How old do you have to be before you have memories that you retain into adulthood?

Factual Questions
41

I remember reading an anecdote, it might well have been here, in fact it was most likely here. I believe the person who wrote it was Canadian. Something along the lines of:

“When I was young my little brother used to watch Play School ( a programme that had toddlers, play schoolers on it) and for whatever reason I told my lil brother that he’d been on it and asked him did he remember being on the show. Years later my brother, now an adult recounted the story of how he was on Play School to the family at Thanksgiving. Everyone including my mother tried to tell my little brother that he had never been on the programme and that it wasn’t a real memory. He got really upset and didn’t really believe anyone.”

Anyone know the anecdote and/or have a link to the original post/site?

42

Oh that’s just great. It is also absurdly late for many of us. When I say that I have memories before 4 years of age, it means that I have lots and lots of memories that are all tied together and many quite verifiable. It isn’t just flashes and glimpses. My father and grandmother taught at a juvenile home with I was 3 - 4. I don’t just remember that they worked there. I remember playing with the delinquents in their pool and going to the state fair with them. They were good to me although they were some pretty rough guys in general. That is just one of many, many things.

I am not sure we are all talking about the same thing. My memories that go back to ages 3 and up are about the same as those for junior high. I don’t remember everything but I can piece things together quite well if I sit and piece events together. I know that I am good at this just based on past experience but I don’t think I am extraordinary.

43

I just finished talking with my dad regarding early memories and what I remember.

Early vacations were some of my memories. I told him I remember camping once and it was raining, the canopy was holding a lot of water and somebody got a stick and lifted it, dumping all the water on somebody in a lawn chair off to the side. He remembered that, it was in Cloudcroft, NM. He said we were in the '64 Ford, so post-64. I told him the only other thing I remembered was climbing up the side of a muddy hill and being scared to come back down. Looking at how high I had climbed scared me.

He said that he remembered that. But it happened in Colorado, not NM. And we were in the Dodge he had before the '64 Ford. He never took the Ford to Colorado, he had the Dodge rigged up to burn drip (in a couple of 30 gallon barrels he kept in the back) so we could go to Colorado, he never rigged the Ford up to burn drip.

None of these stories are part of my growing-up folklore. No family discussions about how I got stuck on the side of a hill, never been related to my dad until today that I even remember that trip at all. And that’s all I remember, I even had it confused with a later trip. So it’s obvious I just made it up or saw it in a museum.

Another pre-64 memory? Nah, Loftus says it can’t be.

44

I don’t understand all the emotional response. I’m intrigued by reseach into the mind and I don’t find it threatening to learn that it may challenge things I have believed in the past. We’ve all seen demonstrations of the fallability of short term memory, why believe that long term memory is so different, or that it only happens to others, not us? I’ve had conversations w/ old friends, about things from decades back and it’s not uncommon for us to discover that we’ve misremembered certain details, no big deal. It may be that you do retain an accurate memory from the age of two, despite reseach finding it unlikely, no one’s calling anyone else a liar, just pointing out that the phenomenon has been heavily investigated and the research results are available. Closing your mind to the possibilities seems ignorant to me and in direct contrast w/ the basic purpose of these forums.
I very recently had a conversation w/ my brother concerning military service numbers, given out prior to the shift to using SSN’s for military ID. I had thought the phased them out in the eary sixties, but he didn’t enlist until '67 and he had one. I was quite surprised by this, but it was alsp clear that I misremembered the timing of it.
I don’t believe everything I read, even the results of controlled scientific study. That’s a basic tenant of scientific conclusions, they must stand up to question, to skepticism.

45

We were taught what Hilarity N. Suze suggested in intro to psych - the younger you were when you acquired language, the younger you were when you formed memories. I guess that makes sense to a point, but I spoke in complete sentences by 18 months and my earliest confirmed memories are from about a year later. And if it wasn’t for the fact that my parents were upset when I asked about a couple of the memories (watching an uncle get on a bus to flee to Canada to avoid the law; visiting a family member who was in a mental hospital) and expressed their wish that I didn’t recall them, I wouldn’t be sure they were real. I think there has to be something more than just acquire language–>memories. Surely most people are speaking in complete sentences long before the commonly cited age four for real memories?

46

I don’t think it actually is all that emotional response - unless exasperation counts as the kind of emotion you were thinking of. Whether or not anyone is trying to call anyone else a liar, or delisional, or whatever, that’s pretty much what it amounts to.
It’s pretty frustrating to recount something that, although personal and somewhat anecdotal, is still quite soundly corroborated, only to have it slapped down by someone saying what amounts to “well, I have a book that says you must be wrong - whatever you say happened, you must be wrong”.

And it’s that frustration that is showing in people’s responses here.

47

There are three problems with this train of thought:

  1. It makes it almost impossible to prove that an early memory is accurate instead of invented later.

  2. It is prejudiced towards later memories instead of early ones.

My family was dysfunctional at that early age until now. We never talked or joked about much of the things I would refer to from ages 2 - 4 yet they are mostly verifiable. I could easily sit here and write a chapter on what went on for me from the late 2 year stage until 4 years old with plenty of easily referenced date markers (at least among all the people I knew). Do you want to know what my mother told me when I lost my favorite “Bert” plastic figure when I was 3? I can tell you. Do you want to know why I thought gorilla hunting was a good idea behind our house at 3? I can tell you. Expand this summary by 1000 and you can see why people may get pissed when someone claims that their memories are not their memories.

I do have some scientific proof that pops up from time to time. During family gatherings, more remote family members will show a picture from the time I was very young. Some people will discuss it and I will usually interrupt to point out what is false and share what I know. It tends to be pretty impressive.

I am starting to believe some people don’t have this capability at all and that is why they don’t believe it. For me, it is exactly like memories of junior high and I am sure it is for others too. Claiming that I completely misremembered junior high wouldn’t go over well either.

48

I’m all for skeptical observation. I’m not all that hot on being called a liar at every turn.

So let’s say that 99.99% of all people can’t remember anything when they were 2. Fine. So the other .01% either might, can, or are liars. Break that down, will you say that there is absolutely zero chance that I can have a scant handful of memories prior to the cited Loftus minimum? Absolutely zero?

I never said I had total recall of my early life. I said I could remember a few things from a handful of instances that I would have no other way of knowing. And I get Edgar Cayce thrown at me in return.

That’s what irked me. And since I didn’t have a video camera handy, I have no cite, so I have to be making it up.

By mentioning what I think are memories to others who were there, I have implanted them with false memories?

Still don’t buy it. If it was one coincidental memory, I could concede that maybe my family really did have roundtable discussinons regarding breastfeeding, or that I just happened to make a lucky guess on an upholstery pattern. And if I had a multitude of such “memories”, then perhaps they were all just implants. But I don’t. I have a scant few “snapshots” of random events that when described just happen to jibe with my memory of them…without some intervening discussion about the events.

I don’t remember anything else on either side of the events I describe, it’s not like I have a whole story. Just flashes. But since this is the SDMB and I don’t have a cite, I’m a liar.

49

Musicat, please explain to me how Loftus could tell the difference between the true ones and the false ones. . .

I’m sure that more of our earliest memories might be inaccurate or muddied than later ones, but that certainly does not mean that we cannot have any accurate memories from our early years.

50

Wow, people are getting very defensive about their memories. I wonder why that is?

51

I can’t even imagine how this could be determined. How did Loftus come up with this figure?

It is one thing to claim that some or even most memories prior to that age are false. It is another thing entirely to claim that no memories prior to that age are of actual events.

I wil be interested in hearing how this was determined.

52

Aha, an anecdotal story that proves that some people do have reliable memories, even at an early age.

When he was 7, my son was in a study group at the University of Denver psych department, and he was asked the “lost in the mall” question. Possibly a replication of the Loftus stuff discussed earlier. They took him into a room and asked a very open-ended question but one that didn’t necessarily presume that he had ever been lost in a mall, something like, “Was there ever a time when you were really little when you and your mom got separated,” or something like that. Very carefully worded.

He said, “No, but once somebody else got lost and they thought it was me and tried to take me away. But my mom wouldn’t let them. And then another time my mom lost the car.”

The interviewer asked if he wanted to say anything else about it, and he said, “It was because I was wearing the same thing as the lost kid.” And that was it. (I should note that he was kind of a reserved kid. Not real effusive.)

Meanwhile they asked me about the same story, and I was kind of dumfounded, because it was exactly as he said. I had been buying paint in Sears with him along, when they announced over the PA system that a two-year-old girl was lost, and if anyone saw her to please bring her to the main desk upstairs. She had red hair and was wearing a blue jogging suit.

My son has red hair–at that time, fiery red–and was wearing a blue jogging suit. The guy selling me paint said something like, “Gee, hope they find her,” and handed me my ticket. The deal was that I was to drive around to the dock and hand over the ticket and pick up the paint at the dock. So we went up the escalator. At the top, a Sears employee said, “Oh, you found her!” and actually put her hands on my child. I said, “No, this is my little boy.” Turned him away from her and headed on out. A woman at the main desk also tried to stop me. Then when I got to the door a very serious security guard would not let me out. I repeated that this was my child and a boy, not the lost girl. The guard said, “Yeah, well, there aren’t a lot of redheads, you know, I’m gonna have to ask you to wait.” I figured, okay, fine–but no way I was handing over my kid. And then suddenly his demeanor changed, he relaxed, and said, “Sorry. You can go now.” I think what happened was that the woman at the desk brought the mother who obviously knew this wasn’t her kid–or maybe they found her–at any rate the security guy got some signal. At that point I was feeling maybe a little shaky because I don’t like scenes like that and I was envisioning my kid being strip-searched to prove he was a boy. But we got into the car, pulled around, got the paint and, while I’m sure I mentioned it to my husband when I got home, it did not become some big family memory that we ever talked about again. It may have been more traumatic for him than I realized, but not memorably traumatic.

So the kid got it precisely right, and he was 20 months old at the time. His spoken vocabulary consisted mainly of “No,” 'NO," "I a BUNnee!" (when wearing his Easter bunny ears), and “No.” Obviously he understood a lot more. And he did know his colors.

53

Some of it, I’m certain, isn’t huffy defensiveness, it’s exasperation. See post #46.

It’s very easy to misinterpret the tone and emotion of plain text - I could, for example, equally easily read your comment above as a disinterested inquiry, or a smug taunt.

54

I don’t think it is a logical fallacy to suggest that memories you now have were acquired by means other than what you assume. If it is easy to have “memories” that aren’t really memories, and the holder of them isn’t likely to be aware of that, it casts doubt on the source of all memories, at least from a very young age and a long time ago.

If there is doubt that a memory is truly a memory, then it cannot be used as evidence that your mind acquired the image firsthand.

I apologize for not immediately answering other questions asked of me, but duty calls and I won’t be able to get back to a computer for at least a few hours.

55

I agree that it should casts doubt on the reliability of any given memory, but what it doesn’t do is to rule out the possibility of any and all of them being reliable.

Which is why corroboration is probably quite important - what I can’t quite understand is the amount of resistance to the idea that a few events, particularly striking or important ones, could be retained fairly reliably from an early age. Does corroboration mean nothing at all?

56

As I have said elsewhere, I think that for the most part any memories we have that predate acquisition of language are not going to be recognizable to us when we do remember them.

Most of our accessible useful memories are encoded with a combo of visual, auditory, and other sensory data, emotional data, and cognitive stream (the interp we gave to it all at the time it was happening), the latter formed of concepts we learn along with language.

I am not going to make those annoying sweeping statements like “No one can remember events before they were 3 years old”; but I think it is rare for a person to know what they’re remembering when they have such memories, to make any kind of sense of them.

Consider: go to the library and pick up a book written in a language that uses an alphabet you have no familiarity with. Casually examine a few pages. (Not deliberately exerting yourself to memorizing the shapes of the ink on the page, though). Now go take a night course and learn the language well enough that you can read its text with moderate fluency. Can you now recall the phrases and ideas from the pages you saw before you started the course?

So it is, I think, with memories formed before we have language. They get formed, but without a “narrator” stream-of-consciousness track embedded. Emotional content, yes, but not that self-referencial “OK this is what’s happening” soundtrack of our life thingie that we usually mean when we speak of “conscious thought”.

For thosoe who are pretty sure they recall material from preverbal stages of their lives, note that I bracketed off an exception in my allegorical example. If for some reason when you were in the library you did stare at the foreign-language text with such intensity, or so often, that you could remember the then-meaningless shapes from the paper at the later time when you could know what it meant, you could indeed realize what the text had been saying. The allegory is simpler than what we’re actually talking about, but it still seems a reasonable parallel.

But I would think it would be rare, and I think it’s no accident that most us remember back to no earlier than around the age when we became truly verbal people and could think about thoughts we had had yesterday, etc.

One other contributing factor to the rarity of successful post-verbal processing of pre-verbal memories is (IMHO) that we don’t tend to re-analyze memories in general with the additional knowledge we’ve acquired since they were formed.

Example: when I was about 8 my Dad said the car’s engine had a problem, “the rods are knocking”. I had seen the car with the hood open and the air cleaner was the most prominent thing and therefore represented “car engine” to me, so the image I had of “rods knocking” was of a bundle of metal sticks under the air cleaner, improperly loose so that they were rattling against each other instead of being bound firmly together. Decades later for some reason I was thinking of that car and whether it had needed a lot of repairs in comparison with a modern car and flashed back to the time when “the rods were knocking”, and the unedited/non-updated image was again of the bundle of sticks beneath the air cleaner despite, by then, having held connecting rods, bearings, pistons and piston rings, mains, rocker arms, and the rest of the engine assembly in my hands. Nor did I recognize that fact quickly. It took a conversation that dove into how engines of that era were made, in conjunction with “the rods were knocking”, before my mind, trying to compare that bundle of rattling sticks with a modern DOHC fuel-injected computer-timed engine, finally balked and went “huh?” and I realized the inaccuracy of the image. Connecting rods down in the engine block, not bundle of sticks under the air filter.

Extending that, I think probably even for infantile sensory data that we could recall with sufficient detail to interpret via the more complex info in our heads now, we simply don’t. Those memories don’t have thumbprints on them that say “I was 16 months old” so it’s not like we’re conscious that what we’re momentarily recalling is the view from our crib from when we were 16 months old. Instead, just a fragmentary snapshot (or brief video, perhaps) with no attached interp, kind of like an abstract oil painting, some shapes colors sounds and/or textures that float up in our mind with no particular reason to try to make sense of what it might have been.

57

My earliest memories are images only and have no sound attached to them really, but certainly by two most of us could understand language.

I was born in 1958. I’m pretty sure I was aware in 1960 that we were going to be moving into a different house, but there are no clear sounds associated with the image I have of my father’s parents helping paint in the empty rooms of the new house.

I also have brief memories of vacations in New Hampshire and Vermont. One is falling off a small pier into shallow water and being “rescued” by my mother. Also in New Hampshire were “scarey” visits to the Polar Caves and The Flume. Another memory is a fierce thunderstorm while we were staying in a cabin with big glass windows overlooking a lake. I always knew that those vacations were before my brother was born, so I figured I was four or so. I found out this year that I was two for the New Hampshire trip and three for the Vermont one.

My daughter, now seven, often surprises me with things she remembers. Of course the memories aren’t as far removed for her. There are, though, many many things that she does not remember.

58

I am genuinely interested. I study social psychology and this is one thing that fascinates me. You see similar responses when people are told that hitting children makes them more aggressive; anecdotal cries of “But I remember the blue paint can!” fall on my ears exactly the same way as the exasperated “Well, my parents hit me and I turned out OK.”

My suspicion is that it’s an effort to maintain that stable self-image.

Everything works on a continuum, and there are most certainly memories before the age of three that are genuine and well-remembered. No one is saying it’s impossible. And with the self-selecting higher brain power of the members here, there’s probably a slightly better than average chance that we do have these memories.

But regardless of whether or not our memories actually are genuine, the knowledge of how easy it is to construct a vivid memory should temper our enthusiasm in shouting “BUT YOU’RE WRONG.”
As for me, personally, I suspect that I have fewer created memories than the average person, if only for the fact that I have a terrible memory and hardly remember last week, much less my childhood.

59

When I was 3-4 years old…my older sister (a teenager) took me to the beach at a lake. During the time there, someone was drowning…splashing around out far in the water. My sister, a lifeguard and others jumped in the water and pulled her ashore. They gave her something like mouth to mouth…an ambulance showed up and took her away.

The memory is still somewhat vivid in my mind.

However,

IT NEVER HAPPENED.

My sister insists no such thing ever happened. I found it hard to believe but had to believe her.

If I hadn’t brought the story up/discussed it with my sister, I would have continued to believe it happened.

As other posters have said…you cannot trust those young memories.

60

When I was just a little squirt, my Father brought home a German Shepard that was a little taller than me. I was terribly afraid of him and ran to hide in the closet. I think it made an impression on my mind because I have never forgotten that traumatic incident. I think I was no older than 2 -3 years at that time.