About 10+ years ago I read an article that claimed to back up evidence that people don’t have real memories from before the age of 4. Well, that was new to me.
My earliest clearly datable memory was from age 18-20 months (getting out of the hospital). We moved when I was 2.8yrs and I remember all about that, what was happening before, what happened after, etc. My memory from age 3 is just like normal memory from any later age.
I thought this 4 years old limit was total nonsense. Then I started checking other people. They hardly remembered anything from age 4 at all, and never earlier. And I asked more people and more people…
I have become fascinated with this issue. I have come up with a lot of very early memories and bugged my mom about where we were at the time, the circumstances, etc. The last time I visited her I was able to pin down another memory as being from age 22-24 months (my brother taking care of a neighbor kid’s bunnys, cool stuff for a less than 2 year old).
I can’t believe I’m the only person like this. Is there anyone else like this hanging around the SDMB? (Or, turn this into “Ask the memory guy.”)
Do you have anything else special going on about memory? Mine is quite good on certain things (esp. visual). I used to teach and was a long time in catching on that my students didn’t remember anything they were taught from high school (or the last lecture for that matter) while I easily do. (My high school days were a very long time ago.)
I, for some odd reason, remember being in my crib and looking out the side through the rails to the far side of the room. There was a big pile of… stuffed animals and pillows. I mean big. It went all the way up to the ceiling, and I remember thinking, “cool!”
I talked to my mom about this and she said no such pile ever existed. I’m thinking it was perhaps a dream I had as a toddler. I have a lot of memories from pre-school and elementary school. That shouldn’t count though, because that wasn’t too long ago for me, about 10 years…
I remember running in my feetie pajamas and slipping and falling hard on my butt and deciding NOT to cry because I wasn’t supposed to be running on the hardwood floors because my feeties were very worn out, these being my sisters’ pjs before me. They were a faded red, almost pink and soft and I loved them.
We moved out of that house when I was 3 1/2.
I remember leaning over the front seat of my daddy’s '62 Ford Falcon to look at my new baby sister----she was so pretty! And being told HE was Ray Jr! Lies! This was obviously my little sister, I was going to call her Tammy! Too pretty to be a boy! My brother is 3 years and 7 months younger than me.
My friends and I have this standing joke about our “selective amnesia”… we all remember trivia and useless junk, but important stuff just goes in one ear and out the other… I have a fairly good memory for songs (tunes/lyrics, but not singers or titles), while a few friends remember movies almost verbatim, that sort of thing.
I do have a memory that has to be younger than 2 years old, of feeding pigeons on a concrete floor with a sliding glass door behind me. That was in Seattle, and my family moved away from that house when I was around 2.
Also, I can still remember most of the beginning of the “Book of Three Words” (“San Tz Jing”), which my mom taught me when I was really little (but I don’t know exactly when. Definitely before I was four, though.)
Once I think back around 4 or 5, I only remember a few select things, but I remember a very clear memory from when I was probably between 1 and 2 years old, but I think closer to 1. I was lying in my mom’s arms, and listening to her talk to one of my parents’ friends about how the song “Memories” always made me fall asleep. And he said something very close to “I just pray that when he’s older, he’s never driving and that song comes on the radio, and he just knocks right out behind the wheel.” I think I was around 1, and I remember it really clearly.
I have memories of events that had to have occurred at the time I would have been 2 to 3 years old.
My mother insists it is impossible to remember that far back (she can’t, therefore no one can) and that my “memory” is from seeing photographs. However, some of my memories are of things that have never been photographed by anyone in my family.
My starkest memory is eerily similar to Yo La Tengo’s, only instead of a huge pile of stuffed animals, I was seeing a huge but beautiful woman in white flowing robes. Of course, it was probably a dream, but after 42 years I still remember it like it was yesterday. My grandmother speculates I was seeing my guardian angel, and judging from the fact that I should have been dead along time ago but am still thriving, she may be right!
My son once related his birth to me when he was about five years old. He spoke of the doctor pulling him out of my stomach by his heel. My son was born by C-section, and at that time I had never spoken of his birth to him. I was knocked out cold so I don’t know how they pulled him out to help verify if it was really a memory. He no longer remembers it.
[funny story that should be embarrassing, but isn’t]
My first memory was when I was about one and a half. I got a really bright idea one day - I assumed that if I took Mom’s car keys and shoved them into an outlet, I could drive the house around town. I stuck the keys into the outlet. I haven’t forgotten since.
[/funny story that should be embarrassing, but isn’t]
i have many distinct memories of being two and three.
my middle brother was born when i was two. to express my anger and disappointment, i took a shit in the middle of the kitchen floor and then tried to smother him with a pillow. really!!
i broke my leg when i was three. i remember my father running up the driveway to me. i remember being at my babysitter jeanie’s house and having to sit on each stair to get up the staircase. i remember the girl scouts who lived below us coming to visit. i remember very clearly getting the cast cut off; i got a grape lollipop and chiclets too. lots more.
Back when I was two my parents would send me to the library and they’d read to a big group of toddlers, encouraging early reading. This definitely helped spur me to teach myself to read when I was 4. Anwyay, I remember I had these really crummy sandals, and the book they were reading was really boring. So I went to the back corner of the room (we sat in a circle around the librarian, so I became fairly inconspicuous) and I tried to pick apart my sandals. By the end of the book I had managed to separate the metal buckles from the fabric on both shoes. I then proudly displayed them to my mom as I walked out of the room barefoot. It’s a weird first memory, no doubt.
That article is absolute crap. I remember everthing since I was about 2 years old. I remember my second, third, and fourth birthdays like it was yesterday. My younger brother was born just before my third birthday and I still vividly remember being quite ticked off when my parents brought him home. Maybe the learning challenged didn’t become sentient until 4, but this doper was fully human at 1 year 9 months.
Oh, yeah. Thanks Redukter . I also remember when I was around 2 or 3, I decided it would be cool to stick a small screw driver in a socket. That was fun. I remember it tickled, probably because the plastic handle kind of softened the electricity.
We moved from a suburb of Boston to grad student housing when I was two, and I don’t have any concrete narrative memories of Boston, so no discernable memories before 2 years old.
Very shortly after the move, though, I was sitting at the kitchen table and my Dad had been in conversation with my Mom for a bit and at some point in the conversation (which I had been ignoring up until then) he said “…drip…drip…drip”, and I found this fascinating and wanted to know why he said that. But he kept on talking and it was a little while before there was a lull in the conversation and I said to him, “Daddy, you went ‘drip drip drip’”. He looked over at me briefly and smiled and said “I did?” and said no more and resumed his conversation with my Mom.
I think it stuck in my head because I was mad because he didn’t explain why he said that, didn’t explain what he had been talking about, and I didn’t know how to ask it any better than to say "Daddy you went ‘drip drip drip’ ". Years – no, decades – later, I finally got around to asking him if he had any idea at all what he might have been talking about and he said it was most likely the water heater, which was in a little utility room right off the kitchen, which did leak and cause problems, although he might have been talking about an electric drip coffeemaker or something having to do with the old car.
I can only remember back to age five–specifically, when a friend of mine in kindergarten lost a tooth and was lying on the floor, clutching a wet paper towel to his mouth.
What an image.
I think I remember the apartment my folks lived in when I was about 1.5, but I can’t really be sure. I should ask my mom–maybe I’ll post a correction tomorrow. Other than that, my first definite memory is from when I was about three–I walked in on my parents making out. Hell of a way to start your conscious life, right?
I have an incredible memory for sounds. I remember the voice of almost every person I’ve ever heard on more than one occasion. If I hear a sound that sounds at all like any sound I’ve ever heard, I’ll hear the sound in my head. I have other funny things with sound–I’ve got synesthesia (i.e., I associate colors with sounds), and I can visualize whatchamacallits (those bars that represent the intensity of each part of a sound–they’re the visuals on some CD players).
When we were studying Freud in my crit lit class we read an article in which he claimed that kids under the age of 7 don’t form memories. BS.
I have several memories from before age three. Most of them have been verified by parents of having happened around 2 1/2.
I remember seeing my fugitive uncle off on the bus (he was wanted for bigamy) with my dad. My uncle hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
I remember visiting my Mom the hospital, and the ping pong table and Jesus statue in the lounge.
I remember climbing out of my crib whenever my parents foolishly left the chair they sat in to read me bed time stories. Eventually they wised up and would put the chair across the room before saying good night.
I remember making my grandmother cry when I refused to drink from a bottle because I was “a big girl,” and her telling me about her brother and sister (twins) who went to heaven when they were just my age then.
I remember my Mom teaching me “three jolly fishermen” and letting me sit in the high chair and paint a Christmas ornament (a rocking horse I kept for the next ten years until it broke) just like she did, but with water colors instead of tempras.
I remember visiting a nursery school with her, and what was on the walls…
But, I don’t remember much of anything about 1st or 2nd grade, so go figure.
My first memory is from a month before I turned five (in other words, May, 1990). I remember the hearing test I went through at Arizona State University to determine the level of my hearing loss; they did a test where they played music while a stuffed animal moved in the corner. Then they would play just the music, without moving the animal. If I had looked over the corner, that meant I heard the music and expected the animal to move (I didn’t). Anyway, I remember being scared by the stuffed animal, and not WANTING to look there.
My other two early memories are from when I was five years old. One is playing “House” in kindergarten and the other is realizing I wouldn’t have another “graduation” until 8th grade, after the kindergarten graduation I went through. (I was shocked that it would take so long.)
And there MAY be a memory that might be from later than 4 years old or earlier; I can’t date it. It’s the memory of my mom reading to me (she always read to me, from when I was two years old), and me asking her to sit on the other side, because I could hear her better on that side. Mom says this was one of the things that tipped her off to the loss, but I don’t know if I’m remembering that specific incident or a later one.
Unfortunately, I remember nothing from earlier than that…I’ve seen a video of my 2nd birthday and don’t remember any of it. Actually, it may be because of that hearing loss. If I wasn’t hearing much of anything, maybe it didn’t stick with me as much.
I remember my grandmother, and she died when I was three years old. I remember playing with her, and I also remember that when she was carried from our house to the ambulance she said: “Come see me in the hospital.” She died before we could go to see her.
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