I remember stuff from between two and three years of age and perhaps a little under two years old - I actually ran my memories by my mom years ago to see if I was remembering actual events, and I was.
They are snapshot memories, though, not narratives. blink playing with balloons on a beach blink (Newfoundland visit when I was about two.) blink freaking out when my mother left to go somewhere, and wailing at the front window. blink riding with my dad in his motorbike sidecar and trying to eat a quickly-melting ice cream cone. blink Sitting astride a downed Christmas tree and being pulled through the snow. blink (That one was before two years of age.)
While my Dad was in the army in Europe (WW2), my mother and my brother and myself lived with relatives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She took us with her to go grocery shopping, and left us in the car. My brother convinced me to put a penny in the cigarette lighter, and an electrical fire ensued. I was scared, and my brother decided to pour his orange pop on my head to keep me from burning. The wiring was completely destroyed, but we were unharmed…I was a bit stickier than usual for a 2 year old.
I also remember my father coming home from the war. I would have been a very young 3, and remember him as a giant with a loud low voice…I didn’t like him much at first.
I remember when my dad came home from Vietnam. I didn’t like him very much at first either. I remember asking my mom if we could send him back. :smack:
I have 2 memories that are easy to date and one that is easy to put an end date to.
I remember staring at my newborn sister. I would have been 23 months.
I remember the moon landing, actually, I remember being told to get out from in front of the TV and the reason was the moon landing. I would have been 33 months.
I remember “baking cookies” with my grandmother. She died when I was two and a half, so it was before then.
I remember being in a crib made of chrome with sheets that glowed blue in the dark. And being given a bottle of milk that glowed blue. Later, I connected that with having my tonsils taken out for my 2nd birthday.
And I remember griping with my buddy Eddie about Jimmy, who thought he was Boss of us because he was 4 and we were only 3.
I’m the opposite to most people, I can barely remember a thing before the age of about 10.
Fragments of memories, but I’ve no way of knowing if they’re real or not. I know for sure I created one xmas memory from a photograph (the photo was taken in front of our xmas tree before xmas, be we actually spent xmas elsewhere, so I could not have remembered opening gifts that year under the tree).
I don’t have a noticeably poorer memory than anyone else I don’t think.
Wait, what am I replying to here…?
I’m not going to cite or even attempt to back it up, because I can’t, but some of Freud’s profoundest thought was devoted to examining the actions of the mind separate from the development of the anatomical brain, about which he was as knowledgable as anyone at the time, regarding the psychological inevitability of repressing the earliest memories.
My partner is the same: he remembers almost nothing before he was ten. Coincidentally that was the year his narcissistic mother ran off with another man and from then on he lived primarily with his father. Can I ask if your childhood was a happy one, and if anything major changed (for better or worse) that year? Obviously my theory is that my partner doesn’t remember much of his earlier life because he’s blocked out unpleasant memories of his mother being his main caregiver.
I definitely remember staying at my aunt’s house the night my brother was born, one month and three days before my third birthday. I have another memory of waking up in my cot that I believe is even earlier, but it’s not so easily datable.
And I always thought that people remembered things that were traumatic at a young age which is opposite of Eliahna’s theory.
I don’t remember anything before kindergarten (age 5). My life was pretty mundane and no reason to remember much. As an only child raised exclusively around adults, though, kindergarten was a traumatic event. Sharing? huh? Naptime? what? Work with others? fuuu?
I think you’re probably on to something. There was a lot of unpleasantness and what would now be called physical abuse (but then was just getting slapped about a bit), and it did recede as I got to my early teens for various reasons. I kind of plucked the figure of 10 years old out of the air really. I definitely remember going to secondary school at 11, before that it’s mostly fragments and generally negative at that.
We moved house the summer I was 4.5, and I can remember quite a lot from the previous house, but no recollections that were specifically winter, so there is no event as early as my 4th birthday that I’m sure I remember.
As for the OP’s question, I imagine the youngest a person can possibly remember something would be very near birth, but that would be very rare and any kind of a valid or scientific verification of that would be highly problematic.
Some of the most recent studies of memory in small children indicate that young kids remember A LOT, especially memories that relate to people. I’ve been on the lookout for these articles, because I’ve noticed that my 3 year old can give me details on things and people that she would have experienced when she was quite young. Maybe she is a prodigy!
No, actually, it’s quite typical. Small kids have great memories, it seems. Previously, researchers thought that little kids didn’t form memories in a very strong way, but now evidence seems to be pointing to a model where their memory-forming skills are just fine, but for some reason, somewhere around the age of 7 or 8, most people have sort of a “memory reformatting,” possibly to prep for the neural management of more mature memories. Why do certain memories from early childhood survive that process? It’s not really clear, and for some people, it’s very much milestone memories that are retained, but for other people, the kept memories seem more random. Some people remember quite a bit, others very few.
One factor that seems to make a big difference in keeping memories is how often they are talked about, either internally (like telling stories to oneself) or talking with family members. The more the memories are retold as stories, the more likely they are to be retained as vivid memories. I’ve heard people say “but I never told my mom about that memory!” but if you were the kind of kid to liked to revisit memories in your mind, that serves the same purpose.
My first memories date back to when I was 3 (3 and 4 months, exactly). All tied to the same place, where I stayed presumably a short time then : at my grandmother’s. I remember carcass of beef hanging at a butcher’s (frightening), stairs that I found frightening to climb up too, and being denied to go to see up close a firework, and having to watch it from behind a window. before that nothing, after that, nothing for a year or so.
Something related that struck me : some years ago, I went through old pictures at my mom’s. And amongst them was one of me holding a rubber daffy duck (probably around 4 yo). Suddenly, not only I remembered this toy I was fond of and had completely forgotten, but more surprisingly, I felt the texture and taste of the duck toy’s beak in my mouth.
I was completely amazed by this experience. I’ve been wondering since how many very precise memories like that are “stored”, non-accessible but perfectly intact (moreso than memories we are aware of…precisely I assume because it was a “fresh”, “never accessed” memory, hence not contaminated, reconstructed and so on), just waiting for some trigger to pop up.
I mean, was the beak’s feeling and taste kept in my memory because it was important to me at the time (I suspect I might have been sucking on it a lot), or is the memory of the ice-cream I was served on october 17 1968 or of the gravels I fell on on january 4 1969, and of an uncountable number of other things stored somewhere too? Would the number of events I remember be increased by a thousandfold if somehow all these “hidden” memories could be extracted by some magical mean?
Her is the Wikipedia entry on Childhood amnesia. It says adults can very rarely remember anything at all before about ages 2 to 4 (precisely when will vary by individual), and that relatively few memories before age 10 are retained by most people. Personally, I find that many of my young-childhood memories are isolated images with little context, and so quite hard to date.
Weird. It’s about 5-6 when the memories are more freeze-frame for me; I can remember plenty of stuff from 6 and 7 onward- classmates, where I sat in class, what we studied, etc…
I guess it depends on what you did too. A modern kid who is shut up in the house all day and only sees friends on “play dates” hasn’t had a solitary memorable experience unless the parents made a mistake and they got loose for awhile.
When I was 6, me and my friends used to have adventures. Everyone did. Bill Cosby built a whole comedy career around telling stories of his childhood. If there’s stuff worth remembering, you’ll remember it.
From about 2 I’s say myself. We moved from Texas just after my 3rd birthday party, I was a late August baby and my older brothers had to be in their new school by the first week of September; so everything I remember about Texas was before my 3rd birthday. Texas was hot and had huge bugs that ran when you turned the lights on. And there was dirt and sand everywhere there wasn’t a house and it was hot. I had friends named Skeeter and Roy Bob and it was hot. Did I mention it was hot?
I have a very vivid memory of lying on the kitchen table having my diaper changed. I looked to the side and saw my sister reading, and the wallpaper. Blood red with white broken eggs and yellow chickens on it. I absolutely remember the idea that I could put this image in my mind whenever I wanted to do it.
Years later I told my mother about it, and she told me “I remember that wallpaper. But we moved from that house when you were 18 month sold!”
What is weird? What you say seems fully consistent with what I said. “Relatively few memories before age 10” does not mean none; it just means fewer than from after 10, and the isolated images I was talking about are, I think, mostly probably from under 5 or 6.
What is weird? What you say seems fully consistent with what I said. “Relatively few memories before age 10” does not mean none; it just means fewer than from after 10, and the isolated images I was talking about are, I think, mostly probably from under 5 or 6.