My earliest memories of my childhood (that can be dated) come from a little over 3 1/2 years old.
A friend of mine swears she can remember back to being under 2 (having her nappy changed by her dad)
How far back can adult memories go. Any verifiable instances of people remembering things from less than 2 years old?
I recall a report from several years back, I think in Scientific American, which said that children were most likely to remember two certain events from before age two: severe illness or injury to themselves, or the birth of a sibling. I don’t recall any minimum age being reported, however. There is always the problem in addressing these cases that it’s hard to verify whether someone actually remembers an event, or whether the memories actually formed from hearing other people talk about it.
Another problem is identifying what time the memory is from. I recall quite distinctly sitting on an Aunt’s porch and having my Uncle pick a peach off the tree for me to eat. This had to have been the summer I was two or the summer I was four, but there’s no way to tell. The birth of a sibling or a serious illness is much easier to date.
I easily remember my little brother being born when I was a little less than three. I have quite a few memories before that starting at about 26 months. I can am also sure of the time-frame because me moved just after that.
I started an IMHO thread about this about a year ago. Titled ~ “How far back can you remember?”
Quite a few people seem to have definite memories before age 2, some as far back as about 1.5 y.o. Earlier than that becomes sketchy.
Note that The Pros deny the validity of memories prior to age 4.
:dubious: I can remember when there was a whole bunch of me. We were all running through some sort of tunnel…
and we all had tails…
The earliest memory I have is of Apollo 17 which happened in 1972, when I was 4. Of course, that’s the earliest memory that I can assign a date to, I have other memories which might have occured earlier than that, but I’ve no way of knowing for sure.
The first memory that I can put a date to was V-J Day. I was not quite 25 months old. The reason that I know that I genuinely remember it is that I remember what I was thinking in response to what was going on.
Just two or three years ago I was able to identify a photo of a house that I had visited only once – again when I was two years old (30 months). I also remember two other things that happened on that same trip and what I was thinking.
In three of the four situations, there was a momento that was always present that kept the memory alive. Mother saved some of the firecrackers from V-J Day and kept them in our “junk drawer” while I was growing up. A black and white photo of me on a wooden horse in Mexico kept that memory fresh. (I thought that the horse was real and I remember that the sombrero was purple.) And I chose a tiny flat iron from a box of varying sizes of irons – and still have that.
My first husband swears that he remembers his Dad coming home from the army when he was ten months old.
Salvador Dali said that he remembered being in the womb.
I have distinct memories of my family’s new house being built, which happened when I was 2. I also have a couple memories of the old house. I also remember being angry at hearing on the radio that the Edmonton Oilers had won a game while Wayne Gretzky was out of the lineup – the only game he missed very early in his career was in 1979, which is in that same year. I even had the date researched at one point, but I’ve forgotten it (ha!). I’ve got a laundry list of memories like that.
Until I was18 months old, we lived in an apartment, and I have a very distinct memory of an experience of mine there.
Johnny Carson recounted once that in a previous interview with Lee Marvin, Marvin mentioned that he remembered being in the womb.
Lee also was known to have a few from time to time.
Yeah, ya gotta wonder: whose womb?
I don’t have any memories prior to kindergarten at age 5! Is there something wrong with me? Someone remembers an event when he was 10 months old?? :eek:
I remember getting my “big girl bed” when I turned two. That means I was under two on the occasion that I remember waking up in my crib.
I remember when my brother was born, a month before I turned three. I had to stay with my Auntie Janice, which was good, but she made me eat tomato soup, which was bad. I still hate tomato soup. I remember being really annoyed that he was a boy.
I remember going to Ballarat when I was a baby, and this is tricky. According to the dated photographs we have, I was 15 months old at the time. We didn’t go to Ballarat again until I was 19 or 20 years old. I distinctly remember the swans on the lake, but we don’t have any photos of that. I don’t remember any of the things in the photos we do have. Very weird.
I remember being toilet trained, and have vague recollections of potty training.
I remember going to playgroup when I was three, and kindergarten when I was four. At playgroup I was friends with a girl named Jane and she ended up at the same school as me when we were five. At kindergarten there was a girl who was a bully and didn’t like me and her name was Fiona. Thankfully, she went to a different school to me and I never saw her again. Our teacher was Miss Black. I remember having my kindergarten photographs taken because I was doing a jigsaw puzzle when the photograph started snapping shots of me. He convinced me to leave my puzzle and go outside for more photos, but I kept insisting I had to go back to my puzzle or Miss Black would be angry. It was against the rules to leave something out if you weren’t using it. The photographs I have show my smile getting progressively more forced as I got angrier at the photographer for not letting me go back to my puzzle. Finally, he was done and I went inside - and Miss Black told me off for leaving the puzzle out. She’d put it away and I didn’t get to play with it again.
While I do wonder about the validity of some of my memories (that Ballarat thing just doesn’t seem right), I’m quite certain that I do have many accurate memories dating back earlier than four years of age. I think The Pros are off on this one.
My earliest memory that I can date was from when my family moved to a new house - just a month before I turned four.
I have a few other memories from that house that had to be before we moved - running up the two steps from the hall into the family room, ahead of my mother who was carrying the laundry at the time. Falling out of bed after a nightmare, onto the hardwood floor, and asking for my room to be carpeted (I got my wish when we moved). A few more like this, mostly like the laundry one…no reason why I should remember it at all.
Interestingly, I have no recollection at all of when my brother was born, at the age of two and a half.
-Lixi
I had this sort of discussion with my brother a while back and he was telling me about how he remembers how he was climbing around on some bricks for a house that was being built and cut up his toe pretty badly. He was very specific about how badly it hurt, how scared the amount of blood made him, how it tickled when they removed the stitches later, etc.
When he asked why I was laughing, I took off my shoe to show him a very characteristic horseshoe shaped scar on my toe.
I suppose I would have been 3 at the time.
My earliest date-able memory is of my 3rd birthday cake…it was a firetruck. I remember seeing it in the refrigerator and understanding that it was mine, but I don’t remember the actual party later. I have scattered images that are older than that, but I don’t really know how much older.
I had a nightmare about a rocking chair that we had attacking me that is older than that, but I can’t be sure how much older.
My brother is 21 months younger than me, but I don’t remember him being born.
I remember my 3rd birthday party, largely because of the cake which had flowers, a green border, kittens and sprinkles. My grandmother made it. It was almost too pretty to eat, but I have a distinct memory of being left unattended and being able to filch an icing flower off of the cake. I remember sitting under the dining table (my favorite hiding place) eating the flower when my mother came back in and saw the damage. She ran toward my older sister’s room, where my sister and my cousins were playing, yelling “Who messed with the baby’s birthday cake?” 
The next true memory I have is from five months later – the assassination of JFK. That’s the point where my memory really comes together, I don’t have major blank spaces after that point.
thanks for all the responses, guys.
Somehow, I don’t think I believe Salvador Dali or Lee Marvin.
1010011010’s story is pretty instructive. I Have Heard It Said (now there’s a cite for you…) that this sort of thing happens quite a bit with twins … each twin thinking that a particular event happened to them.
Wasn’t there a thread on that recently, in fact?
I’m quite sure that my earliest memories have stuck because they were ‘rehearsed’ - that is, I can remember as a child (about 8 or 9) wondering what my earliest memories were, and the 3 or 4 incidents that I can remember before kinder have stuck in my memory because they were the ones I thought about then.
Maybe the extent to which you remember early experiences has something to do with how much you try to remember - and how early?
My sister is three years older than me and my mother used to sit us in the double kitchen sink to wash/bathe us (we used to pretend we were in a train). At the age of three, we moved abroad for several years and when we returned, we had grown too large to be washed this way; even at age 6 (when I was 3), my sister would have been too big to sit in the kitchen sink alongside me, so I’m certain that the memory I’m describing is from a time when I was two years old or less.
I’m also sure that I’m remembering the actual event itself, rather than remembering subsequent conversations and third-party reinforcements about it, the reason for this certainty is that I have never spoken about this to anyone since it happened.
I was sitting in the right-hand sink, my sister was in the left, the water came up to about the level of my belly button and it was completely clear (there was no bubble bath or soap residue in the water at that moment) - I farted and must have inadvertently expelled a small fecal nugget, which I then must have sat on, squashing it flat. When my mother noticed and scolded me, I remember pleading with her “It’s not poo mummy, it’s a leaf, it’s a leaf!” (it did look quite a lot like a small autumn leaf).
:o Embarrassed now :o
Now it will probably be argued that I’m not remembering the actual event itself, but instead remembering remembering the event, but I’m not sure that this couldn’t be argued to be the case about everything, even things that happened yesterday.
I was a very early talker and I think language helps to cement memories - I have other memories that I believe to be from even earlier, but I cannot confirm that they are original like the above.