Baby memories: trick of the mind?

In My Humble Opinion
1

According to this article in the New Zealand Herald, baby memories before speech skills are acquired are just the mind playing tricks on us.

I put it to the Dopers - anyone here with relatively clear memories of early babyhood? One of my memories is of me lying on my back in a darkened room with the television playing and above my eye level. I wiped a hand across my chest where some Vicks vaporub had been spread, then rubbed an eye. Man did that ever sting! But – as to how old I was, I have no idea. I must have been in some kind of cot, though.

So – what are your memories, if any? Do you think the research is accurate?

2

I couldn’t open the site but->

Yes and No. Do I have memories of my mother/siblings/family members nipping my cheeks saying, " oooo little coochy-woochy you are soo cute???" Or of the terrible diaper rashes because my mother used cloth…No. But that’s not because I could not express those situation in words.
There are some early childhood psychologists who think memory starts with consciousness. This can be readily seen in women who “play games” with their children when they are in the womb. Playing music with them, talking to them etc…etc…there have been countless studies of new borns responding to their mother and fathers voices in a positive way. Ergo a way where they remember the voices pitch and pace and frequency even. Cognitively this would suggest that infants do infact have memories, one could even argue that memory begins with conscousness. This said, if babies could talk what would you ask them when they came out…So, how was it in there? - answer - hot, cramped, rather stinky…
Jst because an infant lacks the ability to express themselves with words certainly does not mean they do not have a memory. I’ll try and dig up a couple cites…I’m a tad busy at the moment.

3

That research is certainly accurate to my own personal experience. I have almost no memories from before I started kindergarten.

4

I have distinct and numerous memories from about age 2 on. My age is pretty easily pinpointed in these memories because of the building of my family’s new house, which figures in a lot of the early memories I have. There’s also memories of getting my first cat at about age 3, and going to The Empire Strikes Back in the theater (also about 3).

5

I believe if you polled most newborns, they would say, "Warm, cozy, and wet… and when I came out, all hell broke loose. :smiley:

6

We lived in my parents’ first home until I was 2. I can tell you where the living room and kitchen furniture was, what colors the kitchen was, I remember the landing on the stairway, the bathroom on the first floor by the stairs, my crib, the door into the next-door-neighbor’s half of the building, their living room… and we have no photographs of the inside of that house. I drew my mother a map, and she said that it was all correct. So I dunno what to make of that, in light of it being called a trick of the mind.

7

It isn’t that you can’t remember things that happened before you had acquired language, but that you can’t bring up the memories of the sensations and emotions you were feeling at the time along with the highly useful track of thoughts and interpretations to accompany them.

That is, I can remember Ms. Mason’s sixth grade classroom with the brownish rollup shades pulled down and the fluorescents humming and watching the minute hand tick off its one-minute increments while waiting for the bell to ring. I can *know that that’s what I’m remembering * because all those visual and auditory sensations and the emotions bound up in the situation were understood by my verbal self at the time.

My memories that I can identify in terms of what they are memories of go back to around the age of 3. I have maybe one memory (or possibly a mish-mosh of several), a sense of Mommy and grass and happy that seems to be from when I was very young, which some external evidence leads me to think dates back to when I was 2. The vagueness of the memory fits, too – very little was getting encoded in such a way as to make it easy to “think of that time”. So I agree with the theorist cited in the OP.

Meanwhile, I’m sure that dozens or hundreds of little moments when some momentary experience makes me feel a certain way, pleasant or unpleasant, are not just aesthetic responses to the current moment but memories of other moments when things looked or sounded or smelled like that, and how I felt back then. And some of those no doubt date back to preverbal times. But that’s different from “I remember being one and a half months old and being in my cradle and my big sister leaned over and dangled my favorite toy for me to grab” – I’m suspicious of anyone claiming to possess such memories because without language there’s just no way to “write down” in your mind what was happening at the time, to turn it over in your head and think about it, and therefore to recall it later in the terms by which you understood it as it was happening.

8

I also couldn’t open the link, but my gut feeling is that the emphasis on verbalization and language skills is more of a philosophical viewpoint than anything that’s been proven. Sartre was saying similar things about language back in the 50s, and there was no evidence then, either. Would you think that someone with a severe language diability doesn’t have the ability to remember anything? I wouldn’t. That viewpoint overemphasizes the importance of producing some output that’s intelligible to other people. It really has nothing to do with one’s abiity to perceive.

As far as my memories are concerned, my earliest is a very clear memory of being high up, looking out through gauze at my house, on a sunny day. When I explained this memory to my mother (at a young age) she told me that must have been the netting over the baby carriage. So if I made it up, I was very young when I made it up!! But I think it’s a real memory. I also have other memories from the age of 2 or 3, but of course I was talking by then… One was sitting in the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital with my parents… After I told my mom the story, she said it must have been when she was going to the hospital to give birth to my sister.

9

I have heard that theory before. And I suppose it may be partly why we remember so little of our first years. But, it’s usually the case that babies understand more than they can say–and who can tell what they can do inside their heads? Anyway, my dad says he clearly remembers a time when he was potty-training, and he remembers that he could not talk, just babble. For myself, I have very few memories before 3 or 4.

10

I have very clear memories from infancy - it creeps out my mom sometimes.

Eg/ I remember my mom changing my diaper on the floor of the living room. It was a cloth diaper. She pricked her thumb with the pin, yelped, and told my father to go get a band-aid. Meanwhile she was sort of waving her thumb at me, bringing it near my face then away again because I’d go cross-eye watching it (I remember going cross eyed too, because I did NOT like the blurriness, it made me feel queasy).

The interesting thing about the memories I have from that age is that they are devoid of language.

When my mom pricker her thumb, she yelped, turned to my dad, and I heard her voice, but it was nonsensical noise to me. Just an agitated “blah, blah, blah, yak, yak” noise. My father made his own “balh, blah, blah” sounds, got up and left.

As an adult, I can assume my mother yelped: “Ouch! Dammit!.. DadCrayons, grab me a bandaid from the bathroom!” or something along those lines. But in my memory of that little scene, I have no memory of language, I remember the voices, but no words .

I’m a mnemonic freak though. Especially when I was young I had disconcertingly weird memory and language skills. I would most definitely be an exeption to the rule.

11

Infantile amnesia, I’ll agree with. However, I do not agree with this being the result of having no words to express things. Here’s an example of why this is not right from my psychology book (Myers 5th edition, p. 329):

Therefore, the babies, although having no words to describe what happens to them, still should be able to percieve it.

12

Granted, I’m a biased “memory freak” but I’d agree with you because I think baby’s can also remember negative things enough t want to avoid them.

My dad carried me into the kitchen as a baby, I touched a hot burner on the stove. Believe me, I certainly was able to remember that the top of the stove hurt. Even if the only language I had for it at the time was “EEEEAAAAAAAA!”

I will concede though that many, many people need the orginizational architecture that language provides in order to sort things out into coherent memory.

Think of a well-organized filing cabinet compared to a box full of papers that were jsut thrown in there.

You might have your infant memories in the box somehwere, but good luck finding them in any meaningful order.

13

Thanks for the replies, folks. You’ve provided much food for thought. Sorry to those who couldn’t connect through to the Herald page in the link – it’s fine this end, but maybe the ad-intensive site blocked things.

Thanks again.

14

I can clearly remember an accident I had when I was 2. My aunt was riding me on her bike. I was barefoot and ended up getting my big toe cut off between sproket and chain.

I remember having fun before the accident. My aunt peddling the bike and telling me to stop trying to steer. I remember us bouncing over the roots of a big oak tree. I don’t remember the exact moment that my toe was cut off, but I’m guessing it was caused by us bouncing over the roots becuase my memory picks back up just a few feet beyond the tree.

I remember my aunt carrying me into the house. I was protesting. I wanted her to put me down, becuase I could walk. I remember sitting on the kitchen table and watching blood drip onto my grandmother’s clean floor. I remember this concerning me, because grandma didn’t like it when you messed up her floor. I remember asking for a papertowel so I could clean it up.
I’m pretty damn sure I’m acctually remembering this, and not contructing it from conversations that I’ve heard. My family tends to be a little closed mouthed when it comes things like this. My grandmother, mom and aunt all blamed themselves for the accident and never talked about it.

I have a few scattered memories from around 2 on up. Nothing as clear as the accident though.

15

Please pretend that I actually previewed that post. That’ll teach me to try to work and post at the same time.

16

I remember my second birthday but I had language skills then.

I know because I remember my mom asking me what kind of animal crackers I wanted on my birthday cake and I know I at said elephant, not sure which other one.

I also remember looking up and seeing the carving on Stone Mountain in Georgia. That was when I was 2 1/2.

17

I didn’t learn to talk until quite late. I definately remember my first birthday, as remember a cake being put in front of me, but I didn’t recognise what it was without a slice taken out. Everyone was watching me, obviously expecting me to do something (blow out the candle) but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so burst into tears instead!

18

I remember pulling myself up by the bars of my crib. I remember sitting on the floor of the dining room as my mother, a student, came in through the garage and up the cellar stairs with her arms full of books. I remember a recurring nightmare inspired by the American-themed print on the kitchen chairs upholstery. The nightmare involved a laughing clown and I always woke up facing the wall. I remember screaming as I was strapped into the potty chair.

I would have been in the 12 to 24 month range. I was toilet-trained long by 18 months. I was talking by a year (my family swears that my first words were President Nixon).

I always was Little Miss History/Grampap what did you do in the war, and I used to mentally run through my list of memories, trying to commit them to permenent record. So all that recollecting I did either preserved these memories or helped my five-year-old self fabricate them.

19

I suppose if it can be shown fairly conclusively that any memories before a certain age are generally confabulated, then stories about memories before said certain age are not evidence against that claim. After all, if a confabulated memory seems real, but is really a trick of the mind, YOU are not going to know that, you will, for all intensive purposes, think it is real and that it actually happened.

Adults cannot even remember a person they saw a week ago with any reliablity (with enough detail to pick them out of a line up for example), let alone convince me they have vivid memories of when they were five. People have holes in memories, and the human brain does not like that, so it fills it in, unconsiously of course, and will “borrow” material from things like current memories, movies, books, other peoples stories, etc.

So yeah- I agree whole heartedly with the study, and I saw quite a few more studies in my Psychology class, as well as several books related.

I too have many vivid “memories” of when I was a child. I remember how my house looked (which doesn’t match up with pictures at all), I remember a tornado that passed by a few streets over, which according to my parents wasn’t anywhere near that close (2 miles away). I remember these vividly and they seem real to me, but face it, they don’t match up with the facts, and the simplist explination for these supposed memories is confabulation.

Now each and everyone of you would argue something along these lines- “You don’t know my memories, you aren’t me and cant get into my head, so therefore you cannot say that my memories are false.” Which is true, but I wager that they are, and I also wager that each person holds onto wanting to believe they are real as much as their unconsious fooled them in the first place. I suppose that there is a rare person out in the world somewhere that has accurate, detailed (vivid) memories, and it can be shown with evidence and other peoples testimonies that it really occured. Unforunately I have never seen such a study, or heard of such a person. I highly doubt all the people in this thread are those “rare” people though. If they so exist.

Anyway, if it brings you comfort to believe you are speical and your memories are somehow uncorrupted by time and the nature of the human brain, they go right ahead, doesn’t effect my worldview any whatsoever. However, I have learned not to trust my memories, and that has saved my pride, my job, and made my life much easier, not to mention saved me from looking a fool once or twice. Now if I cannot remember accurately (matches up with other people that were around at the same time) something that happened at work two days ago, how can I trust that my crystal clear images of my “past” aren’t something I picked up watching a movie?

:confused:

20

Infantile amnesia is bunk. Some people are just better at remembering than others, regardless of age. I get into trouble all the time by remembering earlier events quite clearly. Bosses don’t like that.

I started a thread entitled “How far back can you remember?” a couple years ago. Many of the posts were quite convincing proof that memories before age 2 can be retained. My earliest datable one is an illness when I was 18-20 months old.

So now I “collect” my old memories and try to find out more about them. The last time I visited my mother I asked her about an early memory I had about taking tarts to the hospital/old folks home. It turns out, based on where we lived at the time, that I was well under age 3, and given the season, likely under age 2.

My memories from age 3 on are as good as from age 6 on.