donnat, that’s what I call a “drinking bird”. It contains a substance that boils at a fairly low temperature (room temperature, or below, I think). When the liquid inside it boils, it drives it into the bird’s head, making the head heavier than the body. The bird then pivots into the glass. The water in the glass is cold, which forces the liquid back into the body, and it rights itself.
It’s not a perpetual motion gizmo, because it requires the temperature of the liquid in the glass to be less than room temperature.
The aforementioned article probably meant the majority of people (it probably “went without saying” because most ‘facts’ have anomolies)
Persnaly I believe that most people will have no memorys from before they were 4. And that the people who replied to this post with memories earlier than that are in the minority (and incedentaly far more likely to respond to a post like this - thus making it look like they are not a small minority)
My earliest memory is of an object - a red, wooden racecar toy. I think my first memory of that was about 4 or 5. Before that I have absolutely nothing. And it’s not as if the memory has deteriorated - because I remember thinking about this (I must have been about 10 when I was thinking) and the answer was the same then - no memories before 4.
My memory between 4 and, say, 8. is quite limited. Most of it will be school.
I thought my earliest memory came from when I was around 18 months old, but recently I was flipping through the photo album and I saw a picture of a trip I remember taking - and it was marked Carol, 15 months old. So obviously my earliest memory was a little earlier than I thought.
For the record, I don’t remember what was going on in the picture. I clearly remember swans on the lake that we visited on that trip, but no one thought to take a photo of the swans or of me admiring them. Therefore, I do not think I’m confusing a photograph with reality because there’s no photo of what I remember. I didn’t return to that lake until I was 20 years old.
My mother and I both have very lucid memories from before we were 2. One of my mom’s is falling out of the rafters of a barn on to a saw horse (she apparently was quite the climber when she was little.) I remember looking over to my brother in his crib next to my bed and wondering if he was asleep. We were separated before I was three. Another is sitting on a huge black horse and a long dark lady is holding me while the horse is walking. I thought it was a dream, but my mom tell me that the lady is my cousin Cherry. We were at the state fair. I was 20 months old. There are others. None of which I’ve been told about, but when I ask, my mother tells me yes, they happened and how old I was.
It has been my experience too that I’m unsusal this way. I have one other friend that has very early memories, but that’s all.
My Mom and Dad divorced when was about 1 year old. I can remember the house we used to live in on the lake. My memories of this time are in great detail. I can remember my Aunt taking me out on the lake in an inner tube. I can remember my Dad taking me to get my bunny rabbit (he kept saying “We’re almost there, we’re almost there.”) I remember our dog at the time, a Bassett Hound, named Bumb. I can even remember the pattern of the old wool rug he used to lie on in front of the fireplace. I can see all of these pictures as clear as if I had a poloroid of everything. After that I don’t have another memory until the first day of school when I was 5.
I was less than a year old when we lived on the lake.
My earliest memory is when I was playing under the ironing board and pulled the hot iron down and it landed on my back.
I was 10 months old. My mother wore a blue colored top. she picked me up and put me in the sink and ran cold water over my back.
When I told her this she looked at me astounded.
After that, my next memory involves doing a lot of crying and then some one coming into my room in the dead of night, turning on the light and pressing on my abdomen. I cried more and was taken to the hospital. I had a hernia. I was about 1.
Then there was the memory of climbing on a lazy boy and it reclined with me on top and my head hitting the corner of a cabinet. Off I went to the hospital again. I was maybe 17 months.
I’ve asked this question to a lot of friends - one of Shirley Ujest’s Break The Ice Questions - and every person )that I talked to)responded with a memory of injury.
I can remember my second birthday on Columbia PIke in Arlington, VA. I can describe the tin train set I got. I can recall the entire layout of the apartment. We moved from there when I was three. I can rembember moving into a just-built house in Dominion Hills in 1947, again when I had just turned three. I have described the night we moved in to my parents and they are amazed. There was no electricity that night. I have told them which room we spent the night in and more. All confirmed by Mom.
I remember looking at a floor and seeing what I recognized years later as an empty Jujyfruits box. From the bits and pieces my parents gave me, long after the fact, the box was on the floor in the train station in Indianapolis. I was born June 10, 1949, and we came out here to Southern California in March 1952–three months before my third birthday.
These are all interesting posts; I’ve wondered about my own very early memories and whether they’re real or not. I’m sure many people have early memories of receiving injuries, but that’s something one probably would have been told about at a young age, and I wonder if they’re remembered from being retold? The ones that strike me as indisputably genuine are the ones of mundane moments, like dougie_monty seeing the empty Jujyfruits box on the floor; surely no one would have mentioned that later to him.
My earliest memory (posted above) is from I’m not sure what age, but I couldn’t even walk yet, so I guarantee I was under 4. Probably under 2??? I did receive some traumatic injuries at a young age, including a big gash on my head when I was 2 and walking barefoot into a pile of fire ants one time, but I have no memories of these for some reason.
I also have no memory of my parents’ divorce, when I was 6 or 7. Dad was there, then there’s a big blank period, then Dad was gone. Go figure.
Somebody made the point earlier that generally people may not have memories before age four and that a thread like this would naturally bring out all of us statistical deviants, and I think he or she was probably right as many of my acquaintance have few memories befor elementary school.
I have several, and it’s late and I’ve not got much time before the eyes get off work for the night. I can clearly remember the grandfather clock I liked to watch in the house we lived in from the time I was 1 until I was almost 2. My mother mentioned last night, when I recalled this, that I was bad about taking the rocks out of the counterweights.
And I remember the view from my crib out of the plate glass window in my room in the next house. The layout of that one is still with me, too. I described it to my mother last night and she confirmed it. As well, I remember crawling out of my crib and down the backstairs of the house, and heading out of the garage. I could not speak yet, but my aunt was watching me that night and I remember her yelling, “Where’s the baby!?! Where’s the baby!?!” and turning around to crawl back toward her.
As someone else above’s post notes, kids can understand spoken language before they can speak it.
We lived in Hawaii the year I was three (1956) and I remember much of that. The house, my third birthday, the daycare on the beach with weird little cages we crawled into to nap, the pineapple fields, why you don’t play in pineapple fields, the day we found mice in my sister’s teddybear (“Pinky”).
There’s too much there for me to believe these are somehow “restored” memories from other sources. Man, wasn’t it nice to know so little about credit cards?
Yes, one of my earliest memories is of an injury. Prior to that I have brief in-my-crib or playing-with-toy moments, but my first clear memory is age 3, slipping on the kitchen floor and busting my chin open on a chair. It was the first pain I’d ever had that didn’t stop.
Also, for years my mom didn’t believe I had a memory of being on a baseball field. I mean, not like a neighborhood baseball field, but one in a stadium. I knew it had to be a real memory, because it was from my POV. Recently, my dad confirmed it: Fan Appreciation Day at Shea Stadium, 1974.
Two years, seven-and-a-half months. The drive to the hospital to see my newly-minted baby brother. Oddly enough, I can’t say for sure that I remember seeing him in the observation room… only the drive.
Another really early one: one day, the dog made a mess in the house, and Dad [Daddy, then] was absolutely furious, chasing Saki around the house with a rolled-up newspaper. I dove behind a sofa, terrified that I would be next. Why? Because, as I was painfully aware, it hadn’t been all that long since I had been a diaper-wearing dirty girl myself, and that I occasionally still had accidents…
There’s lots of other really early stuff, too, but I can’t date it on my own… eating a banana and loving it (I started to hate bananas at an early age); eating from the segmented plastic plate, decorated with mildly psychedelic silkscreen prints of cartoon jungle beasts (very '60’s, totally groovy!), in a high chair; being afraid of the German Shepherd which started acting aggressive when I was still a toddler, and was then given away, (or so they say); lots of memories from the first house (we moved before I started pre-school at age 4, in the fall of '72); a clear-as-yesterday memory of my walking around the first house balancing a plastic fish on my head for extended periods of time (I was absurdly fond of doing this; and let’s face it, you’d have to be pretty young and silly do make that your #1 hobby, right?); lots of memories of Dad watching the early '70’s Miami Dolphins in the first house (and him shouting things at the T.V. about personal fouls, penalties, first downs, touchdowns, Garo Yepremian, Larry Csonka, and where-the-hell-is-[Bob] Griese-throwing-it-to!?!). The '71 season was a S.B. year; the '72 season was the Perfect Season; and Dad gave me a Dolphins pennant (among other things) for Christmas in '72 or '73, by which time I felt like an old fan. Any football memory from the first house would have to have been from '71 or earlier. And in my clearer memories of this, I understood that there was a whole season devoted to this football stuff, that it had happened the previous year, that it apparently happened every year, and that I’d might as well get used to it… although it made Dad just a bit scary.
I still don’t know what the hell Garo Yepremian was thinking, though. Maybe I should ask my Dad! :rolleyes:
My earliest memory dates back to about 2 1/2 years old. My mom used to read to me every night from a big picture book called “My First Book About Jesus.”
One morening I woke up, picked up that book, and suddenly realized that I was reading the words! I ran out to the kitchen where my dad was sipping his coffee and reading the LA Times, and proudly told him: “Daddy! I can read!”
He patiently watched while I read out of the Jesus book (all the time certain that I had memorized it while Mom was reading it to me), said how well I did, then handed me the sports page, pointed to Jim Murray’s column, and asked me to read it.
He almost fell out of his chair calling my Mom into the kitchen when I DID read it - missing several words, of course, but sounding them out the best I could.
The best part of this whole story: In 1991 I was covering the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic golf tournament in Palm Springs, CA for KDES radio when I ran into Jim Murray, the abovementioned columnist. We had lunch together, and I told him the story. He loved it!
And the part about not remembering anything before age 5? Bravo Sierra! (ham operators will get that reference) I remember things very distinctly, from pre-school to my dad’s unemployment when I was 3, to my little sister’s birth when I was 3 1/2, etc. VERY clear memories - and I still remember my dad’s license plate on his 1952 Cadillac. which he sold when I was 4. He verified that I was right when I brought it up in 1995, shortly before his death!
I used to remember a couple of things that had to have happened before I was 3, but now I only have memories of remembering it - when I was a kid I remembered going to a feedstore and looking at the ducks and chicks. The oldest memories I still have date from when I was 4 - I can remember the Christmas of 1976, getting a coloring book and being criticized by my sister for my choice of colors for a picture of a house (green).
I remember the layout of the apartment where we lived before we moved from Finland to New York when I was 3.
I also remember that since my birthday is in August, and we left before then, I celebrated my fourth birthday two months early in June. My aunt bought me a pink My Little Pony that was supposed to “smell pleasantly of candy” and I had to keep it out on the balcony for about two weeks until my mom stopped getting a huge headache whenever she was in the same room as the damn thing.
And I remember Barbara, who was from Hungary. She was an au pair who took care of me when my mom and dad were at work during the day. I was 2.
Hmm let me work backwards. I clearly remember things from before the age of 4 (though I have many many more memories after that age) when still living in my old house in yonkers (I know these are from before 4….my brother was not yet walking).
I clearly remember wanting to have my picture taken in the little car one christmas, shortly after he was born. No mom I don’t want to hold the baby I want to ride in the car!!! Age : 3 years 2 months.
I equally as clearly remember going to visit my mother after my brother was born. I remember seeing a candy machine and wanting some candy, as well as hugging my mother and seeing my brother and the other babies there. Age : 2 years 11 months.
My earliest confirmable memory was when we bought our subaru GL back in the summer of 82. My mother was pregnant and I seem to remember a guy with puffy white hair on the sides of his head. I recently confirmed the memory when we drove by a car dealership and it struck me as the one in my memory. My parents agreed (we don’t have any pictures of this place)
I THINK I can remember as far back as 18 months, but these memories seem almost dream like…very fuzzy, and hard to confirm with anyone. My uncles bought a malamute when I was 18 months or so, but no one remembers where they got him or what happened that day… Gee great i can remember and they can’t
I was 2 years old and travelling in an airplane. I remember taking off and the objects on the ground getting smaller. I also remember my mother reading a book to me on the plane (It was a Golden Book version of ‘Little Black Sambo’ --My wern’t we PC back in the early 60’s).
When I recalled this memory years later I first thought maybe I had dreampt it at some point.
After that, there are bits and pieces but mostly after 4 before I had a good handle on my memories.
