What's your earliest memory?

In My Humble Opinion
41

[QUOTE=jjimm]
You could understand English already? :dubious:
[/QUOTE]

Of course not, dumdum.

Since you’re dubious, I’ll clarify a bit and tell how the memory plays out in my head:

Baby me is lying on top of mom in hospital bed. Nurse walks in and speaks. Mom tenses up. There’s a pain in the heel of my foot. Suspenseful silence. Nurse speaks again, in a surprised/congratulatory/soothing tone. Mom relaxes.

I’m perfectly fine with your disbelief. Like I said, my own mother didn’t believe me, and she was there, too.

42

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
Yeah right, and I remember going to a picnic in my dad and coming back in my mom. :dubious:
[/QUOTE]

Of course you remember, you’re still only a Wee Bairn.

43

I have often been unhappy about the fact that I don’t remember a single moment before or during my emigration to the States. That’s almost five years of memories, gone forever, or at least locked up in this head of mine because of the trauma (not bad trauma but trauma nonetheless) of moving so far and changing so much.

My first vague memory is of going to school. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Cook, and she spent a long time patiently with me teaching me English. I talked to her a lot in Hindi. She was a really big woman and wonderful to hug when the other kids were mean to me because I couldn’t communicate with them.

I would love to remember some of those other memories - I was a really happy, non-shy kid and then I came to the States and went and hid in a shell. I’ve even occasionally considered hypnosis and if you know me you know how anti-hypnosis I am.

Ah well.

44

[QUOTE=An Gadaí]
Is there an orthodoxy for how early you should remember or is it different strokes for different folks?
[/QUOTE]

I’ve had this discussion several times over the years. I’ve heard people claim to recall memories from their infancy, even from the womb, but my limited reading tells me that long term memory begins around the age of three and a half. I do recall some research into naturally ambidextrous people, indicating that they tend to have earlier childhood memories. Something to do w/ links between the two hemispheres of the brain.
I think most people confuse stories, about their childhood activities, that may be told repeatedly, or photographs, maybe even videos they’ve seen, w/ actual memories.

45

[QUOTE=rucciface]
Of course not, dumdum.
[/QUOTE]
Call me a “dumdum” if you wish, but please re-read your post and realise that you indicated you could understand the words in the conversation.

It’s also quite an extraordinary claim.

46

Probably my Mom’s wedding when I was three. Some details have been filled in by pictures and what not, but I specifically remember that I wanted to give my mom a present like everyone else was doing and the only thing I had was a ticket in my suit pocket (most likely from the drycleaner). I walked over to where she was sitting on the couch and gave it to her.

47

[QUOTE=rucciface]
Of course not, dumdum.

Since you’re dubious, I’ll clarify a bit and tell how the memory plays out in my head:

Baby me is lying on top of mom in hospital bed. Nurse walks in and speaks. Mom tenses up. There’s a pain in the heel of my foot. Suspenseful silence. Nurse speaks again, in a surprised/congratulatory/soothing tone. Mom relaxes.

I’m perfectly fine with your disbelief. Like I said, my own mother didn’t believe me, and she was there, too.
[/QUOTE]

Your previous post states you recall the nurse saying what a good baby you were.

You do realize that this claim would make you probably the only person in history with such an early memory- perhaps you should (seriously) contact a local university and have some study your brain, as you have a condition no one else has ever had, and studying it could prove helpful.

48

[QUOTE=jjimm]
Call me a “dumdum” if you wish,
[/QUOTE]

Please know that I regret having typed that.

Acknowledged.

Agreed.

49

The oldest thing I remember is coming out of my bedroom to get a glass of water, and catching my parents playing The Legend of Zelda on a portable television set in the kitchen. They had bought a Nintendo for Christmas that year specifically so that they could play the game, and they had been ‘previewing’ the dungeons after my sister and I went to bed so that there would be less boring wandering about when we were up and ‘helping’ them play. (“Daddy, have you tried this door? No, THIS door. No, the DOOR. No, Daddy, THAT’S a DOOR there.” At which point one of us kids would lunge for the television and put a fingerprint on the door in question.) We had one of the shiny gold cartridges you got if you ordered the game early, so that must have been the first Christmas the game was out, making me six at the time.

I’ve seen home movies of earlier times (parents bought one of the first VHS camcorders, grandfather had an 8mm film camera before that) and none of it looks the slightest bit familiar to me.

50

I remmeber when my sister was born. I was about 33 months old

51

I remember riding across town on the back of my mom’s bike. We crossed the big bridge and went to a sidewalk sale of some sort. I was between 2 and 3 years old.

52

I am not sure I actually remember this or that it has been described to me over and over enough that it is embedded in my mind: I am pretty sure I remember visiting my dad in the hospital an eating some of the candy that someone had brought to him. He never came home from teh hospital and died when I was 1 year and 7 months old. The next memory is very clear: I remember my older brother returning from boot camp. I was two and a half.

53

I remember having my picture taken with my baby sister propper in my lap, right before Christmas 1968; I was 3 years, 1 month. I’m reasonably sure I don’t just remember this because I’ve seen the photograph – I really do remember (or think I remember) the whole circumstance before and after it being taken. It seems real, anyway. Memories of my sister coming home from the hospital (I’d be two and a half) are fuzzier, and may be from seeing photographs and old Super 8s and just filling stuff in.

My memory is fairly un-elephantine, though. I don’t think I have a single meaningful memory of fifth grade, for example, including my teacher’s name. Per the poster above, I start to have a bunch of memories beginning the summer of 1969, when I was 3 and a half.

54

Most of the pictures in the photo album I THINK I remember. I think my mind fills in the details looking at a picture and I’m not sure if it’s a distinct moment in time or it’s just a conglomeration of memories. I remember picking up our first puppy and we have no picture of that, I was 3.

55

[QUOTE=A.R. Cane]
I’ve had this discussion several times over the years. I’ve heard people claim to recall memories from their infancy, even from the womb, but my limited reading tells me that long term memory begins around the age of three and a half. I do recall some research into naturally ambidextrous people, indicating that they tend to have earlier childhood memories. Something to do w/ links between the two hemispheres of the brain.
I think most people confuse stories, about their childhood activities, that may be told repeatedly, or photographs, maybe even videos they’ve seen, w/ actual memories.
[/QUOTE]

I’m going to assert that the earliest memories anyone can viably claim access to date to no learlier than when they had acquired language.

Consider the hypothetical falsification scenario: Joe Blow remembers things that happened before he knew words. Remembers what, how? Sensations, yes, and perhaps emotions, but if you consider your accessible memories, isn’t a central part of what makes them accessible is remembering what you thought at the time? Your interpretations? “I was in the sandbox”. “Tommie wouldn’t give me my doll”.

If you were to remember back to a time before you possessed language, you would not have been thinking, at that time, in the verbal-linguistic sense that we as adults usually mean when we say “thinking”.

I’m not saying those memories are irretrievable, but I am saying that what you now experience when you have a memory-flash from back then is a composite mish-mosh of raw sensation and emotion, with no “labels”, no verbal string of thoughts as they existed at that time explaining to yourself, in your own words, what was going on at the time.

And because of that, you don’t know, can’t know, what you’re remembering. “I saw a tile floor out through the bars of my crib”. Oh really? You knew these visual and tactile impressions to be “crib bars”? Had thoughts about them, mental representations of them in your mind, allowing you to form the thought-bubble “crib bars”?

I’ll not claim that no one can have memories from a preverbal time in their life, but it would have to be extremely rare to bring up enough sensory impressions that one could interpret them (without any remembered thoughts from the time) so as to put one’s finger on when and where that would have been. Instead of “I saw a tile floor out through the bars of my crib” there would be perhaps a still image of a grid of shapes with a couple of out-of-focus brownish-yellow stripes superimposed on them and perhaps a proprioceptive memory of your body’s posture at the time. We probably have those all the time, but we can’t place them (Was that from a movie? Dream? Some place I once was, standing up and looking at something, dunno what…)

56

[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Seeing the concrete culvert in the backyard come up when I fell and struck my forehead. Dad had gone into the house and left me for thirty seconds in the fenced backyard. He would soon faint in the ER when they sutured my forehead. :slight_smile: I thought I was much younger, Mother said I was three.
[/QUOTE]

Oh yeah, throught the haze of gore and pain I saw Dad come out onto the back porch wearing khaki pants and a white tee shirt.

57

I love comparing stories like these–my early memories are a little episodic, but I can easily jump from event to event.

My earliest memories are probably from when I was 2 or 3–I was very very tiny in the kitchen of the house we lived in at the time. I was walking around a table or an island in the kitchen to my mom, who was doing the dishes. I remember I wanted to ask her to turn on the TV, because I wanted to watch an I Love Lucy rerun. (That, some crayons in a white plastic case, and my brown clunky boots were my small joys.) She told me that it wasn’t on right then, and then had me come down to the basement with her and wait at the bottom of the stairs while she got the laundry.

I’ve actually got another one that must have been from a few months later, because I had this bad habit of sticking my crayons in my ears–the ones from the white case. Yeah…I don’t know either. All I know is that it felt funny, and I vaguely remember a sense of purpose I couldn’t express. My mom wasn’t amused after telling me for the fourth or fifth time, and took them away. I was frustrated at the injustice of it all, so I cried and hid in the curtains.

58

[QUOTE=AHunter3]
I’ll not claim that no one can have memories from a preverbal time in their life, but it would have to be extremely rare to bring up enough sensory impressions that one could interpret them (without any remembered thoughts from the time) so as to put one’s finger on when and where that would have been. Instead of “I saw a tile floor out through the bars of my crib” there would be perhaps a still image of a grid of shapes with a couple of out-of-focus brownish-yellow stripes superimposed on them and perhaps a proprioceptive memory of your body’s posture at the time. We probably have those all the time, but we can’t place them (Was that from a movie? Dream? Some place I once was, standing up and looking at something, dunno what…)
[/QUOTE]

The last time we had one of these threads, one poster was talking about her husband (I think) who had had a recurring dream he could not interpret, but that was consistent with being in an NICU incubator. The “light” corresponded to the light bulb in the incubator, and the “hands” corresponded to those gloves that a person outside puts their hands in to touch the baby. So it was like you said: a memory of a perception.

59

The first memory I have is crawling up a dirt “ramp” at my parents house. As I learned to walk before I was 1 year old it must have been before then. The area was concreted around my second birthday (before my sister was born), and my mum was fairly surprised I could remember it so well.
I clearly remember seeing the first moon landings on the tv at kindergarten - I was four at the time.

60

I was three years and two months old and remember being in the back seat of my uncle’s car when he was taking my Mom and newborn brother home from the hospital where bro was born.

I hated the little fucker who took my Mom’s attention away from me. My Dad at that time was in the Pacific in WWII. When he returned he chastised me in some way or another. He was a patient, non-abusive, non-spanking wonderful kinda’ guy and the problem was solved. Am sure it was far more complicated, but I don’t remember the details.

Funny thing? My bro and I have been estranged since 1984 when my Dad passed away and bro couldn’t make it to the funeral. Bro is a fresh water fish zoologist and had some important Alaskan fish stuff to attend to.