has Infantile Amnesia. Maybe many do, but not everyone.
Lot of interesting comments here. It is odd that we Cartesians consider "memory" to be a kind of passive process, like geologic sedimentation, RAM, or something like a material impression. Memory is interactive. It's a skill, like walking. I've taught kids the art. It takes work and very specific techniques. I'd point anyone interested in the topic to folks like Henri Bergson, or Frances Yates's "Art of Memory".
As Steven Wright says, "I kept a diary when I was born. It said, "Day 1 - Still recovering from the move. Day 2 - Everyone talks to me like I'm an idiot."
I remember reading a book by Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria about a man with 100% memory. Afair, he was able to recall the events right from his birth when he was still in a a crib.
I remember visiting my moms house in my 20s and seeing an old dresser I had as a baby. I immediately had a flash of the feeling of chewing on the drawer handle. My theory is that the memories are there but they just don’t make a lot of sense to us once we start to use language for storage and recall.
I have a memory of falling off a dock when I was 3 while fishing.
I think half the memory might be imagined, which is while I was underwater. I remember it being green and seeing fish nearby, which seems a little unlikely to adult me (I would scare the fish away presumably).
The rest of my memory is being rescued. I'm relatively certain it's a real memory, because I can describe to you what it feels like to have your entire body weight pulling against your scalp, as my dad lifted me out by a handful of hair onto the dock.
It was not painful, as you might imagine. It was rather nice.
I recall reading about a paper where they ran a test on kids just as they had started to learn language, and again a year later after they had learned a lot more.
They did a vocabulary test and played a game. A year later they did another vocabulary test and memory recall challenge. They found that for the kids that remembered the game they played, if they didn't know the word for something at that point, they wouldn't use that word when recalling, even if they had subsequently learned that word in the meantime between tests.
Their conclusion was that memories were closely linked to the vocabulary the kids knew at the time the memory formed.
I have this vivid memory of listening to a conversation between my parents, and they said something (I don't remember what) was going to happen on "Saturday". I did not know what "Saturday" means, so I tried to ask them about it. They could not understand my question though. I sometimes wonder about this memory, if perhaps I was at an age where I could understand some, but not speak. Pretty weird.
We moved when my baby was one year old. Both our old and new houses had stairs he would scoot down backwards on his belly. Once right after we moved he would reach the bottom and keep scooting backwards on the floor. He pretty clearly was thrown off by the fewer steps in the new house.
I've a terrible memory (actually I think its more accurate to say recall, the memories are in there, it's just hard to access at times). However my earliest memory is of seeing an orange glow as I was falling asleep in bed. I found out many years later, well in my 20s, that I used to sleep in a cot in my parents room that had an electric bar heater on the wall. We moved from that house before I was 1. Crazy.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadI would re-state what you said as:
"semantic memories" (of facts in objective reality), "procedural memories" (how to do something) and "autobiographical memories" (of subjective experience).
In the same way that if you fail a high school math test based on material you covered in class already, it is because you were unable to recall the bits you don't yet understand. You've seen it before the test, but since you didn't understand it, you can't recall and apply it.
Edit: Oh, and of course the memory from when I was exactly three.. I fell on my head from quite high, landed on ice.. I probably fainted, but I remember a guy came and carried me home. I got a concussion from that.
If I get a new piece of information, I'm much more likely to remember it if I can relate it to things I already know. The things that don't relate to anything else are difficult to remember, or at least difficult to recall.
My theory is that when you're first born you have no basis to relate anything to. Eventually you experience enough things that your brain starts making connections to make it easier to start remembering things. Those early memories, if they exist, are orphaned and lost to time without a clear path to recall them.
You're right in another way, though: when you are born your body is still not physically wired up completely yet, a process which starts in the womb but we're not in there long enough to allow it to complete.
This is part of the reasons newborns flail around so much -- they're learning what's connected to what, and that takes lots of repetition.
I would be surprised if this didn't affect the physical wiring of the brain, too.
Also keep in mind that in the body, connectedness is not a binary idea. It's really the strength of connections in relation to each other that make up how we respond to things.
With the same level of stimulation that you get from a sensory deprivation tank (by design.) Without memories and associations to get lost in, lying in a sensory deprivation tank would probably be a completely timeless thing, no different than being dead. There's very little you're going to learn in the womb that will help you to interpret what's happening outside, other than you may get some experience with the sounds of your mother's language. [edit: Feelings of acceleration? A sense of one's own mass?]
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/01
Yes, it implies that we are essentially conscious through others and no man is truly an island.
As the article mentions, it might explain the lack of autobiographical memories in early years.
It also explains how treating a person as if they were X results in them eventually behaving as if they are X, especially if you are of consequence to them (a parent, a teacher) or if this treatment is persistent in their life. Since their model of themselves is partly your model of them, it adjusts correspondingly to whatever label they are assigned.
The only reason I can recall anything is because the words that I use to try to recall it ("what did I do yesterday morning?") take me down a chain of associations that hopefully will spit me out yesterday morning sometime, and that thing I remembered (maybe that I dropped one of my shoes when I was putting them on, or that one of my teeth hurt when I brushed it) can be a conduit to remember the rest of my morning.
The memory experiment just seems like spaced repetition to me [edit:which you can use to teach a cockroach, or a worm.] They show a baby a unique object with a particular use. The next time they show the baby that unique object, they either recall the particular use, or the experimenter demonstrates it again. As these periods grow longer and longer, the memories grow longer. The intuitive reason it would be less effective earlier in life than later is because babies can't see properly, or understand the positions of things in space, so they don't care when a mobile or a train moves; they don't recognize it as interesting.
Note: I can never remember what I did yesterday morning, because with the way I process the world, there's usually nothing in the sentence "What did you do yesterday morning?" that would associate with a particular day; every morning is yesterday morning. If I'm celebrating having done something significant "yesterday," however, I can start with that thing and work backwards to how I prepared for that thing. Some people are journalers/diarists, or heavily scheduled, and knowing what they have to do today, or maybe the last thing they wrote in their journal, would bring up almost immediately the memories that I have a huge difficulty recalling.
Even then, though. At a very early age, they will recognize their mother. This comes well before "object permanence," which happens at about 8 months.
(Object Permanence is the ability to remember a thing even after you can't see it anymore, and to recognize it as the same, rather than a new one, when it returns. It is the ability to mentally follow an object when it "goes away" and to understand that it still exists)
If there's any stimulus that gets worked over and over, it's your mother's face. Surely in a traditional mother-child relationship you use your mother's face to learn how faces work, probably even your own face.
I'm not sure what you're trying to explain to me. I'm aware of object permanence.
I've lived in the same house for 20 years now, and don't have anchors to connect memories to dates because of that. I have memories that could be 5 years old or 15, I couldn't say.
I also do this thing, where when I read about something that was some time ago with a specific year, I try to see it in the context of what I was doing back then, and what situation I was in. For example "ah, this was my last year of university, so I was living in that apartment, meeting so and so...".
Again all those things are "free floating" with no feeling of calendar in my mind, but factually knowing what I was doing during some time frame and using other specific "anchor dates" of important events in my life and the world, it's fun to read about something old and reconstructing it in the context of my life back then.
It does not work very well the other way around. There are a lot of memories similar to: "Oh, I remember that party... wonder when that was. I definitely was in university then, but that's not narrowing it down." (Especially because "pre-PhD" university studying lasted much longer in Germany back then than it is nowadays.) If I really wanted to know the exact year, it would be detective work.
My dad kept a journal of his WW2 experience. He told me some years ago that he read it, and was shocked that it didn't jibe with his recollections.
Sometimes I wonder how people who write autobiographies can possibly remember things in such detail.
During the same trip, I also heard my mother as if my mental dictionary of sounds was made of her voice.
Interestingly language shapes memory. There was a study I read years ago (digging up that citation would be next to impossible) that revolved around psychologists asking adults to recall memories from their childhood. And what was curious about the study is that all of the participants reverted to using simpler, more child like vocabulary to describe the memories, because the memories formed at the time were formed along with the level of language they had.
I have observed this in myself when discussing certain computing concepts, talking about projects I undertook 20 and 30+ years ago, and describing in language those concepts that today we would simply say "oh, that's this data structure" or a particular technique or algorithm or concept.
You observe the same thing in certain cultures that do not have the words to describe certain concepts, e.g. complex familial relationships in English. And you observe certain things in gendered and non-gendered Romance languages.
I grew up before there were camcorders and video recording in every phone or even instamatic polaroid cameras in every hand at every point in life, and I have "core memories", very distinct events in my life, where I describe them as "riding a bicycle" moment. One day you cannot ride a bicycle, and then something clicks inside you, and then you can. Learning to swim, learning to read, learning to ride a bicycle, learning to wire up a circuit, learning to stand up in my crib, learning to take my first steps, learning to get out of the pushchair. I have a recurring nightmare, that has lessened over the years, as I've gotten older, but still holds the same terror, that forms part of my earliest memories, I would say I have had that nightmare before I could even speak coherently. It's like a movie that plays in my head, the exact same way, the exact same sounds, the exact same feelings of dread.
I also log a lot of my life, so I don't recall "yesterday" but I can tell you a lot of what was going on in my life on any particular day, from deaths of pets and family members, to changes to my workshop, to code I wrote, to algorithms I was pondering, to new stuff I learnt.
This correlates well with the study on toddlers I described here[1]. I guess it's not terribly surprising that words are being used to encode events, they're pretty darn good at compressing details.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31719872
Notheless I repeated it to him since more than anything it seemed he just wanted me to say it for his own amusement. Shortly after while I was under this fog of confussion I was given photographs of me with some cousins at some nearby park, the event had happened a week earlier and I was very intrigued by these photos and spent a long time looking at them trying to recall the event in some way but no matter how much I tried I never did, to me it was the same as looking at a stranger's photos.
That's my first memory, since then its been an uninterrupted stream. By my calculations I must have been older than 3 and younger than 5 since I remember when my sister was born who is the youngest but not my younger brothers. If someone ever mentions a past event all I ever need is a few pieces and then I will eventually recall without problems and with many more details than they themselves remember, same thing with any photograph that includes others. I've never experience anything similar to that initial event.
I met my great grandmother, whom was nearing her death. She knew that we were making one last visit and that I was coming. I remember meeting her, being in the old 80's hospital room with the upper white and lower green tiles. I remember how frail her hands were, like delicate paper. I remember getting out of my stroller and laying my head on her hand, carefully.
I could feel this was my last and only moment with her, and that somehow a continuation or some completion was right then and there.
I have other memories that become more 'solid' later. My memories really start around when I was 3 onwards, along when I was able to read. I never was taught... I just knew how to. My mom even still has my first alphabet I wrote down when I was 2.5y old.
Direction was important to me somehow. I can remember the orientation of every house we've lived in. And it's coarse, like north, west, etc...
The very earliest one is of being in my crib, bouncing the little spring that is wound around one of the shafts that hold the crib together. I would lay there and lift it up, and it would bounce. Boing, boing, boing... Lift higher, more bounces. Slamming it down worked too. A related one, a bit later was flicking the little springy door stop and realizing they were the same kind of thing! And that realization is probably why I remember.
I can remember my crib, parts of the house, and the porch with little walk leading to the fence and the little gate that could open to the sidewalk, out of our yard, into the world.
One day, my parents set me down, opened that gate and walked next door, across the street! And there was this other little kid. A little older than me, his name was "cash" and I had associated "cash" with money, and why would someone name a person like money? I thought about that a lot while we met, and I have a set of photos from that day in my head. The walkway, being set down to walk. The gate opening, or open. Walking up to Cash, my parents on my left, us talking while they talked, and then the best:
Cash said, "you want to play downstairs?" I said, "yeah" because I had been downstairs in our house a time or two and people had all manner of interesting stuff in the downstairs! Parts, equipment, things, and all sorts of smells, and the walls are usually not finished, can see stuff we don't always see.
We walked in the door, Cash opened the door leading downstairs and flicked a light switch, and the light came on. He said, "Two way switch" and that it just worked when you needed it to. I remember being super impressed! Like that was some high tech our house did not have. Their house was much bigger than ours...
I need to cut this short. Bottom line is those people were thieves. They had way more stuff downstairs than I had seen and it solidified in my mind. Tires, radios, stuff..
Years later, age 17'ish, I mentioned all this to my mother, who said they moved after finding out!
The people in this discussion saying that memory is about connections are on the right path. The earliest ones I have also have a basis, a connection of sort, a place to be.
Years later, soon after learning to speak, the baby girl (my ex) kept talking about going back into the warm, dark, safe room.
By the time she and I were in a relationship, it was unclear whether it was her own memory, or just what her mother had repeated back to her over the years. But the story has stuck, and it does make me think deeply about life.
(This stuff + sleep deprivation is a heady cocktail!)
Edit: this is what a pediatrician said to help console a parent who was hesitant to try sleep training
A variation on Merlin Sickness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence
How can he be afraid of the thing that happened yesterday if he doesn't remember yesterday?
I have a collection of memories from when I was 22 months old, but I can date those in retrospect. I also have various memories of being fairly young, but have no idea if they were before or after 22 months as there is nothing to date them by. It's not that different than more modern memories - I can remember something happened about a decade back, but often have no idea if it happened eight years ago or twelve years ago, unless I can date and contextualize it by some means.
Memory at this age is extremely malleable. And I mean "malleable" even years later. I mean "malleable" as in you can create false memories. Consider this experiment [1]. Participants were told about meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney. A significant number of participants then added their own stories of the same thing happening. Bugs Bunny isn't at Disney. He's a Warner Brothers character.
What I suspect happens is that you're told about these events at various points, enough that you start to fill in the details.
Dating memories from childhood is even more difficult. It's easy to be years off the mark. Often it's only successfully dated by corroborating details eg you remember a dog that died when you were 4 or you remember your room in a house that you moved out of.
[1]: https://www.washington.edu/news/2001/06/11/i-tawt-i-taw-a-bu...
The scientific evidence? Scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons moves to the left or the right, how can a scientist determine that I don't remember what I remember?
There is further a memory I have of being outside of an apartment being carried inside the apartment and to the left of the entry way was a mirrored wall with an orange couch in front of it. My parents have no pictures from this time period, and we moved out of that apartment when I was a little over a month old, because it was, according to my mother, a childless apartment complex, so they had to leave.
I have a lot of memories that pre-date me being 4 which many people I know have no or only one or two memories from their lives that young.
I just find it hard to believe that I manufactured all these memories.
I don't believe that everyone has Infantile Amnesia. Maybe many do, but not everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky
Hope my kid will more memories of me, her mom and the people that love her than the few I have of my dad.
I think half the memory might be imagined, which is while I was underwater. I remember it being green and seeing fish nearby, which seems a little unlikely to adult me (I would scare the fish away presumably).
The rest of my memory is being rescued. I'm relatively certain it's a real memory, because I can describe to you what it feels like to have your entire body weight pulling against your scalp, as my dad lifted me out by a handful of hair onto the dock.
It was not painful, as you might imagine. It was rather nice.
They did a vocabulary test and played a game. A year later they did another vocabulary test and memory recall challenge. They found that for the kids that remembered the game they played, if they didn't know the word for something at that point, they wouldn't use that word when recalling, even if they had subsequently learned that word in the meantime between tests.
Their conclusion was that memories were closely linked to the vocabulary the kids knew at the time the memory formed.
Been trying to find it again to no avail, sadly.