Louis CK on the subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU
Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#52Perhaps 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 happe…
When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew.
I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage.
Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash.
Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real".
Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#53I 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-…
Where have you read about the very early memories, like <1 year? There is a thing that puzzles me most of my life. When I was a teenager we had a family discussion about early memories. I have described several ones I've always assumed to be my earliest, but I've never knew what age they are related to. In one of them my cradle was involved and I was told by my mom that I was removed out of cradle at the age of 3 months.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#54I'm pretty sure most of my early memories are not of the actual event, but of the times I thought of the memory.
Like others have mentioned, at 5 years old I could remember details of being 2-3yrs. I think I'm now going back to the 5-year-old rather than the 2-year-old.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#55Perhaps 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 established phenomenon. My guess is a lot of things like what you described are real memories, and people assume they're imagined events recast as memories because they simply don't believe in early memories. I doubt your parents were discussing details like that later, but you'll probably never really know.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#56First memory when I was about 1.5 years old, where my family, specifically the man who I now called father is having a dinner.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#57Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#58Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#59I think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories from before we could talk.
It seems to me that we can go a layer deeper than words and language. An infant has an incredibly shallow model of the world in their brain. At birth, it is almost entirely blank. As we become toddlers, we build up our model of the world at an astonishing rate. I wonder if it most memories don't survive this process. Perhaps the world model grows too quickly, and the old memories are unable to be integrated. I do agree that language plays a role in this, but I would guess that most of this happens at a level beneath language.
At some point though, the existing model is robust enough that new memories more firmly take root and can be better integrated into future changes of the model (even though it is still being developed at a rapid rate throughout childhood). Naturally, this point occurs at different ages.
Re: Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
#60The 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/…
>If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2 That is news to me, but then again I find it hard to ask a 5 year old about anything.
[deleted]