I remember my 1 year old birthday party and plenty of stuff before that. I remember finding an unprotected outlet and putting a butter knife in it. It made me involuntarily fling the knife across the room. My mom came in and got mad at me for crying for "no reason".
Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#62Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? My guess is it's because human memories are ideas and like all our ideas they depend on other ideas for their meaning.
However when we were young our ideas about the world were very different from what they are now: much simpler and with many falsehoods. So our earliest memories don't make sense to us and can't be recalled.
What we call our 'first memory' may just be the earliest thing we can recall and make sense of now.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#63Perhaps 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…
Don't be so sure that its from something you heard and imagined that you later incorrectly recalled as a memory. You can also have retroactive interference, which is when a real memory gets contaminated by events that happened later. So it's possible you do have a "real" memory of your mom telling your father she was pregnant, but that your brain substituted details from later. Retroactive interference is a very esta…
That happened to me. I have a very early memory of a trivial thing (eating a radish and not liking it) from when I about two. It happened at my family's apartment, before we moved into our first house. I later visited that apartment when I was ten, and a lot of the details match my memory(e.g. the location of my Dad's little garden relative to the stairs) EXCEPT the actual visualization of the apartment building, which got replaced with an image of one near our new house twisted to fit the memory.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#64Perhaps 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 t…
How would you know the car was a honda at that point?
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#65My earliest memory was from 13 months old. It was the second surgery I had on my foot, and I woke up towards the end of the surgery. Apparently anesthesia for small children is quite difficult. I have a couple other very faint memories from 2 and 3 years of age, but none nearly as strong as my first.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#66The 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.
I recall as a teenager catching a whiff of tar and instantly recalling a memory from when I was very young (somewhere between 2 and 5) of being in a parking garage with the same smell. I can still "see" the garage and even smell it, but that's it. I have no other contextual clues to know when or where it happened (unlike my earliest memory of being in a large city---it was Chicago where we lived when I was 2, but I only know that because of what my parents have said over the years).
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder the exact same thing, our boy is 2 and as soon as he could hold a phone his favourite videos were of himself. Going to be interesting "do you really remember X happening or is the video something that you rewatched so much you couldn't help but recall?"
We mostly recall only what we photograph. I'm conscious of this every time I take photos.
I'm not sure that's true. I barely took any photos until I was about 20 but have a rich memory of unphotographed periods of my life and experiences.
How did people remember before cameras?
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#68Perhaps 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…
have similar visual memories from a very early age - I remember two (not too specific) scenes from the house I grew up in, when it was being built (no wallpapers, stairs were simple concrete and not yet with handrail etc). The trouble is, we moved into that house when I was ~18 months old, so I "visited" the construction site with what, 16, 17 months of age? It is hard to believe even for me that I remember images from that time, but my parents clearly never "told" me how it looked. I am not sure what to make of these memories myself, but I have them.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#69Perhaps 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…
A few years ago I went back to the house where I spent the first few years of my life; I had not been there since the age of four.
At one point I entered a room and I heard myself say out loud "my sister was born here..."
To be clear, my parents had no photos of that room or anything growing up. There were pictures of my baby sister, sure, but they were all too zoomed in to make any sense of the surroundings. I took a photo with my phone and sent it to my parents, and they confirmed that that was the room where my sister was born.
I just knew somehow; there was no visual memory but as I walked through the door I instantly had this feeling of seeing my sister for the first time. It was really strange, but then again, it makes sense that a moment like that is pretty impressive.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#70Could this working of the brain be related to how, when you're sleeping, something happening in the real world is incorporated in real time into a dream you're having? That always amazes me, how our brains do that.