How far back can memory go?

A nurse came to stay with us for a few days after my mother came home from the hospital with my newborn baby brother, when I was two years and two months old. When she was leaving us, I remember calling to her halfway down the stairs, with my face pressed up against the railing, “Don’t forget your baby!”

Unfortunately memories are easily altered by things such as television, expectations and other factors not related to the actual memory itself. The chance of an event being misremembered is directly proportional to the time since it has occured.

As a general rule, if somebody is older than 20, and they tell me that they remember when they were 3 or 4, I don’t believe them. Oh, they may think they remember something, but I doubt the memory is accurate. Of course, nobody likes to admit the fallibility of their own memory. That is why threads like this tend to go to IMHO and MPSIMS, because some poop like me comes along and challenges everybodies claims.

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~alex/teaching/WBI/memory.html
http://www.clusteredhits.com/search/fallible.htm

I have one independently verified from the age of 18 months - I asked my mom about it when I was 27 or so, and hadn’t spoken about it with anyone previously. It was my sister’s christening, and me coming into the terrible twos decided I didn’t want to sit still and made my way up to the choir stall, where I was given a hymnal to follow along with. I don’t remember who took me back, but Ma tells me it was my grandmother.

For years I’d just thought it was a dream since the memory stood out quite vividly, but when I described it to my mom she immediately said “Oh yeah, I remember that.”

While reading this, I realized we moved out of the first house I lived in sometime shortly before my younger sister was born. She was born when I was about 3 years and 7 months old. I have many memories of living in that other house. I don’t have a lot of specific memories, but I remember things like my older sister and I chasing each other around the “roundy roundy” – our name for an area in the house where there was a wall between the living room and kitchen/dining room, but the configuration made it, well, a “roundy roundy”. I remember my sister, my father, and I building a huge snow fort in our front yard after a particularly bad snowfall. I remember listening to the humidifier in my room at night, and how it lulled me to sleep (and the room I’m remembering looks nothing like any room in the house where we lived from when my younger sister was born until I went to college). I also remember a dream I had in that house (which recurred over several “sessions”, continuing for I don’t know how long). And, of course, I distinctly remember seeing Star Wars at the drive-in sometime around when I was 2, and thinking the arm looked fake when Ben Kenobi cut off the guy’s arm in the cantina.

I believe that memories before 4 can be foggy and inaccurate, but I can’t believe that they can’t exist, because I know I personally have them.

I clearly remember sitting outside on the back steps in winter with my arm feeling hot. I wondered how my arm could be so hot when it was so cold outside.

My mother confirms I had a broken arm the winter I was two.

I remember getting my nappy changed too. I remember the bathroom counter being cold under my back and my mother stuck a pin in me by accident and my older brother and sister were laughing at me crying :mad: :slight_smile:

I also remember one night waking up crying because the bottom of my crib/ cot had collapsed and I remember my mother coming in to fix it/ see what was wrong.

I remember my grandmother’s dog biting my hand because I was poking around at it’s face and I remember my mother carrying me upstairs to wash my hand (don’t remember it being sore or frightening though…)

All kind of unverifiable but vivid snapshots of memory to me anyway.

I’m pretty sure this should end up in IMHO because…

:confused: what was the question again?

I have a clear memory of my brother’s birth, just after my second birthday. I was taken to the hospital nursery and held up by my father so I could look through the glass to see my prematurely born baby brother, because he was not expected to live (he did). I don’t remember actually seeing my brother through the nursery window, just the importance of the event. I also remember VJ day, a year later, because my parents were so happy that they allowed me to ride my tricycle in the house.

Except, as with** Aspidistra**, I remember remembering these memories at younger ages. None of my very early memories have been ‘recovered’ by me past the age of, oh, let’s say 12. I’m certain that you wouldn’t rely on them for too much in the way of details, but the basic event is something I would rely on. I think it’s key that there are specific things from that time frame that I don’t remember, like my maternal grandmother, who died at around the same time.

And remembering remembering events is somehow immune to corruption because…?

Not that you’ll believe this, either, but I have literally dozens of pages written before I turned 20 detailing my recollections of the last Apollo mission to the Moon. I’ve also had memories from roughly the same time period, resurface when I’ve looked at a photograph (I don’t remember the events occuring in the photograph, but I remember things which happened on that same trip, and I know that it’s the same trip because one of the people in the photograph is not a family member, and I’ve never seen her again, much to my regret.), certainly the details of the memories have faded, I can no longer remember exactly what someone was wearing, or the names of some of the people, but snippets of conversation and emotion do remain. This does not happen with every photograph I see of myself taken when I was a child (there’s a photo of me in diapers reaching towards a Wapakoneta newspaper with the headline announcing Armstrong and Aldrin landing on the Moon, I have no memory of that occuring), and I have other memories which occured before I entered kindergarten, with no photographic record of those things happening.

As detailed in thread memories can be triggered by emotions, scents, sounds, or tastes, for example. Based on my experience, I’d say that the problems with recalling memories from one’s early youth have to deal with finding the right “key” to trigger them. Our bodies are still developing at this point, and I’d imagine that our senses are pretty coarse, so finding the “key” is dependant upon discovering something which matches the way things were percieved by us back then.

Since I started writing this post, I’ve had a number of memories from my childhood come flooding back, which I cannot conclusively date, other than they must have occured before I was 8. (My parents divorced when I was 8, and the memories either involve both my parents being present with me, which has only occured three times in the years since the divorce, or involve things which only could have happened when my parents were still married because my mother and I were doing something we couldn’t afford to do after the divorce.) I haven’t thought of them in years (probably decades), have never written them down anywhere, but the “weight” of them is such that I know that the events I’m recalling must have occured in some manner similar to the way I recall them, the same as I know there’s a hand at the end of my arm.

I don’t expect to sway your opinion, but some of the people here are talking about strong memories; the kind that keep coming back to you every now and again, throughout your life. Are you suggesting that these could be completely false? Tell me honestly, how much of the memory details I described above do you think are likely to be false?

This is definitely a subject best suited to IMHO.

I once sketched the floor plan of a room completely from memory (I was about 21 or 22 when I made this sketch) including the placement of maybe a half a dozen objects, one of which was a bureau that I clearly remember sitting or standing next to. When I showed this sketch to my parents, my mother confirmed that it was my sister’s bedroom… she lived with our grandparents, and they were in the process of moving when I was born. Mother and I stayed in that room recovering for no more than a couple of weeks.

I also remember the living room downstairs, and have seen photographs of it, and of the front porch outside, both of which look familiar. There is no way I could have been in that house after I was about 2-3 weeks old.

Now I know the plural of “anecdote” is not “data” but, given my experience and the other responses in this thread, I have to conclude that 4 years of age is not a hard and fast limit. :dubious:

Well, since it hasn’t been mentioned (at least explicitly), I will go ahead and throw this out there, probably before this heads to IMHO. :slight_smile:

Generally speaking, people will not be able to retain memories they had before the age of 3. The reason behind this is simple: the hippocampus - an integral part to the brain’s ability to retain short-term memory (which essentially acts as a “cache” until memories make their way into long-term memory) - isn’t fully developed in humans until the 3 year mark. Of course, this might vary a little from person to person, but it basically all averages out to 3 years.

So, as far as people “remembering” events from before 3 years (say, maybe 1 or 1.5 years old)… it’s highly unlikely, and as others have pointed out, those types of memories are usually created by the brain from looking at videos or photographs from the particular event.

I’ll see if I can dig up the formal citations for these facts (I vividly remember them from my Development Psych class).

LilShieste

I remember looking at chicks and ducklings at a feed store. I mentioned my memory to my mom, and she was surprised because that store burned down before I was 3.

I still have a distinct memory of something that happened when I was 19 months old. My family had a cottage on a lake and one day I took a long walk off a short pier (the dock, actually). My two older brothers saw this and came running to rescue me. The older one sat down on the shore to take his shoes off but the other just dove right in and hauled me out (these details were supplied by my parents much later). My memories are of seeing the roots of the lily pads underwater and then of being the object of much fussing and attention in the cottage right after. The reason that I believe these to be real memories - as opposed to memories of memories or whatever - is that the images of the lily pad roots are so clear even now, nearly fifty years later and this detail has never been a part of the “family narrative” associated with the event.

But why should it be completely nonfunctional while it’s developing?

It’s interesting (well, to me anyway) – I have one memory from when I was as young as 2 that I strongly suspect is constructed from a photograph. And yet there’s a memory from only months or possibly a year later that I believe, just as strongly, is a first-hand recollection.

The earlier memory is of me taking a bath in a room full of bubbles, in a shiny blue sink. I’ve remembered this for years and years. However, since I know there’s a photograph of me being bathed in a bathroom with bubble-patterned wallpaper, I do think this is kind of an “implanted” memory. My family moved from the house with the bubble wallpaper when I was 2, which is why I’ve doubted my recollection of this is “legit.”

The later one is different. It’s of the death of one of my grandfathers, both of whom passed away the same year – 1969. Since I was born in August 1966, this gives me an age-range window of roughly 2 1/2 to 3 1/2.

The memory is just a couple of flashes. The lights in my house are on, so it’s dusk or later. And I’m following my sister, who’s a year and a half older than I, as she screams/cries hysterically about losing Grampa and runs through the hallway to our bedroom. I stand in the doorway to the bedroom and watch as she either falls on top of the bed or even crawls underneath it, and my mom rushes in, trying to calm her down.

And that’s it. The sad thing is that I have no memory whatsoever of either of my grandfathers while they were living, and I can’t even determine which one’s death this memory relates to. All I’ve got is this brief trauma surrounding the moment my sister and I found out we wouldn’t see one of them anymore. (I do remember being confused and not nearly as upset as my sister, so I probably didn’t realize what “dead” meant.)

BTW, I’ve never mentioned this memory to anyone in my family, so it’s not a “shared” family recollection.

Fascinating subject, this memory stuff.

If that were entirely true, then I would never remember certain events that happened when I was two; some things are remembered that no one ever talked to you about.

You see, my parents didn’t often talk about when one of them was committed (besides saying that parent was “in the hospital”…I didn’t know what for until I was a teenager), so when I asked " Where and when do I remember going to visit [insert parent] in a hospital with dark buildings that you had to go outside to get to since they weren’t connected? I remember being carried, so my white shoes didn’t get dirty, and there being a statue of the Virgin Mary and a ping-pong table in the lounge. On the way home uncle Joey [a teenager at the time] stole an ashtray from the place we stopped to eat. Later we [me and the other parent] went to great-grammy’s and I played with my toy UFO."

After they lamented that I could remember that, they explained it was Saint Dymphna’s, run by the local Caltholic hospital, where one parent had spent a couple of weeks…

Disclaimer: I buy into the cognitive neuroscience explanation for most cognitive functions. This includes memory. I will avoid heaping scorn on other interpretations and theories, even though they are so wrong it is laughable.

There is no point at which all of your previous memories are locked away. The brain doesn’t undergo any radical change that makes old memories meaningless. Instead the brain seems to be learning how to encode/recall with less context. As such earlier memories have far more context required for correct recall than later memories. The result is that memories requiring more context are harder to recall - the context is gone. Memories that do not have the support of other memories or strong cues will fade away. Often these are trivial events that receive no external support to bolster the memory against forgetting.

Strong memories, however, can persist. The primary mechanism for this is recall of the memory. Interesting and important events are dredged up early in life, as well as later. This forms a suite of new cues for the memory, but also introduces new elements that can be confused as part of the original memory. The other way early memories can be recalled is if there were strong cues involved. If these cues are internal, such as emotions, then the memory is more likely to be recalled later.

Most childhood memories end up reducing to a sort of haze of impressions and familiarities. Within this haze a few crisper memories exist, generally tied to later memories. Neurologically early in life you have a great number of weak connections between areas representing the memory.