I would guess that more tramautic events would stick out more clearly from a young age. I knelt on an open razor which had fallen on a towel in the sink when I was about three. Cut my knee wide open. I remember it fairly clearly.
My family had no pictures of my mom breastfeeding me (indeed, no camera at the time), there was no family lore of her breastfeeding days. I never even knew I was breastfed until I related my memory of her moving the chair, she had all but forgotten that specific detail herself until I brought it up many years later. And like I said, I don’t remember actually breastfeeding, just the chair in the closet door. It’s not like mom used to take me back into that room as a child and related stories of how she used to open the closet door and place a chair there to breastfeed me.
I’m not dredging it up to feel superior, but there really is no other way for this particular memory to become a suggestive implant. Of course you can dredge up some cites that say that if I claim to remember it I am a liar, but I know what I remember and it’s not from anybody suggesting that that’s what I might have remembered, it was never spoken of at all in the house growing up and was never spoken of again until I brought it up.
To continue drawing from Elizabeth Loftus:
(bolding mine)
Steven Wright may be an exception. He says
Right. I made an educated guess about how my mother moved furniture and opened closet doors to gain some privacy to breastfeed me based on the fact that I never knew I was breastfed.
Groundbreaking.
Like I said, mine start between ages 2 and 3 with the earliest being my 2nd birthday party in Galveston, TX. There are a few pictures of that so it may have gotten reinforced by those but there are many, many more of which no one had any reason to remember but me. We built our house and moved just before I turned four and there is no way in hell someone is going to tell me those aren’t genuine memories. It is as clear as any past period has ever been and it it filled with quite mundane things like the color my mother and I painted a little boat we made (Apple-Green; the boat was just a piece of wood) that I promptly lost in the local river. I could list a hundred or two more because that era had a lot of stuff going on for me. No one else remembers it because it wasn’t remarkable to them but I can easily spook my family by tying in references to stuff they would remember and how it fits in what I am saying.
I find the 3 YO lower limit to be suspect. My dad had a grayish green pickup with a homemade camper shell on it. There are no pictures of this pickup in the family. It was a Dodge, he sold it when he bought a new '64 Ford. I might have been 3 when he got the Ford, but I remembered the Dodge well enough to describe it to him, at least remember that there was a pickup before the Ford.
My dad sold his Tri Pacer in ‘63. I remember it being red and white and remember riding in the backseat with my mom during a banked turn. I was terrified. I remember him spinning a crank on the ceiling like rolling down a car door window. I have never been in a Tri Pacer since, yet I just happen to have fabricated this memory? That’s another one that was brought up by me. I told him years later that I remembered the plane and spinning that handle was one thing I could recall. It was to set the trim, I had no way of knowing how to trim a Tri Pacer or even that there was a window-like crank on the ceiling to do it. It’s not like dad used to sit around and talk of the good ol’ days of spinning a crank to trim his Tri Pacer that embedded a suggestion in my head. I saw him spinning the damn thing, I know it, he knows it.
Duke of Rat, the only problem I have with your memory is that it’s your memory, which Loftus has shown can be easily corrupted so that the memory feels genuine, even if the events did not occur!
So just because an event is burned into your mind indelibly and you can relive it with detail, and it coorborates with other sources, it doesn’t prove that it first got there thru your own personally attached eyes and ears. You simply cannot tell where it came from merely from your ability to recall events, even in considerable detail.
If you have not read Loftus, I would like to recommend her works, many of which are online. Here’s one: (PDF) Creating false memories:
She tells of implanting stories in children’s memories of events that did not happen, yet later, those same children had incorporated the false events with their own true ones and could not tell the difference.
We humans are very good at fooling ourselves. Recognizing that is the first step to true knowledge.
That is all true Musicat. However, it gets pretty philosophical past a certain point and dives straight into what is real for any of us, not just little kids. By those standards, it becomes almost impossible to prove that anything happened as we remember it. Childhood memories that contain supporting details mostly unrelated to the main body of the memory provide evidence that it is real.
Let me give you one example among many. I just thought about this and never give it any thought before.
While we were building our house, my next door neighbor, Scott used to watch me a lot. One day, he turned on the radio and danced to the “Shake Your Booty” song. There was no reason for me to think about that event until now. I just thought his dance was funny.
The circumstances I just listed would have meant that I was 3 years old. I just looked up the song and it was Shake Your Booty by K.C. and the Sunshine Band
I was born in 1973 and it was released in 1976. All facts match. I can’t speak for everyone but this type of this is very easy to do for me and it irritates my family if something they say doesn’t match what I remember and can prove it through some type of research like the above.
The hippocampus plays a major role in the process of memory development and learning. In my Developmental Psych course, we learned that the hippocampus doesn’t fully develop in humans until the age of 3 years (though, sometimes as early as 2 years).
Because of this, memories that people recall from before the age of 3 years are usually constructed/false memories. Of course, since brain development isn’t completely uniform (just like any other kind of development), there can be a little bit of variation in this threshold.
Some cites regarding this part of the brain:
http://www.psycheducation.org/emotion/hippocampus.htm
http://thalamus.wustl.edu/course/limbic.html
LilShieste
So I just imagined riding in a Tri Pacer that was sold when I was 2, and imagined parts of the flight that were never related in subsequent years until I brought them up and they were cooroborated by my dad? I call BS.
Why would I know where the brake lever on a diesel locomotive was located? I wouldn’t, because I’ve never ridden in a diesel locomotive.
Why would I know that there was a crank on the ceiling of a Tri Pacer that the pilot cranked during flight? I’ve never ridden in a Tri Pacer since I was 2, don’t know anything about Tri Pacers, never been around Tri Pacers or seen any films of pilots flying Tri Pacers. I never flew in any other general aviation aircraft since then up until just a few years ago, and then it was not in a Tri Pacer. I just miraculously made this crank up and happened to be correct about it? Really?
Or maybe I saw it being used and remembered it.
Sorry, you can cite Loftus until the cows come home and you will still be mistaken. Call me a liar all you want, I don’t care. Tell me I imagined it all, made it, my dad secretly tied me up and made me listen to stories of him flying the Tri Pacer. You’d still be wrong.
But Loftus disagrees with me, so I have to be wrong.
Got it.
I recall as a child attending a particular event with my parents. I can clearly recall some of the details of this. In later life, I always assumed that I was maybe four or five years old when that happened.
Relatively recently, while doing some historical reasearch, I found to my surprise that the event had taken place when I was just two years old.
We also moved across town when I was two and I remember a visit to the new house before we moved there. My grandparents were doing some kind of cleaning/fixing/painting in the kitchen before the move.
Around two seems to be the age for my earliest memories.
First off: I’m not trying to debate whether or not your memories are real. I’m just going to offer another possible explanation.
Your brain is capable of constructing memories like this, even if you’ve never ridden in a diesel locomotive. The brain can piece together information from miscellaneous sources: scenes in a movie; details from books and novels; stories told by friends and family. People can have very vivid memories of events they’ve never actually experienced.
OTOH, it’s possible that your memories are valid/not-constructed. In most cases, though, there are alternate explanations.
LilShieste
If you read Loftus, you will find that although many of her experiments involve kids, she is not limiting the observations to just kids. Indeed, some of her experiments indicate that the longer an implanted memory is held, the stronger and more real it gets.
Quite.
It may prove that the event occurred, but it does not prove that your memory of it is first-hand.
Loftus’ experiments were largely intended to show that “recovered” memories, often of sexual abuse brought forward decades later, were likely to have not actually happened. Patients were encouraged to fantasize about events by therapists, and those fantasies, with therapist reinforcement, became all too real, leading to some tragic court cases.
In this thread, we are concerned more about whether memories we can recall came from personal observations or were introduced to our minds from a different source at a later age and became mixed. Are we are capable of remembering and event from age 2? If not, it’s likely that any “memory” of such an event, true or not, came from somewhere or someone else.
It’s not important to this discussion if the events actually occurred. It is important as to where those “memories” came from. Loftus’ research (and others’) suggests that the age of 3 years is an approximate onset of the ability to retain actual events.
Or, as LilShieste puts is quite succinctly,
Also, how would I know what color the plane was? I never saw a picture of it until the age of the internet when dad produced one and we looked up the N number. I had never seen a picture of the plane before then. I had never seen a picture of the interior and remember it as a tight plaid. How could I just guess both and nail them? Now I could buy this whole “implanted memory” deal except for the fact that this plane was never spoken about in our family. Come to find out, dad was a bit bitter about having to sell the plane when he had kids and had to give up flying. It’s not like he told any stories about it while we were growing up, he loved flying and had to quit because of kids.
Oh, and when he dug out the Tri Pacer pic (he had a total of one picture of the plane, a Polaroid that somebody else had taken, there was no camera in our family at that time), he also had a pic of the plane he had before the Tri Pacer. The one I have no memory of because I never saw it or rode in it. The one I had no idea about how it was flown or what color it was becasue I never saw it or rode in it. A cream colored Piper Clipper. No memories of that one since I had never experienced it.
Do you realize that you are using the exact same argument as those who try to prove that NDEs, past-life regressions, remote viewing, Bridey Murphy, Edgar Cayce, magic tricks and psychic abilities are real? “How else could I/she/he have known about it unless I/she/he was there?”
There are undoubtably a million possible ways, most of which you wouldn’t have tried to remember at the time because it meant nothing to you. Have you ever seen a train movie? A plane movie? Any relatives ever talk about trains or planes? Ever been to a museum? Ever had toys planes or trains? Known friends who had? It’s the rare person who can’t answer “yes” to at least one of those even if they’ve forgotten most of their life.
And there is the possibility that you indeed obtained your memory from first-hand observance at a very young age. But your ability to recall verifyable facts does not in itself prove it.
Newsweek recently had an article on memeory and reported that permanent memories begin at about 4 years.
That could just as easily be true of something that happened last week, yesterday or five seconds ago. The event itself is gone from reality, all that remains is the memory - which by definition is not the actual event, but an artificially sustained representation of it. How do we know that I’m not just under the very compelling illusion that I remember clicking ‘post reply’ before typing this, and what’s the difference.
For the record, I believe the hard limit of three years old to be false, in at least a few cases (and yes, because of my own memories). I can distinctly remember an event that occurred before I was three (it cannot possibly have occurred later because of the location), and because it was an embarrassing event, it was never discussed until many years later when I reached adulthood, whereupon it was corroborated by an astonished person who was originally present.
Of course it can be argued that the person corroborating the memory was wrong or just humouring me or something, anything but admit that the experts, having issued an absolute statement, might be slightly wrong.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that we remember everything, or ordinary things, or in perfectly clear detail before a certain age, but I simply don’t believe it’s true that we remember nothing.
I realize it’s very difficult for you to concede that I have these memories. It would take far too long for me to list the entire spectrum of my life experiences, and frankly I just don’t feel like trying to prove what I know. All I’m saying is, having never seen a picture of the plane, nor heard detailed descriptions of it, I could describe it based on my observations. I didn’t recall it as a blue and white plane, even though the sum total of my later knowledge concerning it could have easily made it blue and white in my mind. It didn’t. I could have imagined the interior to be blue suede. I didn’t. I can 100% guarantee you that the seat upholstery scheme in that plane was not once mentioned during my entire life until I mentioned it based on my memory. Lucky guess? No, I remember it.
As for the laundry list of BS you posted, I’m not concerned with that. I’m talking about my memories, not a dozen other scenarios. Oh, that’s right. I can’t have memories because Loftus says I can’t. Sorry, not going to buy it.
Yet there WAS a reason for me to remember. I was terrified at the time. Extremely terrified. I don’t remember every detail, but the experience is like a snapshot. I remember because I was terrified.
There are stories my parents have told me about other things I’ve done in the same time frame that I have no memory of. Does mean they didn’t happen, since my parents were only going from memory? Nope. It just means that there was nothing unusual enough from my perspective so that I remember them.
As for the chair in the closet door, I don’t know why I remember that. Maybe I was very hungry, I don’t know. I do know that it was never spoken of in my life until I brought it up. Did I see a movie with the same layout of the room? No. See it in a museum? No. I was there and I remember it. As hard as it is for you and Loftus to concede, that’s what happened. Now why would that be. I had no idea I was ever fed in that room. I had no idea that I was ever breastfed. I had no idea that there was no door in the doorframe at that time, from what I remembered there was always a door on the doorframe. Why would I just happen to make these memories up from whole cloth? Oh, that’s right. Edgar Cayce.
About the same time in my life, I got a severe burn on my leg from a clothes iron. Even though that story has been repeated many times during my life, I don’t remember it.
No, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense that dragging up Edgar Cayce. Sometimes humans do things that might not fall into tidy little factoid-filled Loftus papers.
That false memories pertaining to young childhood can be implanted does not necessarily mean all memories present pertaining to young childhood are falsely implanted ones. Do I smell a logical fallacy?