Age of your earliest confirmed memory
- Thread starter Nerys Ghemor
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Could you see Russia?
Sorry.
That does sound pretty scary. I assume you had a life preserver on?
My earliest memory is somewhere between 2 and 3 years old, when we went to Disneyland for the first time. I don't remember much, just being carried through the parking lot by my mother, and being set down in my stroller.
I also have a memory of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (I was 3 at the time). We lived in the East Bay and I remember my mom folding laundry while watching the baseball game, while my younger sister and I played on a blanket in the living room. I was standing up and things started shaking, and my mom ushered us into a bedroom doorway.
I have many other memories beginning around the age of 3. We lived next door to my grandparents at the time and I remember doing many things with them, such as my grandpa reading a book to me, playing with stuffed bunny dolls, and sitting on the porch with my grandpa at night while he pointed out the difference between stars and airplane lights.
I have MANY memories of my time in preschool, around 3-4 years old. Such as learning to read, writing my name for the first time, taking a community cooking class with my mom, accidentally stapling my finger (and running screaming out to my dad in the yard to fix it), watching Barney, and laying with my dad on the couch on Christmas eve, admiring the glowing lights on the tree as I fell asleep.
I take comfort that the vast majority of my memories are good ones. I do remember some bad things from that time period though, most notably the night terrors that I used to have. I still have a very vivid memory of two of them; in one my house was on fire and flames had engulfed the only exit from my house. It seemed so very real, it's STILL hard to believe it was only a dream. In the other my dad had been cloned and the clone was evil. I didn't think of it in exactly those terms at the time, I was just very scared by a strange man who looked exactly like my father coming into my house and even though he didn't do anything bad, I had a very bad feeling about him.
Shortly after these terrors, my mom successfully taught me lucid dreaming, so nightmares have been few and far between since then (or, they start as nightmares but I quickly realize I'm dreaming and change them).
I have a similar memory from the same time period, of there being a solar eclipse. A teacher and my mother had said that you weren't supposed to look at it, so I became fearful of looking anywhere above the horizon and stared at the ground while I was outside.
I also have a memory of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (I was 3 at the time). We lived in the East Bay and I remember my mom folding laundry while watching the baseball game, while my younger sister and I played on a blanket in the living room. I was standing up and things started shaking, and my mom ushered us into a bedroom doorway.
I have many other memories beginning around the age of 3. We lived next door to my grandparents at the time and I remember doing many things with them, such as my grandpa reading a book to me, playing with stuffed bunny dolls, and sitting on the porch with my grandpa at night while he pointed out the difference between stars and airplane lights.
I have MANY memories of my time in preschool, around 3-4 years old. Such as learning to read, writing my name for the first time, taking a community cooking class with my mom, accidentally stapling my finger (and running screaming out to my dad in the yard to fix it), watching Barney, and laying with my dad on the couch on Christmas eve, admiring the glowing lights on the tree as I fell asleep.
I take comfort that the vast majority of my memories are good ones. I do remember some bad things from that time period though, most notably the night terrors that I used to have. I still have a very vivid memory of two of them; in one my house was on fire and flames had engulfed the only exit from my house. It seemed so very real, it's STILL hard to believe it was only a dream. In the other my dad had been cloned and the clone was evil. I didn't think of it in exactly those terms at the time, I was just very scared by a strange man who looked exactly like my father coming into my house and even though he didn't do anything bad, I had a very bad feeling about him.
Shortly after these terrors, my mom successfully taught me lucid dreaming, so nightmares have been few and far between since then (or, they start as nightmares but I quickly realize I'm dreaming and change them).
Actually, one thing I do remember from childhood was a solar eclipse. I'm not sure how old I was, exactly (it was some time before 1994 because we were living in our first house). We were going to go to Chuck E Cheese, but my mom wouldn't let us leave the house until the eclipse was over.I remember my neighborhood looking very orange.
I have a similar memory from the same time period, of there being a solar eclipse. A teacher and my mother had said that you weren't supposed to look at it, so I became fearful of looking anywhere above the horizon and stared at the ground while I was outside.
It totally still weirds me out. A similar experience I've had is memories of TV shows I watched as a kid being in color, when in fact the shows in question were only ever produced and shown in black and white: my brain filled in the colors for me. It's amazing how much strangeness there is to be found in our memories if we really pay attention.
And, I thought an analogy might make my point a little clearer as to why I am so certain Tiberius' memory is artificial: someone claiming that he can remember comprehending language and metaphor, and that he had the ability to make a plan and attempt to carry it through at only a few weeks (or even months) of age, is analogous to one claiming he could not only walk, but hop, skip, and jump at that age.
This reminds me of a story I heard when Ronald Reagan was well into his Alzheimer's disease bout, but still able to have conversations. He used to think some of the movie scenes he had done were memories of his real life.
Just to think, imagine one day Johnny Deep, Brad Pitt and Arnold Schwarzenegger at that stage.
Yeah, I'm terrible
It makes me think of one of the stories in the collection of short stories, Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman (my favorite book, I've read it well over 100 times in the ten years I've known it. Each short story takes place in a universe that is operated in accordance with a different theory of time. In one of these worlds, people's memories last for only a day. To get by in society they have to keep track of everything they do in a book; when they wake they open their book to find out where they are to go to work or school. When they come home, it is to spouses and children they are meeting for the first time, known only by their names, written in their books. They look up who their parents are to phone. When they get old, the book becomes too massive to be read in one day, so they have to choose: Will I be a child today and read about my youth and school days? Will I read about the past few months? Will I relive the time when my children were children...children of whom the only memory I have are the handwritten pages in a book. And it would present you with a choice, right? What if you opened your book and were disappointed in what you saw? You found a career that didn't ring true and a family that didn't feel right. Would you continue the script you'd been writing yourself or would you give up and run away? Would you weep if you found you were a loathsome, weak, or cruel man? Would you rend the pages?
My great grandmother suffered from dementia before she died, and it was as if the pages of her book were still there, but coming up in all the wrong order, and whichever page arose, that was the version of herself who was living in that moment. I learned more about the depth, brilliance, kindness, arrogance, insanity, and bravery of that woman in those times than in any other.
Then how do you explain my mum also being aware of the event? Did I telepathically send the memory to her or something?
Trouble with false memories is that no one else can possibly have them. So how do you explain that I was the one who told my mum, and she was also aware of it?
So how about you stop playing psychiatrist and realise that maybe it WASN'T a false memory? Like I said, I could be wrong about the age (as I have no idea how old I was in the memory and I am going by what my mum told me), but how do you think it is a false memory if I can tell other people who were there and they say, "Oh yeah, I remember that, and your dad did say that too!"
My earliest memory is of my mother coming home from the hospital with my baby sister. I was 2 years and 9 months. I couldn't see her, she was in a blanket high up where my mother was holding her.. my grandmothers were both there and everyone was peering at the bundle. I was very curious and excited. I knew this was important. I next remember making her laugh when she was a couple months old in a crib.. I was singing her the song "Bye baby bunting, papa's gone a hunting" and she was laughing and kicking her legs at me. I was absolutely THRILLED about this.
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So how about you don't make impossible allegations and then get angry when they get questioned? You know the meaning of impossible, right? It means that, whatever you remember, whatever your mother said, whatever the circumstances, it could not have happened.
At six weeks, the human brain is completely, totally, unquestionably incapable of understanding language, metaphors, and to plan any action beside "crying to get attention". If you "remembered" flying out of your crib and around the house at six weeks, and you mother distractedly confirmed it in a off-hand conversation, would you believe it's a real memory? Because there are about the same possibility of your memory being real as you being "Tiberius, the Amazing Flying Baby".
Now, one year or so... maybe. But six weeks? No.
So how about you don't make impossible allegations and then get angry when they get questioned? You know the meaning of impossible, right? It means that, whatever you remember, whatever your mother said, whatever the circumstances, it could not have happened.
At six weeks, the human brain is completely, totally, unquestionably incapable of understanding language, metaphors, and to plan any action beside "crying to get attention". If you "remembered" flying out of your crib and around the house at six weeks, and you mother distractedly confirmed it in a off-hand conversation, would you believe it's a real memory? Because there are about the same possibility of your memory being real as you being "Tiberius, the Amazing Flying Baby".
Now, one year or so... maybe. But six weeks? No.
Do you even bother to read my posts? You don't, do you? You just read enough to make up your little mind, ignore the rest and then you come on and act like you know everything.
First of all, you just say it's impossible, without explaining how my mother could also have a memory of it when I had never told her.
Secondly, You COMPLETELY ignore the part where I freely admitted that I could be wrong about my age, because all I had to go on for that was my mother's claim. Maybe it happened as I described, except I was six months old. I have no idea how old I was, and I stated REPEATEDLY that my claim about my age at the time was based solely on what my mother told me.
But no, you never read that, did you? You made up your mind before you read the whole thing and ignored everything else.
How do you know that you didn't hear, but not remember, your mother talking about it when you were two or three years old and that the image came into your mind then?
^Not to mention it probably happened more than once...
One of my cousins was hit by a car while riding a bicycle when visiting us TWICE in two separate visits. But she only remembers it as ONE event. One can recall multiple incidents as ONE event. By the way, she was able to walk away with no scratch or bruises both times...
Plus, we all noticed your comment about being wrong about the age. We are mostly responding to the fact you said you understood your father, and well developed thought process that was in response to the event- impossible for a baby.
One of my cousins was hit by a car while riding a bicycle when visiting us TWICE in two separate visits. But she only remembers it as ONE event. One can recall multiple incidents as ONE event. By the way, she was able to walk away with no scratch or bruises both times...
Plus, we all noticed your comment about being wrong about the age. We are mostly responding to the fact you said you understood your father, and well developed thought process that was in response to the event- impossible for a baby.
I'm not playing Psychologist, Tiberius. One of my degrees is in psychology. My other is in childhood special education (which includes intense focus on brain development). Both are from NYU, one of the top universities in the country. My concentrations were in neurological development and learning disorders (which means I spent a lot of time learning about human memory). I know what I am talking about, and, as I said before, your claim is just as credible as if I claimed to be doing cartwheels at 2 months old.
And I did indeed read the part of your post where you mentioned you might be (are certainly) wrong about the age...and that's fine. Sure, if you were a year and a half old or so then this could be a real memory. I'm just trying to point out that the very nature of memories means that they are mostly artificial to begin with, because of how the human brain synthesizes information to fill in the gaps left by imperfect senses, and this is how false memories seem and feel as real as real memories do. A great example of this is saccadic masking, which results in the fact that we spend up to 40 minutes of every day blind: our eyes move more quickly than our brains can process (if we actually registered and "saw" the movement it would be debilitatingly nauseating). This means that for a few seconds or fractions of a second every minute or so, you are not processing visual cues. You don't notice this though, because your brain fills in the gaps to make things more pleasant for you. Your brain does the same thing with memories.
Now, I'm not expecting you to take my word on this, which is why I suggested reading materials in an earlier post. Any neurology textbook will give you the information I posted, and it would also be quite easy for you to research peer-reviewed papers confirming what people here are telling you. However, those types of reading materials can be dense or dull for laymen, which is why I suggested checking out Steven Pinker, who is an excellent writer, neurologist, and linguist, and has written some entertaining and insightful books that deal with language development and memory. I've read and enjoyed three of his books, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and How the Mind Works.
Please educate yourself before implying that I don't know what I'm talking about.
And I did indeed read the part of your post where you mentioned you might be (are certainly) wrong about the age...and that's fine. Sure, if you were a year and a half old or so then this could be a real memory. I'm just trying to point out that the very nature of memories means that they are mostly artificial to begin with, because of how the human brain synthesizes information to fill in the gaps left by imperfect senses, and this is how false memories seem and feel as real as real memories do. A great example of this is saccadic masking, which results in the fact that we spend up to 40 minutes of every day blind: our eyes move more quickly than our brains can process (if we actually registered and "saw" the movement it would be debilitatingly nauseating). This means that for a few seconds or fractions of a second every minute or so, you are not processing visual cues. You don't notice this though, because your brain fills in the gaps to make things more pleasant for you. Your brain does the same thing with memories.
Now, I'm not expecting you to take my word on this, which is why I suggested reading materials in an earlier post. Any neurology textbook will give you the information I posted, and it would also be quite easy for you to research peer-reviewed papers confirming what people here are telling you. However, those types of reading materials can be dense or dull for laymen, which is why I suggested checking out Steven Pinker, who is an excellent writer, neurologist, and linguist, and has written some entertaining and insightful books that deal with language development and memory. I've read and enjoyed three of his books, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and How the Mind Works.
Please educate yourself before implying that I don't know what I'm talking about.
Your experience is making me question my own early memories now. And, it's so hard, probably impossible, to determine whether they are real or not at this point.
I've seen movies with subtitles and then remember them as being in spoken English and was surprised when they weren't! I remembered the voices in English!
At 6 weeks you're not comprehending much, but definitely not planning actions and appreciating humorous statements!
Mr Awe
With the clear risk of sounding stupid, but my earliest confirmed memory (and it is maybe nothing more than a flash) was laying on my stomack on the floor looking up at the window in the livingroom where my youngest brother was turning the windowblinds open and closed so that the orange light landed on my face sometimes.
I know I was unable to walk yet so I was close to a year old.. but both he and my mother has confirmed it.
I know I was unable to walk yet so I was close to a year old.. but both he and my mother has confirmed it.
It's extremely common for parents of male babies to get peed on that way. In fact, I remember at parenting class they specifically recommended having a towel nearby just in case.
So, assuming that you are a male, it's extremely likely that your parents would have a memory of such an event because that event was likely to happen and multiple times.
I can buy that the situation as you described it could have happened at some point. I don't know what age at which the require language and planning facilities develop though. I would think around 18 months at the earliest, but I'm not an expert.
Maybe our resident expert TSQ knows?
Mr Awe
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