Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew. But I rea…
Yep i have similar memory about playing with a toy, but somehow rewritten to new home. But i am sure noone 'told' about this, seems more like i have fragment of memory, and mind filled the missing information with something and rewritten the memory
The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and then as we get older we forget them again. If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the early memories are completely lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
My hypothesis (along with your observation) is that as we age, the way we remember things is different. At a young age, it's all sounds and images. Then language gets added to it, and we start seeing events in different ways. Our old ways of accessing information (in the brain) are used less often, and we forget.
This touches on an interesting aspect of my very early childhood memories. Do you ever have dreams where you "know" you're in a familiar location, like your old high school or childhood home, but they have a completely different feeling to them, and may or may not have the same layout as in real life? My very early childhood memories have a similar sort of dreamlike quality. I know objectively the memory takes place in the neighborhood I grew up in, but there is a certain atmosphere or feeling that isn't the same and that I can never quite relay or capture today. I've wondered if this isn't due to the way these early memories are formed and stored.
Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew. But I rea…
It seems like the brain fills in fragments of memories it deems unimportant, can't locate, or that have been otherwise lost. It doesn't make sense for an event to take place without a location so your brain picks a likely location and injects that into the memory.
Knowing that memories are like Flash and subject to being rewritten when recalled is a bit unsettling but the research seems clear that it definitely happens. It also explains why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable: the brain ignores trivial and unimportant details (the boring shirt some random person was wearing) but when pressed to recall the details your brain fills in (I would have remembered him being naked so he must have been wearing something boring). Even tiny hints can produce fake memories. Once this process takes place people will swear that their memory is correct because for them it is the way things happened!
Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew. But I rea…
My earliest memory is from about the same age. I remember looking down from the balcony at the apartment complex where we lived. We moved from that complex before I was three-years-old and I don't remember anything else about it. I brought it up at some point and was told that they ended up putting up chicken wire because I was always trying to look through the iron bars. But I'm fairly certain the memory came first (and I have no memory of the chicken wire).
The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and then as we get older we forget them again. If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the early memories are completely lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
Agree. Let me add. Infantile/childhood amnesia has many causes, but being unable to form a memory is not one of them. Memories in infancy are fragile, and context dependent, and even if retained through life are likely fragmentary, non-verbal, non-conceptually embedded, that we'd not recognize it as an episodic memory. Moreover, the medial temporal lobes and hippocampus (brain region critical to relational memory formation) are still immature before age 2, before which time the dentate gyrus in the tri-synaptic circuit of the hippocampus may not be fully operational, potentially leading to massive interference between similar memories from less efficient representational separation and a bias towards pattern completion. The last tidbit is particularly interesting as such a bias to pattern completion may support the rapid semantic knowledge acquisitions occurring early in life, which may benefit from layering of similar representations to extract reoccurring key features about the world, as opposed to the more efficient pattern separation later in life that allows more fine grained memory distinctions to be retained and allowing individual events to be better remembered.
I actually did some casual research into this 3 years ago before my kids were born. All the theories and speculation in the article have been disproven - specifically theories about autobiographical memory or narrative memory being important. What actually happens is the brain undergoes periods of shift/growth/change that nuke the ability to recall earlier memories. Most of the incorrect explanations come from adult-oriented bias: The memories are so far gone we can't even remember that we were once capable of remembering earlier times.
Children can remember events clearly from before they acquired language. No adult has ever been shown to have this ability (it is always due to mis-remembering the time period or making educated guesses based on other knowledge). As children get older and gain a better mastery of language they can often describe _more_ memories from very early childhood, indicating that the memories exist even when kids lack the ability to describe them in words. These abilities to remember early childhood (even <1 yr old) begins fading around ~10 yrs old. By your teenage years those early memories are mostly gone.
My hypothesis (along with your observation) is that as we age, the way we remember things is different. At a young age, it's all sounds and images. Then language gets added to it, and we start seeing events in different ways. Our old ways of accessing information (in the brain) are used less often, and we forget.
This touches on an interesting aspect of my very early childhood memories. Do you ever have dreams where you "know" you're in a familiar location, like your old high school or childhood home, but they have a completely different feeling to them, and may or may not have the same layout as in real life? My very early childhood memories have a similar sort of dreamlike quality. I know objectively the memory takes place…
Sometimes, while dreaming I will recognize and recall that I've had this dream before, maybe many many times...then I feel a sense of loss, like losing a friend. A moment of de ja vu I guess. It is a weird feeling though, and I don't even know if I truly had the dream before, or if it is a false memory!!
Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew. But I rea…
I have something very similar, but I know that I didn't hear the story from anyone. I would have been under 27 months because my brother wasn't alive. In my early 20's I asked my mother when we had a brown honda, and she replied that we never did. I said I was sure that we did because I remember being in a brown Honda, driving on the highway and that we got a flat tire, and the police came, and that there were Palm trees. The part that didn't make sense is that I thought we were going to Alberta beach(in Alberta) and there are clearly no palm trees there. After talking about it for a while and giving some more details of my memory, we figured out that it was a trip to hawaii that we did before my brother was born and that the brown honda was a rental car.
Yeah I saw, rogue c&p in the "hide it from most of the internet" script. It's an old site migrated from my first machinations back in the early 2000s. And I make no claim to "absolutely authority". But take your pick which "expert" you want to listen to. The experts rolled out by the "love thee blue blooded leader appointed appointed by god" channel. Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he'…
> Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day. It says on your site you graduated in 2007. I'd take the experts any day.
finished electronic engineering in 98, just as all the sensible engineers f'd off to south korea and china.
its now valuable enough capital that i dont technically have to work anymore and can spend my time flying helicopters and enjoying luxury yachts.
Although life isnt exactly that simplistic. It does give me some pleasure to know for certain the outcome was the us and uk loosing the world leadership.
And now you got Trump and May as your top representatives.
I remember one distinct memory from when I later figured I was 1.5 years old (18 months).
My great grandmother (mom's mom's mom) was on her deathbed. I remember meeting her, with my parents one last time before she passed away. I distinctly remember the tile on the wall was robin's egg blue up to about 5 feet tall. She had such frail skin, it was like tissue paper.. I held her hand knowing that she was nearing the end.
I was later (years later) told that my parents were terrified that I was going to do something and rip her skin. I also found out she stayed alive long enough to see me off. She died by away the next morning.
By all accounts, I shouldn't remember this. But I told them details from what my own parents forgot.