We went to live in Cyprus when I was three years old and we stayed there for a further three years, so I have a very distinct cutoff point - I can say without any doubt that certain memories are from age 3 or below - I remember telling my parents that Marmite made my teeth ‘itch’ - and I’m pretty sure that this was because my gums were sensitive from some of my milk teeth still growing in.
I remember riding in the back compartment of my dad’s old VW Beetle (not the back seat - the little parcel compartment below the back window - and above the engine - we used to call it the ‘back front’ - because we’d pretend we were sitting there driving) - he disposed of that car before we moved abroad.
I remember lying on my back in the ‘back-front’, on the way to visit my grandmother who lived a few miles away, and telling my parents that the orange sodium streetlamps were called ‘fish finger lights’.
I have a number of other such memories, including one related to my mother bathing me and my sister in the double kitchen sink (we pretended we were in a train) - she’s three years older than me, and again this must have taken place before we moved abroad, but other details of the memory (which I won’t elaborate) mean I must really have been two years old or less.
I remember being changedd - though I don’t remember it for what it was.
At about age ten: “Mum, before we went out, you used to lie me on the sofa and it would prickle my back!”
“You remember that??? I used to change you on the sofa before we went out. I’d put a cloth nappy (diaper) down to protect you from the prickly fabric, but sometimes I was in a hurry and didn’t.”
We moved from the city to the country when I was four years and three months. A good cut off point. I have literally thousands of city memories, including the ability to draw you a floorplan of the house and a rough street plan of the suburb.
The floorplan has been verified by my mother, and the street plan is known to me as an adult as not differing.
I thought this was normal, and am continually surprised otherwise.
And even if memories that far back were available – I mean, you’ve just gone through a birth, seen light and fellow beings for the first time, you spend the bulk of your day wailing for food or asleep – I don’t think an infant is scanning the room for decor. I’ve had a child myself, and it boggles the mind that an infant would notice those kind of details at all. You’ve never even seen a room before – by what criteria are you going to remember the details of a room? Infants are focused on human faces (mainly mom) and the breast.
That sounds entirely reasonable. Language is a way of cementing and tagging memory in older humans, so why wouldn’t that be the case in infants?
I wonder if it might even be the case that memories can imprint upon an infant mind, but after acquiring language, the person does not recognise them as memories anymore, as they’re not retrievable with language-based tags, so they fade.
-And it makes a lot more sense than other assertions I’ve seen, such as a blanket denial that anyone can ever remember anything prior to the age of 5 or some such - In anything like this, humans develop capacities at slightly different rates, there are going to be individual cases that are right on the thin fringes of the bell curve, so it would be nonsense to set a solid date-based limit.
I have a very clear memory of lying in my mother’s lap in the living room of the house we lived in when I was born. I don’t know how old I was, but I wasn’t yet able to walk. The room was dark, as when the curtains are drawn on a sunny day, and The New Zoo Revue was on TV.
I have another memory from before I was able to walk, but the one above was definitely first, based on where we lived at the time.
AHunter3, I certainly can’t claim that I knew then what was going on as clearly as I do now. It’s only in retrospect that I can describe things like “the room was dark, as when the curtains are drawn on a sunny day”; at the time I just saw the room, and for some reason the way it looked stuck with me. The scene is too trivial to be something I’ve been told about, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture from inside that house. I remember it vividly, though.
Mine was when I was somewhere between two and three (born 9/19/1972), and I was helping my mother navigate her way to a doctor’s office at a professional building downtown.
Since I’d figured out how to read, she showed me how to read a map, and highlighted the route, and would tell me where she was, and ask me where she should turn.
I also remember watching the news with my Dad, and them mentioning that Zhou Enlai had died; I thought his name was “Joe Enlai”, and asking my dad who he was, but didn’t really understand because I hadn’t heard of countries yet.
I remember quite a bit from when I was 3-4; I recall going to the petting zoo, I remember distinctly when the MUD district let the people in our area paint the fire hydrants in patriotic schemes for the Bicentennial. I thought that was the coolest thing at the time. I also remember being no taller than the fire hydrants either.
But we have language now, and (especially on a message board) no way to share or express those very early memories except by “translating” them into words. When I tell the hot pepper story in person, I wave my hands around a lot, pant, and look up at the ceiling and spin around, because I’m telling the memory as I experience it and simultaneously “translating” it into words that my listeners will understand. Now, of course, I have two versions of the memory - the actual memory, filled with taste and sight and movement, and the version with words, where I see myself in the third person, because I’ve told the story before.
Of course, at 2, I had plenty of language already, but I did store the memory mostly without it. I’m not prepared to say it’s impossible preverbally. If one is an older child or adult with language, one can make a pretty good guess that the picture in your head of parallel vertical lines crossing a square of light might be the view from your crib. It’s then translated and perhaps stored some new way as a word based memory, but the old picture memory may remain.
I was three. I tumbled down the basement stairs during an ill-conceived game of catch with my brother. It translated into a fear of heights, and a habit of holding onto hand-rails whenever walking down stairs.
WhyNot, that’s reasonable. This thread has spawned another, a debate on how early it’s possible to remember, and I elaborated on my position in this post. I don’t think it’s impossible, just exceptional, for reasons I went into in that post.
But if you think of the amount of information that floods through our consciousnesses, and the extraordinary number of events we experience, even the exceptional becomes somewhat common.