I’m sorry that a few anectodal stories convinces you, perhaps you should read this article, and do a google search on the topic- there is a wealth of information and it is supported by a multitude of studies.
In fact people can unknowningly create false memories, in the article mentioned above, they mention this:
There is a wealth of information out there, countless books, many studies, and strong arguments for these theories, dismissing it as bunk just because a few people say they have memories at a young age on a message board is pretty un-SDMB. For shame.
You did not know “diaper” or “living room” or “mom” or “dad” or “thumb” or “band-aid”? So all you remember about them is what they looked like or felt like, etc? And you can remember those experiences so well, so vividly, that you can, in retrospect, identify those items as “Oh, well that was a diaper, and that pattern of backdrop colors and shapes was the living room, and oh, I see, she was making that sound because that was a pin and she’d jabbed it into her thumb, and that was my Dad of course and that was a band-aid…” – ??
More likely you had more language going for you than you think. You may not have known enough words to follow the conversation and still had enough to encode “that’s mom” and “that’s dad” and “I know this room-place, thatroom” and also probably something that meant “diaper” to you. I’ve got my doubts about you comprehending the pin or the band-aid at the time, but if you had enough other memories you could think about, you might have recalled the appearance and behaviors and figured out what had been happening when you thought on it a few years later on. ftg:
Again, you probably had more of a vocabulary than you’re giving yourself credit for. Babies are not without language up until the moment they start speaking in words themselves, after all!
I should also add that there’s some evidence that at least some infants develop their own home-brewed language which they can use to stand for experiences and concepts. I seem to recall some sets of twins in which such proto-languages were even shared and persisted into early childhood. Mostly, of course, kids pick up the language used by their family instead. My point is that a language is there, and therefore that memories can consist of the baby’s description of self of what just happened, and therefore think about past events.
Memory, especially long-term memory, is just too hard to make sense out of without having interpretations and concepts and the narrative of “thoughts that went with the experience” to go with the recall of what your five senses were telling you and how you felt about it.
I’m curious. Are you saying that toddler memories (Say age 2-4) can’t happen? Not only do I remember these things, I remember the experiences, and I remember remembering them, before I knew this was something remarkable. I also learned to read at a very early age (2 1/2) so I wonder if that has anything to do with the process.