My youngest daughter remembers seeing the blue birds over her basket when she was just 3 months, she didn’t remember what they were, just something blue that moved! she asked me years later, what that was over her bassinette!
And if, a year from now, she has forgotten the original balloon incident but remembers talking to you about it and what she was thinking then, will she be able to tell the difference? This is what I meant by “remembering remembering” earlier – there are incidents and images from my early childhood that I feel I remember, but I honestly don’t know to what extent these memories are “originals” and to what extent they’re things that have stuck with me because I can remember talking or thinking about them when I was a little older, before the original memories faded.
Note that the article in Slate agrees with what I said, which was that organized memories begin when a child understands what a story is.
And I remember being pushed in an old brown wicker stroller, with pieces of broken wicker sticking out. I remember the pond with the huge goldfish, and the stone path we were on, which crossed the pond, and led to a greenhouse.
We moved from there before I was a year old.
You could say exactly the same thing about the memories of an adult.
I think that is Mijin’s point. We can prove that adults confabulate memories in this manner just as readily as infants. Yet for some reason we accept that the memories of an adult are “real”, but the exact same memories of an infant who was also there are somehow confabulated.
This theory fails all the basic tests of reason. We know that both adults and infants can confabulate memories. We know that *some *of the memories of both adults and infants are “real” because they can be objectively confirmed. And we know that the vast majority of memories of both children and adults can not be objectively confirmed.
Yet for some reason some people want to ascribe almost all infantile memories to confabulation, and they want to ascribe almost all adult memories to experience. That is egregious special pleading.
Unless someone has some evidence that more infantile memories are confabulated than adult memories, there is no reason to assume that is the case.
People with an eidetic memory often have very early childhood memories.
For instance, Solomon Shereshevsky ( Solomon Shereshevsky - Wikipedia ) could literally describe in detail the view he had as an infant, lying in his crib.
Based on this thread and other casual discussions on the same topic, I’d say that hardly anyone questions the accuracy of their own early childhood memories and that most people will deny that any of their own memories could possibly be confabulation.
Is this supposed to be a response to something in my post? Because I didn’t say anything about childhood memories vs. adult memories. I was pointing out that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between things we genuinely remember and things that we think we remember.
Uh, that’s what memory is. You always remember the last time you remembered something, not the original event. That’s why confabulation and false memories work.
I have many very early childhood memories.. earliest are around 18 months. I am slightly offended that people doubt these memories could be actual memories. Those memories are certainly foggy and full of gaps, but, damn it, they’re memories.
I was recently at my grandmothers house. She opened a drawer and I saw this plastic clip shaped like a “1” and it had the name of a business printed on it. A memory came flooding back to me at that moment. I had seen that clip in the glovebox of a blue car with white vinyl seats. I remembered that when I saw the clip, the car was broken down and my dad was trying to fix the car and everyone was very stressed.
I asked my grandmother about it, and she was shocked that I remembered it. It was a family trip we had taken to Gatlinburg and the mountains had gotten the better of the car. I did not even remember making this trip and we did not have any pictures of the trip. I asked my mom about the trip, she confirmed the details and said that she was pregnant with my brother then (he’s 19 months younger than I am ).
If it was a story they had told me, why did I remember the clip? Why was this memory associated with a stupid plastic clip in the back of a glovebox? now that I asked them about it, my memory is likely contaminated, but I remember that damn clip, where I saw it, and the circumstances around it.
I have many other memories like this… we moved A LOT when I was little and I can associate vague images or memories with particular houses or lots or layouts, some of which there are no pictures of and no longer exist.
Not saying my memories are perfect or are free from things added in later, but they are certainly at some base level real.
Do you have some evidence to support that? I’m sure it’s possible to remember your last memory of something, but I don’t see why you can’t remember an original memory, or a previous one. I don’t think you can prove that each recollection alters the memory for each subsequent one.
My first memory isn’t a confabulation, either. Couldn’t be because it’s so personal. I remember pulling myself up and then taking a dump in my diaper. I thought something like, “Uh oh, I’m going to plop back down on that in a minute.”
I might have been around ten months old but I’m wondering if it wasn’t earlier. My mother always said I started walking at ten months old. I never believed her, lying seeming to be one of her hobbies, but I have a picture of me and my older brother out in the yard. I look like a doll, a plaything. In fact, it’s kind of creepy because it doesn’t look like somebody that young and small should be able to stand alone.
I have several memories along the years afterward right up to school-age etc.
This is something I’ve wondered about a few times. I have memories from very early on but can’t remember the 6th grade at all.
We moved to the house where I spent most of my childhood when I was four. I don’t remember anything about the old house, but I have some memories before then. A girl, the younger sister of one of my sister’s best friends gave me a Little People Sesame Street house. I couldn’t tell you when, but it was before we moved.
I also remember going on walks to a candy store with my brothers and sisters because I remember thinking it was really far, actually it was less than three quarters of a mile, but that’s far to a little kid!
Memories aren’t stored like bits in magnetic memory. They are, as others have noted, a collection of impressions that are formed as preferential pathways in ganglions. More specifically, short term memory is the result of enhanced sensitization of a neural junction via repeated or intense stimulation and the resultant concentration of a “messenger molecule” (cyclic adenosine monophosphate, or cAMP) that makes repeated stimulation easier. Long term memory is the result of protein synthesis of conduction pathways due to repeated stimulation. The process involved in this is far more complicated and still not entirely well-understood, but the research of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel and his associates has advanced the field of knowledge dramatically. Basically, the brain builds more and stronger connections which become preferred.
However, when you revisit these memories–remembering–you are, in a sense, “reliving” the moment, albeit internally, and thus, reinforcing the memory. The same visual and aural cortexes activate when recalling an intense memory as when experiencing a similar event. This also means that the memory is subject to distortion as it is conflated with other memories and sensations; this is particularly true when a memory is isolated of context (as may be true with early memories); the mind naturally attempts to weave the disparate threads into a coherent pattern. The question of whether a memory is “original” or a distinct “copy” is subject to speculation, since we have no way to observe the formation of a high level memory, but Kandel’s research on sea slugs indicated that repeated stimulation formed along the same pathways over and over. The sea slug is, of course, a simple creature–it only barely has something that could be considered a brain–but the learning behavior and memory formation in some sophisticated creatures is analogous.
As another point of anecdota, I have distinct memories of being an infant and toddler; specifically, of laying in a crib and looking up at a mobile, being in a walker stuck in the grass, being in a swim class at the YWCA (when I was two or three), the Mercury Cougar that my father drove, the bane of the girl in preschool who cornered and kissed me, the twins that lived across the street, and the boy that my mother used to babysit, et cetera. This notion that no one can form or recall memories before the age of six or seven (or before this vaguely defined formation of “ego”) is provably untrue.
Stranger