Several years ago, I was in one of my favourite places, the Lucas Cave at Jenolan Caves, near Sydney. The Cave Guide was telling us how many millions of years old the cave was, and then suddenly interrupted himself, and said, “Of course, this means nothing to any of us, as the average person can only perceive time up to a maximum of twenty-five years”.
He said that a five year-old event stored in memory will seem like it happened five years ago, give or take a little. Something remembered from ten years ago will feel like a decade-old memory. Likewise for twenty and twenty-five year memories. But something which happened forty years ago will seem like twenty-five years ago. Something sixty years ago will also seem like twenty-five. It’s only a known chonological sequence of life events which will provide mental cues as to older events, but the “feel” of them will max out at a quarter century.
At thirty-three, I’m not sure I have lived long enough to test this for myself, but I suspect there may be something in it?
You guys think he was right? Or was it just one guy’s wacky personal theory?
It sounds on a par with “a duck’s quack doesn’t echo” (please don’t start a thread on that, just do a search). I am 46, my earliest memories are from when I was 3, and I have no idea what this person means by how memories “feel.” Memories of 30 years ago seem much different to me than memories of 35 years ago and 40 years ago.
I guess I can say that I might remember reading a particular magazine article, but have no time reference for when it was, and might think it was last week, or last month, or last year, or 20 years ago. And I am usually wrong when I look it up. I consistently think such things happened much more recently than they actually did.
But this whole idea of memory “feel”, I agree with Al. I don’t see how you can possibly quantify it, or even define it.
As previous posters have observed, we are dealing with something which is extremely slippery and abstract.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that some things which occurred ten years ago are sufficiently vivid in my memory that they “feel” like they happened maybe a year or two ago, while some things which happened six months ago seem far away.
When he was a teenager, my older brother picked out a Mother’s Day card for our mom while he was in a rush. It in fact said “To the Mother of a Friend” on the cover, and had gushy language inside about how “sometimes you have been just like a mother to me”.
Thirty years later when she was in a nursing home my mom couldn’t remember what she had for lunch yesterday, but she remembered that card like she had gotten it that morning; “you know, sometimes I’m just like a mother to your brother…”
At 47, it seems to me that plenty of things that happened to me thirty years ago “feel” like they happened thirty years ago, and plenty of things that happened forty years ago “feel” like they happened forty years ago. I guess…
One factor affecting how memories “feel” is how often we have called them to mind. As a poster in a recent thread said, psychologists claim that when we dredge up a recollection from our long-term memory we are, in effect, “recopying” it. My earliest memories, I find, aren’t memories so much as memories of memories; there are recollections from very early childhood where I can more-or-less picture myself as I experienced things, as though I was an outside observor.
That’s a big NO-GO there, TLD. My memory’s so good, I can remember the night I went out with my father and came home with my mother. Hell, if I knew any more, I’d be a threat to national security.
I can distinctly tell a 25 year old memory from a 40 year old memory. The forty year old memories are all dim around the edges like those old-fashioned photographic vignettes. It’s how I tell them apart.
I guess I shoulda put this in IMHO. Of course, it’d be damn near impossible to apply an objective test to this. I do know what he meant be the “feel” of a memory’s age, though.
I’m not sure what he meant. Let’s flip this puppy over.
25 years ago I was a 25 year old all-night cabdriver in Austin, Texas. And college student and drummer. I remember it well. That segment of my life seems temporally distinct from five years earlier, 30 years ago, when I was a reactor operator in a chemical plant, with no college plans.
Five years before that, I was a fifteen year old proto-drummer in high school. My job on the mile relay was more important than anything that actually produced income.
Dial back another five and I was a 10 year old fifth grader in ICU, who’d managed to pop the crap out of his liver in a bike accident just months before my family was to move back to Japan. JFK got capped. There was a new band pushin’ on the Beach Boys. Longhaired guys from England.
Move back another five, and I lived in Japan. Went to school on an Army base in Tokyo.
All of those epochs are easily distinct in my memory.
The “flattening” of time, while not acute, seems actually more pronounced in the last decade or so.
As has been noted, subjective reports are all you can hope for here.