Bell curves are everywhere - I think that’s the reason for them being called ‘normal’ (as in ‘typical’)
Is a skewed bell curve “normal/typical”? 
I don’t think the responses in this thread would be representative of the normal distribution - because the thread excplicitly invites selective data from one end.
It’s like if you ask ‘Are you satisfied with our prices?’, for a product that is priced exactly at the market average, you’re likely to get “Well, I saw it cheaper somewhere else”
I was born in March 1954. We moved from Los Angeles to Bethesda, MD in August 1958, and moved to the Mt. Vernon area of Virginia in June 1960, so my early memories are pretty well bracketed timewise.
I have a few memories from Los Angeles that I’m sure take place earlier than this one, but the earliest memory I have that can be placed fairly specifically in time is from the 1957-58 winter (to the extent that L.A. has ‘winter’) is of my dad calling my sister and me to the window to see snow falling outside. At that time, he didn’t yet know that his employer would transfer him east the following summer and snow would become a commonplace in our lives, so he really really wanted us to see it while it was there; it might be years before we got another chance.
There’s a certain visual blurriness to my small handful of memories from before about the time I turned 4. There’s more visual clarity after that. I remember the layout of our L.A. house quite clearly, and I have a number of clear memories (and even a snippet or two of conversation) from that last spring and summer in L.A.
Once we get to Maryland, I have an abundance of memories - the names of other kids up and down the street, the names of the streets and the local shopping center (Wildwood Manor - it’s still there 
), and so forth.
Yes, but I mean the “normal distribution” is not normal in the sense of this quote by Dorothy Parker:
“Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”
Just the fact that probability distributions are so often symmetrical around the maximum despite the fact that one side is limited by zero (many things cannot be negative) and the other isn’t is weird.
I think of the math term “normal distribution” the same way I think of “normal angle” in geometry referring to a 90 degree angle.
Of the infinity of possible angles, there is nothing particularly ordinary or common (IOW colloquial normal) about the angle named “normal”.
Who calls a right angle “normal”? Never heard that ever.
At least in US geometry pedagogy, it’s the bog standard term. Though you won’t often find it called that in casual speech.
It’d be nice if folks would call a “normal distribution” instead a “Gaussian distribution”. That would avoid the confusion with the non-technical meanings of “normal” as “commonplace” or “ordinary” or “expected”.
There’s always a tension when ordinary words are brought into service as technical jargon. Which gets ugly when the technical jargon then gets widely used by folks with no awareness of the technicalities.
This mention of a crib shook loose another very early memory of mine: being put to bed in my crib and, as my mom is leaving my room, reminding her to turn on the night light since I was scared of total darkness. I remember looking through the prison-bar like slats of the crib as I called out to her.
But, like my mention of being in a playpen in my earlier post here, I don’t know if it’s a trustworthy memory since I would have been so young-- when does a toddler transition out of a crib- 2 years old? I know some here say they have memories going back as far as one year old, but when I was 2, my 5 week old brother died of SIDS. Then I got very sick and ended up in the hospital. The docs thought I had leukemia at one point. But I got better, and the docs never figured out exactly what was wrong with me. They just shrugged and said maybe it was a reaction to my parents’ grief from my brother dying. I remember none of that-- not my brother being brought home, nor him dying, nor my getting sick and being in the hospital. One would think that if I retained any memories from the age of 2, it would be some of those. But, I suppose I could have blocked those memories out since they were traumatic.
Well, that is certainly a warm infant memory! 
Hey, I calls it as I sees it 
I wasn’t trying to describe the possible memory in such grim terms, just making clear how I remember it being a crib and not a toddler bed, since I was looking through slats.
The normal distribution doesn’t seem to be a problem AFAICT; you just say “bell curve” and people at least know what that looks like.
What bothers me is when certain professions insist that it’s wrong for us normies use the ordinary words any different from the way their technical jargon uses them.
Mostly lawyers: “no, you can’t say someone was murdered, that’s for a jury to decide.” “You can’t say Joe Blow embezzled $1.5M, he’s innocent until proven guilty.” In colloquial speech, I’ll use ‘their’ words like a layman, because that’s what I am, and my speech or online comments aren’t a legal filing.
Mathematics uses ordinary words as jargon too, but I’m not going to expect that people use ‘eventually’ or ‘almost everywhere’ consistently with their mathematical usage.
People don’t generally block out traumatic memories, and if it ever does happen, it’s rare. Be very wary of “recovered memories,” especially if that “recovery” involved a psychotherapist. It’s possible you just don’t remember because people don’t have a lot of memories from that age. My sympathies to you and your parents, though. It sounds like an incredibly rough start to your life.
In my case, I was abused by at least one person at a very young age - the one who served time was my stepfather at the time. He confessed to my mother. There is no question this happened. I remember none of it. Who understands the concept of abuse at the age of 2 or 3 years old? I remember the court hearing probably because it was unusual. I remember meeting with a social worker. I have one other very mundane memory of that time. I won a free trip to the circus because of a coloring page I submitted to McDonald’s.
The most traumatic part of that experience, for me, was losing someone I was very attached to, very abruptly. According to my mother, in court I waved to him and told him I loved him. Then he was gone.
And for a long time I thought it was my fault, because I didn’t understand that you don’t remember things at that age. So I thought I had lied. I was probably 7 or 8 years old when I told my mother I thought I had lied and destroyed our family she told me the whole story, which involved not only his confession to her, but a TON of corroborating evidence.
It’s weird how much your life can be shaped by events you don’t even remember.
I have several distinct, visual memories from when my family lived in a two-flat house, which we moved out of shortly before my third birthday:
- Sitting under a Christmas tree, playing with a Tonka truck
- Watching a newscast on the television
- Following my father from the living room into the kitchen
I’ve described the memories to my parents, and while they can’t confirm those exact moments, they have confirmed that the visuals I remember about the layout of the house are accurate, and that I did get that toy truck for Christmas just before we moved.
I also remember my sister being born (I was 3 1/2), and her being brought home from the hospital.
It varies. I don’t have any memories of being in a crib, but I remember finally getting a real bed at about the time I turned 4.
I’m pretty sure this is about right for two reasons: first, the memory has the visual clarity that doesn’t start appearing until about that time, and second, as I’ve mentioned earlier, by the time we moved to Virginia shortly after I turned 6, we’d had two moves in fairly quick succession, and I made a conscious effort at that time to recall as much as I could from when we’d lived in Los Angeles, when all those memories were still pretty recent.
Thank you. My sympathies to you as well, for what you went through at a very young age. I can relate to feeling like it was your fault. When I was 6 I was attacked and bitten by a German Shepard. My parents told me that the family down the street who owned the dog said I was cruel to it, throwing rocks at it, poking it with a stick through the fence, and such. I felt terrible-- I had been taught to always be kind to animals, but since grownups said I did this thing I believed it. Grownups don’t lie, right? I felt shame for doing something so terrible and blamed myself. For a couple years afterward I racked my brains trying to remember when and what cruel things I supposedly did to the dog to warrant it biting me. Finally I realized “ohh, they were lying to try to keep the dog”.
It’s very common for survivors of trauma to blame themselves, I think because it lets us avoid the painful reality that we were completely helpless. We are autonomous creatures who don’t want our autonomy taken away, even if it means suffering guilt and shame for what we imagine we could have done differently.
I have several memories from before starting kindergarten, and a few more that might have been that early. I have no idea what order they go in, so I’m not sure which one was earliest of all. The earliest one I can put a date to was when I was three years and eight months old. I remember standing on our front porch where my grandmother was sitting, as we watched fire trucks go by and saw smoke in the distance. My mother came out to see what was happening and then walked down the street to see what was going on. I was mad she didn’t let me go with her. She came back and told us the Baptist Church down the block was on fire. I also remember walking past the site of the fire a few days later with my siblings and was surprised to see the building was still standing. It turned out the exterior walls were intact but the inside was gutted. I didn’t know it at the time but it turned out this was part of a string of deliberate church fires around our county. I don’t know if they ever caught the arsonist.
Most words have multiple meanings or senses or definitions. It’s really weird when people don’t get that. ‘Organic’ is another one.
Most of my coherent memories start around the 2nd grade. My teacher was Mrs. Griffith, probably in her 50’s. I remember the day in 1956 when there was a motorcade that went down the street next to my school for Adlai Stevenson. I remember riding the bus across town twice a week to get allergy shots. I remember being escorted by school patrol to a point about halfway home, and then walking the rest of the way on my own. I remember the day I figured out I was queer. All those happened in the 2nd grade.
Before that, I have very few memories, and only one that is specific enough that I am confident that it is real. That is the first day I was tall enough to see over the top of the breakfast nook table. It was a huge change in point of view, where before I felt like the floor was where I lived, and now my horizons had expanded (so to speak) to include higher places. I figure I was probably 3 when this happened (I was always tall for my age, and the average table is about 30” I think).