[HN Gopher] Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?
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Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 206 points
Date : 2025-02-17 23:44 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| jprd wrote:
| I absolutely have memories before 3, and I've always been
| frustrated when told I've recreated them from stories and/or
| pictures.
| catmanjan wrote:
| You do realise you've just recrated those memories from stories
| or pictures?
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| This being HN it was only a matter of time before someone
| found a way to shift the conversation to Rust.
|
| Well played, sir, well played! :)
| akagusu wrote:
| I think it's time to rewrite the brain in Rust, making use
| of its memory safety features to prevent memory leaks
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Rust does not prevent memory leaks.
| akagusu wrote:
| No? Really? So what is the point? Why are people so crazy
| about Rust?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Yes.
|
| > So what is the point?
|
| What Rust helps with is _memory safety_ , which is stuff
| like dangling pointers and use-after-free. Memory leaks
| are not a safety issue, they're an efficiency issue.
|
| > Why are people so crazy about Rust?
|
| The whole memory safety thing isn't actually the reason
| so many people love Rust. In the Rust 2024 community
| survey, 82% of users agreed that "Rust allows us to build
| relatively correct and bug free software." Memory safety
| is part of that, but there's a lot more to it.
|
| So, for example, while Rust does not guarantee the lack
| of memory leaks, it does make them relatively hard to
| produce by accident in the first place. This is due to
| the intersection of a few different parts of Rust's
| overall design.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I have heard that rust can cause tetanus, which is not
| good for the brain.
| taejo wrote:
| Rust itself cannot cause tetanus but it can include
| unsafe blocks which can activate tetanus spores by FFI.
| boesboes wrote:
| I'm with you. My earliest memory is from my second birthday.
| Not many, if any, other memories from that early though
| tzs wrote:
| How do you know that is where you got the memory? Early
| birthdays can be tricky because it is common for families to
| record them on video and if you saw such a video a few years
| later that could create a memory that you would think was
| from the birthday itself.
|
| Personally I don't trust most memories I have from before
| around 4 because my parents had around 20 reels of home
| movies from that time and I know that I saw several of those
| movies a few years later.
| aeonik wrote:
| I fell off a countertop and got a concussion when I was
| 2.5, it's a very vivid and painful memory. I also moved to
| a different state when I was 5.
|
| I have a very clear delineation of before and after the age
| of 5, and I have hundreds of memories from before the move.
| Most are rather intense events, but I even remember the
| layout of my house, construction sites, my daycare,
| neighbors, friends houses, holidays, first bike ride, first
| lizard I caught, my pets, even some dreams I had, etc...
|
| I didn't have a good idea of time yet, but I can
| retroactively tell when things occurred based on facts I
| later learned, like when certain neighbors moved, even my
| sister was born, etc...
| boesboes wrote:
| We didnt have anything to film with & there are no pictures
| from that day. I remember only a specific moment: we went
| to pick up my grandpa and i recall the shirt he was wearing
| very precisely.
|
| I can't guarantee that the memory is genuine, but it is
| very specific and I had to reconstruct my age from
| discussing the memory with my mom.
| sndinsmd wrote:
| Because -- and this is true -- you absolutely don't.
|
| You can be continue to be frustrated being incorrect, or you
| can accept that you're lying to yourself and move on.
|
| It's that easy. Human memory just doesn't work like that.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Ontologically, you can not say that definitively, you can
| only say that op's claim is highly unlikely. Only OP knows
| what OP knows and no amount of theory can disprove it, nor
| can any theory lay greater claim to ontological accuracy than
| he can.
| goatlover wrote:
| OP only knows it if OP can verify having memories from that
| age. People can be wrong about their memories. Memory
| fabrication does happen.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'd go as far as saying, memory fabrication happens all
| the time - we recompute our memories when we reference
| them, and that result is affected by all the other
| experiences and memories we accumulated between
| subsequent recalls. Or, in other words, humans _always
| confabulate_ (in the exact same sense as LLMs "always
| hallucinate", and I'm invoking this comparison on
| purpose) - the difference between "correct" and "false"
| memory is a matter of degree.
| datavirtue wrote:
| This.
| irjustin wrote:
| > Only OP knows what OP knows and no amount of theory can
| disprove it,
|
| This isn't true either. Memories themselves are non-
| falsifiable. So no matter what we either side says we'll
| literally never know the truth.
| gwd wrote:
| One side says, "I remember this thing from when I was 1
| year old".
|
| Another says, "You cannot remember it, you must have
| reconstructed it from being told or from pictures."
|
| The memory itself can certainly be falsified: if you
| remember your mom using an iPhone in 1998, then that
| memory is false. If you remember talking to your uncle
| but he died before you were born, the memory is false.
|
| How do we know if the origin of the "memory" is the
| person's actual experience, or their imagination of it
| based on descriptions or pictures?
|
| Well if it's an event that had pictures taken of it, if
| it's the _kind_ of event which grown-ups talk about, then
| the simplest explanation is that it was reconstructed.
|
| But my son, almost 5, is always coming out with random
| things that happened when he was 1 or 2, which are
| absolutely of no importance to us, and which we would
| have forgotten long ago if he didn't keep remembering
| them. Once, for example, my wife put a pair of his shoes
| on top of the car while she put him in the car seat,
| forgot they were there, and drove off -- obviously at
| some point they fell of and were completely lost. Every
| six months or so my son talks about that incident
| completely unprompted -- something of absolutely no
| significance to us, but obviously something that struck
| him. And about the time I lost my temper and sprayed him
| in the face with water -- definitely not a memory I'm
| eager to revisit and bring up.
|
| Someone dogmatic person may still say, "You must be
| bringing that up yourself somehow." _That_ is certainly
| an unfalsifiable assertion -- there 's no way, other than
| my assertion and probability, to prove that I'm _haven
| 't_ talking about those shoes on a regular basis. But I
| think any person with an open mind is likely to agree
| that "he's remembering them" is a more likely scenario
| than "the grownups are talking about those lost shoes all
| the time".
|
| Probably these "revisitations" are his brain's way of
| refreshing the memory as his brain grows, which probably
| means the memory as they exist in his brain will have
| been shifted over the years. But that's still an original
| memory -- that's how adult memories work as well.
|
| If at any point he misses a "refresh", they'll probably
| be gone; but the memories he manages to do this for will
| probably stay with him into adulthood. If at any point he
| "misses" a refresh, they'll probably be gone forever.
|
| The flip side of this, of course, is that many of the
| memories we think we have as adults are heavily edited
| too. A few years ago someone recounted to me an emotional
| conversation that they'd had with someone on their
| deathbed (as an adult, only a few years prior to that).
| As it happens, I was in the other room when this
| conversation happened, and my memory of that conversation
| was significantly different. Obviously at least one of us
| is "remembering" something untrue. As I had little "skin
| in the game" about the content of the conversation, and
| the memory this person has seems to me very consistent
| with this person's narrative about their life, I'm
| inclined to think my memory is more accurate. But who can
| tell.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| This matches my experience also. Kids can "juggle" some
| of these extremely early memories into more permanent
| memories but the vast majority are dropped. It's only
| because of the early and possible frequent recall that
| the memories end up winning their mythic permanence.
| plasma_beam wrote:
| I am mid-40s and have several distinct memories from 2.
| lightedman wrote:
| I absolutely have memories of when my father's dog attacked
| me at the age of 11 months old.
|
| And the scars.
| intrasight wrote:
| I have lots of memories from 1yo on.
|
| I will say that my strong early memories are of things that
| were either very positive or very negative.
|
| Any scientist studying memory who doesn't have early
| memories just has a bad memory.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| You can't know that.
|
| I had memories as a toddler that I confirmed after meeting my
| mother for the first time in decades a couple of years ago.
| Specific things about where I lived, events that had happened
| and how someone else in our family had died. I had another
| conversation with an aunt that confirmed other things,
| including a word from another language that I knew from when
| I was little but didn't realize wasn't a made up word.
|
| Memory is fallible and we have an imperfect understanding of
| it, but I know for a fact from personal experience that
| people can remember events from very early in life if the
| emotional impact is deep enough.
| Washuu wrote:
| I have the same experience confirming memories with my
| parents. A few years ago they finally got garbage pick up
| service again and mentioned it to me.(Tiny area, roughly
| 1,000 people, so that service was not feasible until
| recently.) To which I replied, "Oh yeah, it's been like, 30
| years since you last had it." They asked how I knew that.
| "I remember you carrying me up the driveway to drop the
| dirty diapers in the bin." They were both surprised that I
| remembered that and could confirm it.
|
| However, the time that a giant plate glass mirror fall off
| a wall at a department store and crashed through me when I
| was about two years old? No idea. My parents had to tell me
| about that one later in life.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I have a rather traumatic memory of crying endlessly while I
| was getting a professional photo taken, I was less than 2
| years old.
| xutopia wrote:
| I believe you. I have a few memories around my second
| birthday. People are often impressed with my recall of
| people and places. I have reasons to believe because of
| corroborations later in life that my memories were true.
| eszed wrote:
| I genuinely do have at least one memory from the age of two,
| because it was a completely banal event that no one told
| stories about (my grandmother moved to a new office, lol),
| nor certainly photographed, that I (because I remembered it)
| assumed had taken place when I was three. Turns out (crowd-
| sourced family chronology agreed, and documentary proof later
| corroborated) took place either 5 or 6 months after I turned
| two. (Memories differed as to the exact month, and the
| earliest letter we had was from the corroboratory year, but
| from a couple of months after when she would have moved.)
|
| The matter came up because some time when I was in my
| twenties I said, _apro pos_ of something or other,
| "[grandma] moved to [office] in year X", and they said "No,
| it was year X-1", and I said "well how come I remember
| [mundane sense-memory detail], if I was only two?" And they
| said, "yeah, [detail] is correct, but it was definitely year
| X-1", rinse-repeat, until they set out to prove me wrong
| about the year, which it turned out I was, which was a win
| for them, but then both I and my aunt with PhD in child-
| development were forced to conclude that I had a memory from
| when I was two.
|
| Yeah. It blew my mind, too. I didn't think human memory
| worked like that, either.
|
| Something-something only a Sith deals in absolutes.
| Alternatively, don't be such a jerk to that other guy. It's
| not really within the HN ethos.
| gwd wrote:
| Why do you think you know that? How would you know if you
| were wrong?
| strictnein wrote:
| One of the most ridiculous comments I've ever seen on HN, and
| that's saying something.
| helboi4 wrote:
| You are way over confident. I definitely have memories from 2
| onwards and I know I remember them because I remember
| relaying them to people at age 4 onwards, by which point my
| memory was very well formed.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Around 2 tends to be the earliest limits that have been
| confirmed. Memory scientists don't claim that no memory
| persists from infancy, its just that it hasn't been confirmed,
| and there's lots of evidence of infants failing to remember
| events from months back in infant memory experimental
| paradigms, and highly plausible scenarios of memory
| reconstructions, from pictures, or from stories.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Absolutely no way to study this.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Let a 6 month old play with a green or red ball.
|
| 5 year later show the same two balls and say you will give
| the kid an ice cream if it picks the same color. Obviously
| give the ice cream no matter the pick ...
|
| Look for correlation.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Heh. I've got memories from ages two and three that are pretty
| solid, and there were not photos or other records to prompt
| them. Some people really can do this. Some of my early memories
| were "filled in" by later experiences when I learned something
| that "explained" the earlier memory, and it was then
| reinforced, but the early memories are independent from the
| later ones.
|
| My earliest memory was President Kennedy's assassination, but
| of course I had no idea of what a president was, life, death,
| etc. I was 16 months old. What I do remember was a bunch of
| strange people in and out of the house with the TV on and
| everyone very concerned, but what I remember most of that day
| was that it was the day I learned how to shake my crib and move
| it around the room while I was inside. I remember my parents
| not liking the fact that I was able to do that. I've never
| discussed that memory with them, and they're both gone now, so
| I never will.
|
| I've got memories from when I barely knew how to talk, and
| didn't understand what the people around me were saying. My
| memory isn't good enough to decode what was said after I
| learned the language. I can clearly remember sitting in my high
| chair eating Alphabet cereal, and trying to make words with the
| letters I had not yet learned. I get sad when I think about how
| my parents would brush me off, probably thinking that I was too
| young to learn much. (My parents were both school teachers!)
| gsich wrote:
| You wouldn't know the difference.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| When was the last time you updated your brain OS? My
| rememberory format changes every couple of years.
| tomw1808 wrote:
| I also sometimes have memories before 3, but mostly I am
| sleeping.
|
| However, on rare occasion, people send me pictures where I am
| awake at 3, but I have no memories.
|
| Sorry folks, I see myself out, that was inappropriate, I hope
| nobody will remember.
| strictnein wrote:
| Same. I'm always kind of shocked when people don't. My wife
| hardly remembers anything before she was 8.
|
| We moved a couple months before I turned three and I have a
| bunch of memories that predate that. I remember being potty
| trained and lying to my parents about it so I could get a
| treat. I remember my dad coming home from the family farm and
| having injured his hand on some machinery. I remember stealing
| a pack of orange gum from the grocery store and chewing it all
| up underneath the piano in our basement. I could keep going and
| going.
|
| My earliest memory was before I was two. Somewhere around 19-20
| months. I know this because I had an ear infection and that's
| when it occurred. I'm sitting in my crib, crying due to the
| pain in my ear, and screaming "mom" at the door in the room.
| The room is mostly dark, but the door has been left open a
| crack to let in a little bit of light. From my vantage, looking
| through the slats in the crib, the door is open on the left. My
| mom comes in once, finally, and then leaves.
|
| I also feel like I have an earlier one, being carried in a room
| which may have been my nursery, looking down on a changing
| table. I'm pretty sure I'm being held by my father, but I can't
| say for certain that this is real.
| xeonmc wrote:
| I wonder if it has to do with the snapshot timing resolution
| being asymptotically high when you have not yet experienced
| enough passage of time.
|
| As you know we generally experience timescales logarithmically
| with age, i.e. your incremental experience of time is always
| compared in reference to dividing by the total passage of time
| experienced, which is why children tend to get bored much more
| quickly than adults, because waiting for ten minutes constitutes
| a much larger percentage of their current experienced life
| compared to that of an adult's proportion.
|
| Since a baby/toddler has only experienced a tiny amount of time
| passage thus far, their tiny reference "yardstick" would result
| in their memory being snapshotted at an untenable timining
| resolution thanks to division-by-almost-zero. So perhaps the
| brain does some form of filtering to prevent the entirety of
| experienced memory being dominated by the super-early ages, or
| perhaps there is some equivalent of an overflow in their internal
| counter.
|
| Keep in mind that the above are purely metaphorical as a
| functional description, and not to be treated as a literal
| hypothesis on the mechanistic operation of memory.
| roenxi wrote:
| An interesting idea; although I think somewhat unlikely. This
| is one of those instances where I would assume the brain is
| doing something carefully calibrated. But it'd be easiest to
| just not record as many experiences for the first few years
| rather than do a complete flush.
|
| My guess has always been there is some optimal approach to
| learning that works by developing a really basic schema (what
| does a person look like, which ones are mine, roughly how does
| this body thing work, etc) then flushing all the training data
| and starting again. I vaguely expect the machine learning
| people develop some sort of similar process where they get a
| lot of value lightly conditioning a model before sinking
| compute into doing a full train.
|
| Basically, my wild guess is there is a lot to learn in a baby's
| first few experiences but the risk of mis-encoding the lessons
| is so high that the brain uses the data to bootstrap but then
| throws it out as too unreliable and starts again once it
| orients.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| I think the brain compresses experiences.
|
| If you had a routine of k activities every day you won't
| remember every instance of that routine but you may remember
| what the routine was.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Exactly what I was going to say. Go travel through strange
| lands for 3 months and compare the feeling of the passage of
| time to 3 months doing your normal routine.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| N of 1, but my experience doesn't fit with this common
| explanation. Big life changes, travel, _having kids_... none
| of it has done a thing to disrupt a steady progression to a
| point where (around age 40) a year feels about subjectively
| as long as maybe three months did in high school. Started
| being noticeable around age 25 IIRC, and time 's done nothing
| but keep getting faster. This doesn't revert, at all, when
| things get shaken up, not even temporarily. It's still "you
| know that place we went the other day... oh, shit, that was
| six weeks ago".
| close04 wrote:
| > which is why children tend to get bored much more quickly
| than adults, because waiting for ten minutes constitutes a much
| larger percentage of their current experienced life compared to
| that of an adult's proportion
|
| I think boredom is the brain's hunger more than its watch. It's
| about the needs of a developing brain, rather than plain time.
|
| Right after the bulk of neurogenesis the brain goes into
| synaptic pruning where it strengthens some synapses and
| eliminates others. Developmental pruning is experience
| dependent and the scale of the process in childhood needs a lot
| of experiences to fuel it.
|
| Those experiences are literal "food for thought". Building the
| body takes more food, building the brain takes more
| experiences.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| I've always found two things interesting about memory. First, it
| often seems many more memories can be stored than recalled. This
| becomes apparent when you can't remember something to the point
| of being certain you've forgotten, only to later recall what you
| were trying to remember. (My definition of a good trivia question
| is one you can't answer until you're told the answer and you
| realize you knew all along.) And of course people who have the
| ability to apparently remember everything indicate memory
| capacity can be enormous.
|
| Second, I've often thought I can correctly remember a scene from
| a movie or TV show I saw decades ago, but when I see it again I
| realize I got a tremendous number of details wrong, indicating
| that particular stored memory is very general in nature and not
| accurate at all.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| Re trivia, I often find myself thinking "I would have
| definitely gotten that if it was multiple choice".
|
| I agree with your second paragraph too. I often think of a
| certain tone of voice or pacing with which a line was
| delivered, and it ends up being completely different when I
| rewatch it. And yet there are still Mandela Effect people out
| there insisting their memories are 100% infallible and it's
| more likely there's a global time travel conspiracy to change a
| dot on a KitKat package than that they misremembered something
| small.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because the apparatus for remembering is emergent, derived from
| accumulated training data. Only when the person's brain has gpt-2
| level training data is what we call memory available. Of course
| actual memory as in persistent storage, is there from before
| birth.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I figured the reason why we cannot remember such a part of our
| lives is because our brains grew enough that the 'memory' neuron
| groups wound up converted to 'network connections', the
| connection and this is pretty much a result of a geometric
| constraints. Theoretically we could have a process of the brain
| relocate the memories before conversion, but it was probably
| selected against because it would increase calorie consumption by
| 5%.
| viccis wrote:
| >There is debate between memory experts as to the role of
| language in infantile amnesia. Human researchers suggest memories
| may be limited by an inability to give language to early
| experiences. "But there must be something more fundamental that
| also plays a role because we see this same [infantile amnesia]
| effect in non-linguistic animals like rats," says Prof Rick
| Richardson of the University of New South Wales.
|
| That opposition doesn't quite make sense to me. If you are
| examining the linguistic view of it, then what we're talking
| about is that memory requires symbolic understanding. Not just
| language (a fairly sophisticated symbolic tool), but also just
| the ability to schematize your various sensory impressions into
| conceptualized objects. My earliest memory is sitting in a high
| chair playing with Duplos (large Legos for young children) being
| frustrated that I couldn't connect two pieces. That requires a
| few concepts such as a high chair, the tray sitting in front of
| me, the pieces I was playing with, and emotions like anger.
| Symbolic understanding isn't necessary for any of that to happen,
| but it does seem necessary to store it for recall decades later.
|
| The problem with comparing this to rat memory is that I'm not
| convinced that rats have anywhere near the same kind of symbolic
| understanding, so how can they be compared to humans in this
| capacity? Rats can remember things, but babies can also be taught
| sign language starting at around 6 months, which seems much
| closer to rat memory (the direct linking of a perception with an
| emotion, unmediated by a symbolic transformation).
| colechristensen wrote:
| I had a friend who swore she had memories from before she could
| speak, like remembering specific events with extreme frustration
| about not being able to express herself.
| card_zero wrote:
| Same here: she wanted to say to her mother "give me that cup
| back for a minute, I only wanted to look at the interesting
| pattern that's on it".
| jkic47 wrote:
| could it be that memory must require language as a predicate?
| Without language, how does one "record" the memory?
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| There are people without internal monologues, and most people
| can also visualize something and remember scenery without
| words. There are also animals that (likely) don't have language
| that apparently have memories.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| My dog sometimes buries a bone when we give him one. Later he
| digs it up and chews on it some more. He forms a memory of
| where he buried it without the use of language (I'm pretty
| sure).
| drhagen wrote:
| From experience, I am skeptical of this hypothesis. Little kids
| will absolutely recall memories from before they knew how to
| speak.
|
| Just last week, my two-year-old spied the freezer pops in
| storage. She pointed out back and said, "Eat on deck!" Clearly,
| she remembered eating freezer pops on the deck, but the last
| time she did that was last summer (northern hemisphere) when
| she didn't know how to talk at all, let alone say "deck".
| sudosteph wrote:
| That's interesting, because my earliest memory was wordplay
| related. Though I doubt I could have strung a sentence together
| at the time, there were definitely words involved. I have a few
| relatively early memories, but none that are totally pre-
| language.
| o11c wrote:
| I can't counterexample the first half, but my only vivid memory
| from being a 2-year-old is primarily visual (though it does
| involve surprise at the reality contrasting with a prior
| description in words).
| gsich wrote:
| No, you can also remember physical activity.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Animals have no meaningful language but clearly have memory.
| Also the separation between thinking and language becomes quite
| clear as you learn another language and realize that asking
| what language you think in is not such an easy question to
| answer.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| In her autobiography, Helen Keller describes memories from her
| childhood, before she was taught to communicate, so it would
| seem language isn't necessarily a prerequisite for memory
| formation.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > Without language, how does one "record" the memory?
|
| The same way one rides a bicycle without telling themselves to
| balance and operate the brakes.
| mannyv wrote:
| Are they remembering a memory or a memory of a memory? And in the
| end is there any difference?
|
| I took lots of pictures of my kids. Those pictures trigger
| memories, but it's unclear if they would have remembered those
| things without the pictures. And there's no real way to tell if
| those memories are real, or just narratives attached to the
| trigger.
|
| It's interesting to think about.
| intrasight wrote:
| All memories after the first recall is a memory of a memory.
| And after second recall, it's a memory of a memory of a memory.
| And so on. That's how the hippocampus works.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| My mother was shocked when I recalled the bathroom tiles, layout
| and song she sang to me when I was a baby. There's no photos of
| the bathroom, it wasnt discussed as its refit was banal. The song
| she sang, she never mentioned to me past being a baby.
|
| As an adult I have very good visual and audio memory, as well as
| perfect pitch. They're not as useful as they sound.
|
| Make of that what you will.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I remember a lot of my toddler years. I also remember coming out
| of what, looking back, feels like a dream-like state that was
| much simpler emotionally and cognitively but had almost a
| hallucinogenic feel before "waking up" as a toddler.
| dsego wrote:
| I believe I remember trying to say a word and being frustrated
| that parents wouldn't wait and gave up just as I was about to
| utter the sounds, or something along those lines, it's really a
| vague memory of having a memory at this point.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| Memories aren't an objective tape recording. Memories are the
| brain's model of the world. You spend your life refining your
| model of the world. Your earliest memories were initial rough
| approximations (misinterpretations, if you will) that are later
| superseded by better (more predictive) approximations. So you
| forget (they don't activate as predictions) the old inaccurate
| (less predictive) memories in favor of the newer (more
| predictive) memories.
| prngl wrote:
| If we go a bit old-school on AI and reason in the "connectionist"
| framing:
|
| Let's say neural memories are encoded in some high-dimensional
| vector space.
|
| And so memory recall is an associative process that entails
| constructing a query vector and issuing it across the neural
| memory space.
|
| And the brain is constantly learning, and that learning entails
| some changes in the structure of the high-dimensional memory
| space.
|
| And let's say that re-encoding of a neural memory happens upon
| recall, and only upon recall.
|
| Then it could be that all experience is in fact stored, but
| because of changes due to learning, those memories become
| inaccessible. The machinery constructing query vectors has
| updated its structure enough that its encoding of those query
| vectors is sufficiently dissimilar from the encoding of the
| stored memory vectors (which use the encoding from the last
| recall).
| qudat wrote:
| I like this while including the brain regularly does "cleanup"
| of connections that it deems unnecessary and removes them.
| username135 wrote:
| I like this one
| naderraider wrote:
| this appears to be more or less what happens.
| (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade6530)
| memhole wrote:
| On re-encoding memories as well:
|
| https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/35/12144
|
| Oops, someone else posted this further down too. Great minds
| think alike!
| spwa4 wrote:
| Also known as "catastrophic interference" or "catastrophic
| forgetting" ... No all that catastrophic unless it balloons,
| but it's a name that stuck.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference
| perfmode wrote:
| Cool
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Doesn't really explain why it happens universally and why this
| doesn't happen after other major changes in lifestyle (people
| who move to a radically different country don't lose all
| memories of their life beforehand).
| llamaimperative wrote:
| From the brain's POV even a radically different country is
| like 99.9% the same as anywhere else on earth.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Sure, but is the difference between being 2 and 4 really
| that profound? It's not like the memories that are lost are
| just of the womb.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Uhhh yes.
|
| Age 2: Can point to their own body parts; hold something
| in one hand while doing something with the other hand
|
| Age 4: Changes behavior based on where you are; can draw
| a person with more than 3 distinct body parts
|
| There's a _huuuge_ amount of learning that happens
| through this period. Your brain is learning things like
| 3-dimensional space, temperatures exist and I don 't like
| some of them, I-have-two-arms, things fall when dropped,
| I must engage my big toe to stay upright while walking,
| other people appear to have feelings, other people appear
| to believe that I appear to have feelings.
|
| And in any case, the difference between 2 and 4 is only
| relevant to the question of whether a 4 year old can
| remember being 2, not what this article is about, which
| is _adults_ not remembering being <4.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >There's a huuuge amount of learning that happens through
| this period. Your brain is learning things like
| 3-dimensional space, temperatures exist and I don't like
| some of them, I-have-two-arms, things fall when dropped,
| I must engage my big toe to stay upright while walking,
| other people appear to have feelings, other people appear
| to believe that I appear to have feelings.
|
| Many of those things are completely innate. Walking for
| example, while people use the word "learn" in casual
| speech, is something that is innate. I just don't think
| the original comment is well-grounded in what we know
| about infant's cognition. And in any case, a 2 year old
| definitely understands 3D space.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| ... walking absolutely must be learned... They will
| _automatically learn it_ without explicit teaching but
| indeed it must be learned. A child prevented from
| standing or walking for 5 years and then stood on their
| feet for the first time _will not_ be able to walk.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| That is simply not true. There are many cultures which
| greatly restrict infants' ability to move (e.g.
| traditional rural communities in Northern China or the
| Ache in Paraguay) and the children in these communities
| _still_ learn how to walk. Not only that, but the basic
| neural mechanisms that are used in walking are innately
| specified (central pattern generators), not learnt (https
| ://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09594..
| .). Now, there is a degree of "fine-tuning" that is
| learnt that makes the walking more fluent and precise,
| but the basic principles of walking are innate.
|
| One only needs to see a foal walking less than an hour
| after birth to be convinced of this.
|
| Part of the problem is that humans are born _so_
| premature that people confuse natural maturation with
| learning. Just as we don 't _learn_ puberty, we don 't
| _learn_ how to walk.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Which cultures completely restrict their infants from
| attempting to walk?
|
| Did you read the paper you linked? It describes all the
| immense amount of learning that actually happens: https:/
| /art.torvergata.it/retrieve/e291c0d4-b584-cddb-e053-3...
|
| > One only needs to see a foal walking less than an hour
| after birth to be convinced of this.
|
| Have you actually seen a foal walking? They are _very
| visibly_ learning how to do it!
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >Which cultures completely restrict their infants from
| attempting to walk?
|
| The ones I mentioned in my comment.
|
| >Did you read the paper you linked? It describes all the
| immense amount of learning that actually happens.
|
| Again, as I said, there is a degree of fine-tuning but
| the core mechanisms are innate.
|
| Some examples:
|
| > In particular, the core premotor components of
| locomotor circuitry mainly derive from a set of embryonic
| interneurons that are remarkably conserved across
| different species
|
| >Detailed EMG recordings in chick embryos during the
| final week of incubation showed that the profiles of EMG
| activity during repetitive limb movements resemble those
| of locomotion at hatching
|
| > In addition, human fetuses exhibit a rich repertoire of
| leg movements that includes single leg kicks, symmetrical
| double legs kicks, and _symmetrical inter-limb
| alternation with variable phase_.
|
| I don't think you read the article, or else you think
| that "development" means learning.
|
| >Have you actually seen a foal walking? They are very
| visibly learning how to do it!
|
| They can walk right away, but they get better at it. It's
| innate, but you can fine-tune it. Like I said.
|
| Another (impressive) example of an animal innately
| walking, this time to avoid predators immediately after
| hatching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3OjfK0t1XM
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think your definition of innate is counter to the
| common definition of innate. The common definition of
| innate is that there is no thought behind full
| understanding and capacity to perform- for example,
| snakes do not generally need to learn how to move without
| legs or how to open the mouth large enough to consume big
| food. There isn't a try/fail cycle while they understand
| the capacities of their body. I fed my pet snake a baby
| quail for the first time in its life and it clearly had
| to learn how to eat it (tried and spat out the leg, wing,
| etc) even though the core mechanism of big mouth big
| swallow is there was clearly innate in it. Just because
| there is a core mechanism to walk existing in babies
| doesn't mean the baby doesn't still need to learn how to
| perform the behavior voluntarily, on command, consciously
| according to their own will.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| What you just described for the baby applies equally to
| the snake. It's obviously difficult to neatly segment
| things into innate and non-innate, but the idea that
| walking is a matter of maturation rather than "learning"
| is the mainstream view among scientists and has been for
| a century.
|
| Again, I conceded that you have to "fine-tune" to get
| good at walking. But the contrast that with say, playing
| golf. That's something that categorically has to be
| learnt, we don't see fetus practicing their drive in
| utero.
| watwut wrote:
| They do not keep them tied till they are 5 years old.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| That's just being pedantic. They also don't "learn" to
| walk if their legs are cut off.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| No, that is actually exactly what I was describing. If it
| was _innate_ , they wouldn't need to trial and error
| their way (i.e. learn) to proficiency. But indeed they
| do.
|
| Your analogy was puberty, which in fact happens with
| development _regardless_ of trial and error (i.e.
| learning).
|
| The two developmental processes are clearly distinct. The
| distinction is that one is a process of learning and the
| other is not.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I'm talking about being able to walk, you're talking
| about being proficient. I've said repeatedly that fine-
| tuning to get better is not incompatible with innateness.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Have you spent a lot of time with children?
|
| My 2 year old went on a mental breakdown of a temper
| tantrum last night because she saw an apple on the tv,
| decided it meant she wanted an apple, and couldn't
| understand why she could not have an apple despite seeing
| one on the tv just then! A toddler is still trying to
| understand how reality itself works.
|
| A 4 year old knows that jumping off of the stairs onto
| tile is going to hurt. A 4 year old understands the apple
| on the tv is an apple on the tv and is not a physical
| apple in the house.
|
| They are so far apart.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Obviously a 4 year old is much more together than a 2
| year old. But we're talking about a fundamental
| difference so great that no memories can be preserved.
| That's a high bar.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| We know there is massive prunning and "dropout" of brain
| connections during young age.
| tralarpa wrote:
| > The machinery constructing query vectors has updated its
| structure enough that its encoding of those query vectors is
| sufficiently dissimilar from the encoding of the stored memory
| vectors (which use the encoding from the last recall).
|
| Wouldn't that result in very bizarre memories instead of no
| memories?
| phantompeace wrote:
| Not unless the brain does filtering (something we know for
| sure it does - psychedelics mess with this filter). I may be
| completely off the mark though
| mystified5016 wrote:
| The brain is sufficiently complex that I'd expect gross
| distortions will get swept under the rug. You'd get either
| lightly distorted memories (dad is 18ft tall, mom's face is
| wrong, favorite toy lived in this spot instead of that one)
| or nothing at all. If a memory is totally corrupted, your
| brain won't give it to you because it doesn't pass your
| perceptive filters.
|
| Children believe a lot of silly things that they "grow out"
| of thinking.
|
| How sure are you that your childhood memories are accurate?
| How sure are you that you aren't simply conditioned to ignore
| distorted childhood memories?
| thrill wrote:
| Odd. My first memory turned out to be when I described in later
| years to my mother from when I was just over a year old.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Your brain is constantly changing, and much moreso when you're
| young. Imagine that you're trying to load files from a previous
| version of a piece of software into the current version - when
| the format is just a binary dump and nobody has been working on
| backwards compatibility.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| i could never remember a lot far back until an incident caused
| some more recent years to disapear from memory. now i have some
| memories of when i was a baby but not from my teenagw years. i
| think its all in there, paging it in is just practically
| impossible to do on demand. maybe some people can do it though..
| johnohara wrote:
| Your page-swap analogy is apt and razor sharp. Well done.
| biofox wrote:
| I had a similar experience when deeply intoxicated, I saw a
| shadow that reminded me of the texture of the wallpaper in the
| first home I grew up in -- it unlocked a cascade of memories
| from my early childhood (I must have been 2) that I never would
| have been able to recall otherwise. But I can't remember what I
| had for breakfast yesterday.
| taurath wrote:
| What you're describing is dissociation, if you're looking for a
| word! Its effects are not as well known and it's under-
| appreciated how common it is. Plus having 3 different societal
| definitions really makes the concept difficult to talk about.
|
| I've done a lot of work on this myself and one can connect with
| one's parts, if that model seems accurate to you.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Another fun one on this example is somebody after coming out of
| a coma being effectively fluent in a foreign language.
| Obviously the person had to have at least some familiarity with
| it before, but there are countless cases where somebody goes
| from knowing a few words of a language (presumably having
| forgotten everything they learned in school or whatever) to
| suddenly speaking it, more or less, fluently. Similar incidents
| can also completely change a person's accent and have other
| such interesting effects.
|
| There's almost certainly some way to tap into this without
| (what is usually/always) brain damage, which has interesting
| implications for the long-term future of education.
| jack_pp wrote:
| Could be that we don't really replay memories as toddlers and
| memory sticks by spaced repetition. When I have weeks where a ton
| of stuff is happening I don't remember a lot of the details even
| now at 30 because there's too much for me to repeat
| account-5 wrote:
| I can't remember the vast majority of stuff before I was 2-3 but
| I remember seeing my younger sibling when they were bought home,
| there's less than a year between us. And I can remember a few
| other things earlier, they they are definitely fuzzier.
| dsego wrote:
| I also believe I have several distinct memories from around 1
| or 2, but it's not clear that they are real and not just
| confabulations. I probably have bigger gaps in primary school,
| things faded away.
| dijit wrote:
| Frustratingly, a lot of what we think are memories are in
| fact: us remembering remembering.
|
| Human memory is increasingly fallible with time because of
| this.
|
| It's like playing chinese whispers with our own recollection,
| everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
|
| It makes sense that you would remember distinct events, but
| the trouble here is that nearly all memory as you so
| eloquently described, is "just confabulations"- which feels
| wrong instinctively, until it's challenged scientifically.
| taurath wrote:
| Some fact or visual memory is as that, but our memories are
| also made up of sensory sensations and emotional states,
| and combinations abound. In fact, a big part of what makes
| PTSD is a split off different aspects of a remembered event
| because it's so difficult to process the whole experience.
| This takes place after a traumatic event, during attempts
| at memory consolidation.
|
| Also traumatic memory seems to be stored differently than
| day to day memory, which helps explain that triggers and
| flashbacks are valid and real (for traumatized ppl), while
| the confabulation effect can also exist. Though I'd note
| that confabulation can happen but that doesn't mean it
| "overwrites" the old memory, or that confabulation is in
| any way more common than just remembering a part or a whole
| event.
| throwayaw2 wrote:
| I have some pretty intense trauma in my life that I can
| recall extremely vividly even though i have little memory
| of the weeks surrounding the event. Often when I don't even
| want to. Certain memories are true memories.
| ben_w wrote:
| I have some from "shorter than a table" age (I can no longer
| rember even which year), which later turned out to have been
| dreams from before I knew the difference between them and
| reality.
| alexjplant wrote:
| I remember a handful of insanely specific things from this
| age that I've since verified with my parents - I generally
| don't seem to misremember or fabricate memories. That being
| said there are a _lot_ of things that I require prompting via
| photo or video to remember and probably 90% of my life from
| that time is unrecoverable. I vividly recall random moments
| from family functions and some intense nightmares but the
| family dog, for instance, is a complete black hole. Weird
| stuff.
|
| Primary school is still knocking around but I think I (and
| many others) suppress it to retain their sanity in adulthood
| :-P
| globular-toast wrote:
| I had an illness as a child which meant I was in and out of
| hospital for a while. I have a few very fuzzy memories from
| this time. The earliest, I think, was when my grandparents had
| come to the hospital. All I can remember is the _feeling_ of
| the situation. They were all worried. I 'm not even sure if I
| could talk at the time. I'm certain this memory is real because
| nobody has ever talked about this; it's not really a notable
| event for anyone else involved.
|
| I also remember getting transported to Great Ormond Street in
| the night. I remember going in the back of a strange car (taxi?
| Hospital transport?) with a tartan blanket. I also remember
| being given a suppository, something that I didn't believe was
| actually real until about 20 years later (people don't really
| talk about them).
|
| But I can't remember at all whether my siblings were there or
| not. I'm 2-3 years older than my brothers but in my memory they
| were just _always there_.
| Carrok wrote:
| > it's not really a notable event for anyone else involved.
|
| I'm sorry but, what? You think your extended family visiting
| a child in a hospital due to illness was not a notable event
| for them?
|
| > They were all worried.
|
| As a parent I can assure you it was a notable event, or no
| one would have been there, and they would not have been
| worried.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Erm... OK, but I've actually, you know, talked to my
| parents about this during the decades since. Nobody
| remembers this particular event because it was one night
| out of weeks of things getting bad, then worse, before
| finally getting better. This was almost certainly not the
| only time the grandparents visited, but it's the only one I
| remember.
|
| Adults' memories don't just play out like a recording
| either. They remember many other details that wouldn't have
| been shared with me even if I could have understood it.
| feverzsj wrote:
| Because the transceiver(brain) hasn't been ready to connect with
| the real you in another dimension.
| sachahjkl wrote:
| I literally have memories from when I was 4. Same clarity as new
| memories.
| codeulike wrote:
| _researchers have long puzzled over our inability to recall
| events before two or three years of age_
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Maybe the issue is that at that age we haven't yet learned
| compressions for our memories. Maybe at that age our best option
| would be storing something closer to raw experience because we
| don't know enough about the world. Eg we might remember a chair
| as "brown, lots of orthogonal lines, about my size" rather than
| using our experience of other chairs.
| randcraw wrote:
| Yeah, I think the first chair we observe is the template for
| recognizing other chairs later. Surely that 'seed' chair will
| undergo substantial revision in time as we become aware that it
| wasn't the ideal basis on which to base our modeling of all
| chairs to come, and we unconsciously 'normalize' the model for
| chair in our head (and adjust that memory too).
|
| It stands to reason that this happens to all of the baseline
| models for the referents we learn (nouns, verbs, adjectives,
| etc) that subsequent learning surely reshapes.
|
| This is likely comparable to the revision of 'concept' clusters
| that goes on in all unsupervised learning NN models, especially
| in humans, those that arise pre-linguistically (since words
| surely provide landmarks to memories enabling future
| retrieval). Perhaps we rewrite our early word2vec tables,
| making early memories less retrievable.
| codeulike wrote:
| _Why can 't HNers remember to read the article?_
|
| There's actually some quite suprising stuff in that article, e.g.
| some cultures have earlier childhood memories than others, and
| there's some interesting suggestions as to why that is. Also
| considerations about how early events can apparently be stored
| but not consciously remembered.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Why can't HNers remember to read the article?
|
| To quote:
|
| """NEW YORK, NY - A recent study showed that 70% of people
| actually never read more than the headline of a science article
| before commenting and sharing. Most simply see a headline they
| like and click share and make a comment. A recent study showed
| that 70% of people actually never read more than the headline
| of a science article before commenting and sharing. Most simply
| see a headline they like and click share and make a comment.
|
| Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..."""
|
| - https://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-
| commenters-o...
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The most frustrating iteration of this is when someone uses
| an article to make a point in an argument...and they didn't
| read it! A clickbait headline seems to support their claim,
| but the substance refutes it.
| gadders wrote:
| This looks like they listened to the BBC Crowd Science Podcast
| (recommended FYI) a week earlier and re-wrote it:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5rjf
| tracker1 wrote:
| I don't remember everything, but I definitely have a handful of
| memories from when I was a toddler (2-3yo). Such as when my
| sister was born.
| pafry wrote:
| Related: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| But you can? You just reproduce the situation and a strange sort
| of deja vu returns? Take a ball- really badly, then grasp it with
| ever better technique and more precision, until you arrive at
| your grasping skills of today.
|
| Same goes with chewing on things - and the first taste of
| anything.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| The cultural impact on childhood memory is interesting, but I
| have to say that the first paragraph was a bit off-putting, like
| it was written by someone who should pay a bit more attention to
| the actual experience of their child in order to support them
| through these formative years instead of projecting their own
| adult frustrations on them:
|
| > _Life must be great as a baby: to be fed and clothed and
| carried places in soft pouches, to be waved and smiled at by
| adoring strangers, to have the temerity to scream because food
| hasn't arrived quickly enough, and then to throw it on the ground
| when it is displeasing. It's a shame none of us recalls exactly
| how good we once had it._
|
| Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by
| themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of agency.
| They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on the
| kindness of their parents and other older humans in their
| environment. They lack language so have no other way of
| communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of
| great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic
| need (and on that note, even knowing what those needs are half of
| the time, given that the ability to make sense of ones own senses
| is still being developed).
|
| All of this while life is a nonstop series of first experiences,
| meaning that even the most mundane thing can (and often is)
| surprising, confusing and overwhelming, leading to a high need
| for reassurance, because being scared and wanting to make sure
| that you're really safe is honestly a very sensible reaction to
| have when you add all of those things up.
|
| I'm not saying life sucks for babies and toddlers, but as a
| parent of a two-year old myself it's pretty obvious to me that
| it's no walk in the park for them either.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| It seemed obvious to me that part was tongue-in-cheek and not
| to be taken literally. It's quite common to get readers to be
| 'hooked'.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Perhaps. I've seen enough selfish parents voice this
| sentiment unironically to no longer give people that benefit
| of doubt.
| the-grump wrote:
| Not perhaps. It's 100% tongue-in-cheek.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| The word "perhaps" was an attempt to de-escalate a verbal
| confrontation that is unproductive because neither
| assertion is falsifiable.
| the-grump wrote:
| The idea behind human and artificial communication
| converging was that computers would learn human patterns,
| not that humans would start describing obvious humor with
| logical terms like falsifiable.
|
| You're on the wrong side of Poe's law.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| Assume the readers are dumb and in the meantime Huberman is
| in top 10 of most popular podcasts of all time.
|
| Journalists and their great education is the more likely
| culprit.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was an attempt to be humorous.
| tessierashpool9 wrote:
| My guess is that the author was looking for a reason to use the
| term "temerity" and built the statement around this desire.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by
| themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of
| agency. They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on
| the kindness of their parents and other older humans in their
| environment. They lack language so have no other way of
| communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of
| great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic
| need
|
| Funny, the same things happen when you become elderly, minus
| the screaming mostly.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Having been to nursing homes and assisted living facilities I
| think that's mainly due to drugs.
| hibikir wrote:
| Yep, you'd be surprised by how many turn downright violent
| when unmedicated. Sometimes the violence is a big part of
| the reason why the family ended up having to send them to a
| nursing home.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Funny, the same things happen when you become elderly,
| minus the screaming mostly._
|
| You just unlocked a memory of me reading "The Praise of
| Folly" in my teens for literature class and having my mind
| blown by the passage talking about that:
|
| > _Yet abating from this, let us examine the case more
| narrowly. Who knows not that the first scene of infancy is
| far the most pleasant and delightsome? What then is it in
| children that makes us so kiss, hug, and play with them, and
| that the bloodiest enemy can scarce have the heart to hurt
| them; but their ingredients of innocence and Folly, of which
| nature out of providence did purposely compound and blend
| their tender infancy, that by a frank return of pleasure they
| might make some sort of amends for their parents ' trouble,
| and give in caution as it were for the discharge of a future
| education; the next advance from childhood is youth, and how
| favourably is this dealt with; how kind, courteous, and
| respectful are all to it? and how ready to become serviceable
| upon all occasions? And whence reaps it this happiness?
| Whence indeed, but from me only, by whose procurement it is
| furnished with little of wisdom, and so with the less of
| disquiet?_
|
| > _And when once lads begin to grow up, and attempt to write
| man, their prettiness does then soon decay, their briskness
| flags, their humours stagnate, their jollity ceases, and
| their blood grows cold; and the farther they proceed in
| years, the more they grow backward in the enjoyment of
| themselves, till waspish old age comes on, a burden to itself
| as well as others, and that so heavy and oppressive, as none
| would bear the weight of, unless out of pity to their
| sufferings._
|
| > _I again intervene, and lend a helping-hand, assisting them
| at a dead lift, in the same method the poets feign their gods
| to succour dying men, by transforming them into new
| creatures, which I do by bringing them back, after they have
| one foot in the grave, to their infancy again; so as there is
| a great deal of truth couched in that old proverb, Once an
| old man, and twice a child._
|
| > _Now if any one be curious to understand what course I take
| to effect this alteration, my method is this: I bring them to
| my well of forgetfulness, (the fountain whereof is in the
| Fortunate Islands, and the river Lethe in hell but a small
| stream of it), and when they have there filled their bellies
| full, and washed down care, by the virtue and operation
| whereof they become young again._
|
| > _Ay, but (say you) they merely dote, and play the fool: why
| yes, this is what I mean by growing young again: for what
| else is it to be a child than to be a fool and an idiot? It
| is the being such that makes that age so acceptable: for who
| does not esteem it somewhat ominous to see a boy endowed with
| the discretion of a man, and therefore for the curbing of too
| forward parts we have a disparaging proverb, Soon ripe, soon
| rotten?_
|
| > _And farther, who would keep company or have any thing to
| do with such an old blade, as, after the wear and harrowing
| of so many years should yet continue of as clear a head and
| sound a judgment as he had at any time been in his middle-
| age; and therefore it is great kindness of me that old men
| grow fools, since it is hereby only that they are freed from
| such vexations as would torment them if they were more wise:
| they can drink briskly, bear up stoutly, and lightly pass
| over such infirmities, as a far stronger constitution could
| scarce master. Sometime, with the old fellow in Plautus, they
| are brought back to their horn-book again, to learn to spell
| their fortune in love._
|
| (I obviously had to look it up, it's not like I had this
| memorized after a quarter century)
|
| I don't think Erasmus was right about the elderly growing
| blissfully happy with losing themselves to dementia, but then
| again: the book was satire, so we shouldn't expect Folly to
| be sincere in their arguments.
|
| [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30201/30201-h/30201-h.htm
| arkey wrote:
| That's some very good insight, often difficult to remember, but
| constantly having all of this in mind should definitely help a
| bit with managing the day to day of parenting.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > frustrated by their lack of agency
|
| uh.. how do you know this? doubt they even know what agency is
| or lack of it means.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Observed behavior. It's not hard to recognize feelings in
| one's child if one pays close enough attention.
| rootlocus wrote:
| I can tell you 100% my toddler gets extremely frustrated when
| he can't do something by himself. And it wasn't a brusque
| development, babies get frustrated when they want to turn on
| the side and can't. Also, they're extremely joyful when they
| finally manage to do it on their own, and they'll do it
| constantly.
|
| > doubt they even know what agency is
|
| I doubt some people know what epicaricacy is, but they do it
| anyway.
| apwell23 wrote:
| comment wasn't talking about toddlers
| helboi4 wrote:
| Yeah I always think being a baby or toddler must be endlessly
| frustrating. Imagine having absolutely no words to communicate
| your need and no idea how to do anything. I've said this before
| to parents of babies when I was a curious teenager and they
| thought I'm being silly but I'm sure it actually is stressful.
| At the end of the day we all go through it and nobody remembers
| it though, so it's not worth worrying about, it's just
| interesting to think about.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can actually watch the progression as the baby realizes
| "Wait, that's a thing you can do" through "I wonder if I can
| do that" to "darn it, it's not working" and finally to "wow I
| did it".
| crooked-v wrote:
| > They lack language so have no other way of communicating than
| screaming
|
| This is one of those good reasons to teach babies basic sign
| language (https://www.parents.com/what-is-baby-sign-
| language-5115901).
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Teaching my kids sign language was such an eye-opener. Prior
| to that I was totally oblivious to how smart babies are. I
| guess I assumed that they developed speech somewhat in time
| with their understanding of language. This couldn't be
| further from the truth though. There's a huge gap. Maybe I
| was especially clueless; I didn't grow up around babies, so
| this stuff might be obvious to people who did.
| sebasvisser wrote:
| Also be sure to start at age 0, don't wait until 6 months.
| Signing and talking to your baby from day 0 about what you
| are doing and why brings them so much comfort. And gives them
| the opportunity to develop so much more quickly and
| confidently.
| __s wrote:
| Indeed, my father's earliest memory is when he was a baby &
| couldn't talk. His two aunts, quite young at the time, were
| joking around with him, having taken him out of the stroller &
| moving him around recklessly. He identified at that point he
| was a toy to them
| gehwartzen wrote:
| All of what you describe is probably a big part of why we don't
| remember. Not only has the though encoding/decoding process not
| been developed sufficiently to remember things in the way we do
| when older but even if we did those memories would probably be
| horrific for the most part.
| breakbread wrote:
| I remember listening to some NPR segment where a
| doctor/researcher said the first couple years is like a long
| acid trip. He was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it
| resonated with me.
| jiohewrfkopwefr wrote:
| > Life must be great as a baby: to be fed and clothed and carried
| places in soft pouches
|
| Not really. Genital mutilation is very barbaric and traumatising
| procedure. Most victims suppress it, and develop all sorts of
| mental issues. Victims have very high suicide rate!
|
| One of the reasons we can not remember our early lives. It was a
| horror!
| 2rsf wrote:
| Can you support the claims starting from "Most victims"?
| westcoast49 wrote:
| We attach our early memories to our concept of the world as it
| was then. Afterwards, our concept of the world changes. As a
| result, those old memories sort of become dangling pointers. They
| refer to a world model that no longer exists in our minds.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Yes, it's like not being able to remember your dreams, or
| things when you're too drunk.
| jraph wrote:
| > it's like not being able to remember your dreams
|
| That's just aggressive garbage collection happening when you
| wake up, arguably so you don't risk confusing dreams and
| reality :-)
|
| But you can somewhat partially work around it by taking notes
| right after waking up, before doing anything else.
| momento wrote:
| You know you're on HN when people refer to neurology in
| terms of pointers and garbage collection.
| jraph wrote:
| Yep. Of course, one needs to adapt the speech to the
| audience :-)
| randcraw wrote:
| And as an infant our world was incredibly smaller than our
| world is now. Surely the 'principal components' of that day
| were reshaped or subsumed by other pointers later, thereby
| shifting the landmarks used to retrieve memories.
|
| I would hazard a guess that the original pointers aren't
| revised to point nowhere, but are, if possible, moved to point
| into the revised reference model. (Presumably we do this now
| when we learn a new domain like music, and as the model for
| harmony becomes more concrete, our original pointers to
| elements within it are adjusted rather than lost.)
| westcoast49 wrote:
| I think it happens to a certain extent, if we do as the
| article says, and revisit our memories. We then probably
| reinterpret our memories in the context of our new and
| updated understanding of the world.
|
| In other cases I believe it's quite possible that our
| understanding of the world, say at age two, is so radically
| different from our adult understanding, that the old memories
| don't even make any sense in the new context. They can't be
| remapped in any meaningful manner.
| ryao wrote:
| I have memories dating back to the day I was born. I was
| incredibly bored as an infant, so I played a game I invented
| where I would replay all of my memories on a regular basis. It
| turned out that my game was essentially a spaced repetition
| method. The result is that I did not forget, while others did.
| osrec wrote:
| What do you remember of the day you were born? How did you
| validate your memories?
| ryao wrote:
| My parents and I later discussed them. Anyway, I remember the
| room where they put children after they were born. Everything
| was white except for what was really close. A nurse that I
| had assumed at some point to be a relative kept putting this
| annoyingly warm cap on my head that I struggled to remove. I
| even tried pushing myself up once to look around, but I saw
| nothing and the effort was exhausting, so I did not try it
| again even though I contemplated doing it. It turns out that
| my grandparents were watching through the window from the
| hospital hallway and witnessed that, which I later heard
| after I recounted the story.
| osrec wrote:
| Wow, that's really quite something!
| pingou wrote:
| If that study is correct
| https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/35/12144.abstract,
| considering the number of times you must have recalled them,
| what you remember must be significantly different than what
| happened, especially since you were probably missing a lot of
| understanding as an infant.
| ryao wrote:
| It is not that significantly different, although my poor
| understanding certainly left people with that impression. I
| thought the nurse in the hospital on the day I was born was
| an aunt. As a young child, I would later describe my baptism
| at 9 months of age as being dunked. It was not that I meant
| that I was literally dunked into the water. I simply thought
| the sensation of water dripping to the back of my head was
| being dunked. I also had been terrified during my baptism
| since I thought the deacon was trying to drown me. My parents
| were so thrilled that I was not crying like the other
| children while in reality, the reason I was silent was
| because I terrified about actually being immersed into water
| and drowned. That said, at the time, I did not really
| understand how to disambiguate what I had regarded to be
| dunking from immersion, even though I had the faint concept
| that the air supply could be severed by being immersed in
| water, which is why I had been terrified.
|
| I recall one time when I was around 2 years old and my
| parents took me to Pizza Hut. When asked about toppings and
| hearing that we could have three, I said I wanted extra extra
| extra cheese. They thought I was being cute. However, I had
| no concept of cuteness or how to be it. I simply wanted all 3
| toppings to be extra cheese and to my disappointment, 2 of
| the toppings were not. At the time, I had not known how to
| say 3 toppings of extra cheese and I thought repeating extra
| three times would communicate what I wanted.
|
| That said, I stopped playing my memory recall game around age
| 5 when I began to be bullied and did not want to remember the
| past anymore. That left me with far fewer memories from early
| grade school than I had from prior years. It also let many of
| my early memories fade, although not enough for me to forget
| them entirely.
| Feathercrown wrote:
| > However, I had no concept of cuteness or how to be it.
|
| My memory isn't as good as yours, but you just reminded me
| of this fairly distinct feeling. As a child you're being
| earnest; only as an adult do you see that as being cute.
| arkey wrote:
| I have a few memories that my parents have placed at around me
| being 2. I would say they have also remained through
| repetition, but in my case not active or voluntary. Those
| memories, although very vivid and specific (I can pinpoint them
| as specific events), are mostly attached to senses (something I
| saw, something I smelled). And because I continued to have
| those inputs during several years later, I guess the memories
| were thus persisted.
| RIMR wrote:
| If you can remember all the way back to the day of your birth,
| those memories are surely not real memories. Newborn babies are
| essentially not fully conscious - not in a way that would
| create any long-term memory of lived events anyway.
|
| It sounds to me that this memory-recall game likely started
| when you were a toddler or preschooler rather than an infant,
| and that while this may give you additional reach back into
| your earliest memories, it was likely more a game of creativity
| than genuine memory recall. Into adulthood the real memories
| and the invented ones can end up feeling roughly the same.
|
| Unfortunately there's really no way to test the accuracy of
| your memory aside from comparing your memories to a previously
| unobserved but concrete record. For most of us, our childhood
| was documented by our parents, and the stories shared with us
| over the course of our lives, so there's no way to prove that
| even the accurate recollections weren't simply our memories of
| the stories rather than the events themselves.
|
| Humans have poor memory anyway. We misremember things that
| happened recently, so it is probably unwise to trust your
| memory of things that distant as being accurate, especially
| when they reach back to an age where most established science
| suggests that you wouldn't have even possessed self-awareness.
| ryao wrote:
| It started at some point after my birth when I still
| remembered my time in the hospital and given that I later
| successfully recounted events from that day, that my
| grandparents witnessed, to my parents, it is safe to say that
| my memories are accurate. Your assumption that I was not
| conscious is absurd. Maybe you were not conscious, but I was.
| I was a very precocious child.
| jfax wrote:
| A newborn's eyes are not focussed.
| ryao wrote:
| That would explain why everything was white except really
| close things like the nurses' hands. The nurses' hands
| were the only color other than white that I recall seeing
| that day. I had some awareness of the crib's walls (or
| whatever that thing was), but beyond that, I saw nothing
| but bright white light.
| ddingus wrote:
| I have memories way back. Not quite infant, but somewhere
| between 1 and 2 years old, I started to string it together.
|
| One trigger was fear of sleep. How do I know I wake up the same
| person? Seems silly right? Well, past me without a whole lot of
| experience was really concerned. I can remember a ton after
| that time.
|
| What I find really interesting is both of us made some active
| choice to remember. Like we ended up with self awareness really
| early.
|
| For me, it was mostly about unanswered questions. I have
| memories that are strongest from that time:
|
| One was flicking the spring in my crib. Swoosh doing, doing,
| da,da,doing! That is me earliest one.
|
| Why does it bounce like that? And the noise! If I flick one
| today, on one of those
|
| Another was a trip to the neighbors. Their kid was named Cash.
| That is what we call money! WTF is with that?
|
| Cash took me to play down stairs and they had a ton of nice
| stuff down there. Fencing for a ring of thieves. I recalled
| enough to nail them many years later to which my mom confessed
| they moved to get away from those people. Lol.
|
| Another was this big bee. I looked at it and bet I was faster
| and stomped! Ouweeeee! The need died, but also totally stung
| me. Was not faster. Ugh. Boy, I can recall our porch, welcome
| mat, bright clear summer day, that bee and my foot going down.
| . I have more. Turning on the TV was vivid. Old tube one made
| noises as it came up. And smells. I recall it like it was
| yesterday.
|
| Anything intriguing and I go into record mode. Everything about
| that time gets saved. Where I was who I was with, happenings...
|
| I was afraid I might forget and never learn the thing one
| learns on one of those.
|
| I still do it. Not as often now due to experience, but if it is
| really new to me, I will feel that switch and off it goes.
| rightbyte wrote:
| To the day you were born sounds extreme? Does a baby even
| 'see'? Your game as a kid makes the concept kinda believable in
| some sense though. But I have a hard time believing that early?
|
| I have quite a lot of early memories. More than usual. And I
| remember that I remembered more early stuff when I was a child
| but I have no recollection of my first year now and only really
| vague and maybe indirect memories of my second year.
| ryao wrote:
| Everything except things up close was white. If I had to
| guess, I could not see further than a foot if that (although
| when I first was able to talk, I had thought the distance had
| been 3 feet or less). I did try looking around once after
| making great effort to push my torso upward, but everything
| was white and it was exhausting. I wanted to make another
| attempt but did not muster the will to exert myself again.
| The only color I could see aside from white was the nurse's
| hand when she annoyingly reached into the crib (or whatever
| it was called) to put some uncomfortably warm thing onto my
| head. My hands did not work very well so I had to nudge it
| off my head each time using them as blunt instruments. To my
| relief, she gave up after a few times.
|
| Interestingly, my grandparents had witnessed all of this.
| Later, when I could speak and asked my mother why my aunt
| kept putting something on my head one day when I was younger,
| she recalled what my grandparents had told her and told me it
| was the nurse on the day I was born. I had not realized it
| had been the day I was born until she told me. At the time I
| could speak to ask about it, I simply had regarded it to be
| when I was very young.
| ryao wrote:
| To be clear, I had no idea that various early memories were
| from my first year until I talked to my parents about them.
| The memories that have been dated to my first year are:
|
| * The time in the room where newborn children are placed.
| The events here were witnessed by my grandparents and told
| to my parents.
|
| * The remnant of my umbilical cord falling off my belly
| button at my aunt's house. That really hurt.
|
| * My baptism. I had misunderstood the water as a prelude to
| being drowned and was terrified that the deacon wanted to
| kill me.
|
| I assume that there are more memories from my first year,
| but since they do not correspond to something others
| witnessed and remember, there is no way of dating them to
| that year.
|
| In the case of the first two, I had asked my parents about
| them when I could talk and they realized that I was
| recalling very early memories. In the case of my baptism,
| my mother had decided to recount my baptism talking about
| happy she was that I had been the only well behaved child
| there (the Catholic Church often baptizes children in
| batches). Upon hearing that, I remembered the event and
| responded complaining that I had only been quiet because I
| thought if I had opened my mouth to cry, I would have been
| drowned to death soon afterward. What was a fond memory for
| her was a horrific memory for me.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The concept is interesting. I think the awareness of
| babies might be underestimated.
|
| > I had misunderstood the water as a prelude to being
| drowned and was terrified that the deacon wanted to kill
| me.
|
| Sounds like a rationalisation way later though? I don't
| think you could be aware of either concept at the time.
| Like, the fear of the priest as a stranger, or fear of
| the other babies screams from pouring water on their
| heads. Not the concept of drowning or killing.
| Feathercrown wrote:
| Isn't drowning one of the few things that babies
| instinctually fear?
| ryao wrote:
| It was a deacon and I was not afraid of him. I was afraid
| of being drowned. I probably had some prior notion of
| drowning from being bathed by my mother. She was a very
| results oriented person that did not have any idea that
| the details of how you do things are important. It is
| almost certain that she accidentally got water in my nose
| at some point (possibly multiple times), which made me
| acutely aware of the notion of drowning. It is a memory
| that I likely elected to forget, although traces likely
| remained, which likely caused my fear during my baptism.
|
| Coincidentally, I have had a lifelong aversion to putting
| my head below water. It made learning to swim impossible.
| sakopov wrote:
| My goodness, this is fascinating! Thank you for sharing!
| 47282847 wrote:
| For something incredible, read about the methods developed by
| some Hungarian child psychologists to strengthen the bond to
| children even before they are born:
| https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97810033318...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Synaptic pruning?
| scotty79 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning
| tomatocracy wrote:
| One of my earliest memories is not of an actual event/place but
| of a nightmare I had. Given the tendency to forget dreams very
| quickly I've always wondered how common retaining memories of
| dreams from early childhood is - eg I've never heard anyone else
| mention this when talking about early memories.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I do have memories of a nightmare from age 4-5, but it was a
| recurring nightmare.
| fjfaase wrote:
| I once hear the story of a colleague who when going to college
| met with someone who he felt that he knew although they were
| unable to establish were they knew each other from as they came
| from different cities. When he returned home and told the story
| to his mother, she smiled and told him that they as toddlers had
| met.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I had a psych professor with a similar story that she liked to
| share. Her prevailing hypothesis on why we don't remember our
| infancy was that there's typically little to no reason to
| recall it, so the memories either fade or morph into general
| feelings and emotions that often help form the bases of our
| early personalities.
|
| I may be getting some of that wrong, too. I was not
| particularly engaged with that class since I was still a rather
| immature student, back then. I'm not saying I subscribe to her
| idea, but it's certainly interesting to think about.
| Clubber wrote:
| I've read a hypothesis that it's because when you learn to
| speak, you remember things in a new way. You don't know how
| to access the memories you stored before you knew how to
| speak.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Absolutely - "Tree" is so much easier to file than the
| magic thing standing there before you.
| smogcutter wrote:
| In other words, you've forgotten the class for the same
| reasons you've forgotten being an infant.
| barrenko wrote:
| Once in college I had a girl stare at me for a while on a long
| distance bus (we were almost the only passengers in there).
| When I got home my mom told me her mom called her to ask if I
| was also on that bus - apparently we have spent a lot of time
| together as toddlers.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I have had this experience firsthand - I met someone at a
| party, and he was _intensely_ familiar, despite me being on the
| far side of the planet from my usual haunts. We chatted, and it
| transpired quite rapidly that we had been neighbours and
| frequent playmates as toddlers in Hong Kong.
|
| Having had a child of my own in the last few years, I would
| like to think I understand the phenomenon. When we lack
| comprehensive language, we do not store memories as narrative
| experiences as we do as adults, rather just as semantic
| connections and correlations. There have been more than a few
| occasions where I have been doing something like changing a
| diaper, rocking her to sleep, playing with her in the bath, and
| I have had the intense sensation of "I remember what this felt
| like" - not necessarily a specific instance, but rather a
| remembrance of sensation.
|
| My earliest memories are from between one and two years of age,
| and I know that they are memories as they are things that my
| parents do not recall, and I have been able to verify, and I
| know when they are from as we left Hong Kong weeks after my
| second birthday.
|
| I remember the father of the guy I reconnected with parading
| around his garden on stilts - my parents denied this ever
| happened, yet he confirmed his father was indeed into that at
| the time - and I remember the pigs and chickens under the
| houses in the squatter's village near us - again, my parents
| insisted they had never taken me there - and they had not, but
| my au pair, who forty years on I reconnected with and asked,
| had.
|
| There are other bits and bobs, glimpses, that I recall, but
| can't say for sure aren't implants.
| gradschool wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of the documentary "Three Identical
| Strangers" [1], about identical triplets adopted by different
| families during their first months of life who try to re-
| establish their connection when they meet later by chance. It's
| a gripping story with a shock ending. Somewhat relevant to this
| thread and I hope not too much of a spoiler, it's suggested in
| the film that they may have been affected by separation
| anxiety.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7664504/
| miftassirri wrote:
| i remember i was crawling as a child
| Raztuf wrote:
| It's crazy that people here have memories from when they were
| toddlers while I'm 29 and have a hard time remembering stuff from
| my early teens.
| nelblu wrote:
| I am with you. That said, I feel like looking at a photo when I
| was very young say around 4 or 5 does seem to invoke memories
| about the house I grew up in. I wonder if the brain is just
| making up the memory or the photo is actually helping the brain
| access some dormant region in the brain.
|
| Further, I have also noticed that when I meditate sometimes my
| mind wanders and brings me some memories from the childhood -
| totally random, unrelated to current events memories.
| busterarm wrote:
| I drank heavily from my early teens to my late-twenties. Like
| full-blown alcoholism.
|
| I can't remember many things from that decade+, but more
| significantly my sense of when things happened that I do
| remember is usually off by years.
| helboi4 wrote:
| I have memories from my whole life but only smatterings of
| them. When I say I have memories from being as toddler it's
| like a few here and there.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I have a decent memory for places, so-so for people, very
| little for events. I could draw a reasonable floor plan of my
| childhood home and tell you about friends and family who were
| there. But I could only tell you about a handful of things that
| happened in that place.
|
| It's not much better in more recent times. I could say much the
| same about everywhere I've lived as an adult.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Our culture is predicated on the inability of infants to
| remember. The overwhelming majority of newborn infant boys have
| their genitals mutilated and the medical community claims that
| they will have no knowledge. When stakes are this high, we don't
| want them to remember.
| Levitz wrote:
| My earliest memory is about awareness of conscience and memory.
|
| I remember laying in bed, my diapers being changed, I don't know
| who was doing it or what the room looked like at the time, but I
| remember that there was nothing before that, and that on
| following days I thought back to that moment with the conviction
| that it was important for me to remember that specific moment,
| since it was the first for me.
| apwell23 wrote:
| you prbly just made an educated guess
| thornewolf wrote:
| I have a similar experience. "A conviction to remember". I was
| a bit older though and playing with my toys.
| darkhorn wrote:
| Same awakening moment happened to me. I was in the edge of a
| big bed and I was not able to move. And there were (our)
| wardrops on the other side of the room (later they were moved
| out). I remember that there was notning much to remember before
| that and I realized that I was small and new in this world.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I have been able to recall memories from the time I was one years
| old. I even recalled a dream I had at the age of 3. These
| memories were long forgotten and probably the last time I
| recalled them was at the age of 7. I am now 40.
|
| Recently, I unlocked a memory at the age of 2 months. It is
| difficult to believe except to me. After unlocking it, the memory
| felt like it was yesterday. And I have recalled this memory
| multiple times in my childhood phase. I guess I am now recalling
| my childhood in greater detail which is causing me to remember
| what memories I was recalling at the time.
|
| So why can't we remember our baby memories? Because of shock. The
| present day gives us so much stress. So we focus on now. We focus
| on what helps us now. We recall memories that help us in the NOW.
| If you want to recall a memory from before, imagine a stress that
| likely would have also occurred from before. Like being hungry
| and being unable to communicate. And reaching for a bottle of
| milk. Being unable to walk or crawl. Lying on your back. For me,
| hunger does not evoke too much stress. Other things do like
| headaches.
| stef25 wrote:
| So it's like a built-in protection to prevent us from recalling
| traumatic experiences ? Could make sense. But then why also
| block the overwhelmingly good memories like getting xmas
| presents ?
| asdff wrote:
| I don't think you can put logic on what you do and don't
| remember from an event. Biology would have to mate that with
| some contextual reasoning somehow which seems a bit to
| complex for something so inherently subconscious. For example
| when I think of some family vacations from childhood I can
| remember deep details about staring out the car window at
| some place, but as for the fun things we actually did there I
| am at a loss and have to be reminded by family.
|
| I guess all that is to say you can't seem to be in control of
| when the tape player starts recording and you can't reliably
| find your old tapes.
| Supermancho wrote:
| My earliest memory is age 2, which was a traumatic one. Being
| wheeled through the double doors into the surgery areas, while
| my mom had to wait outside and was assuring me we would get
| Taco Bell after.
|
| Age 3. My father assembling a solid plastic child riding horse
| with springs.
|
| Age 4. A residential home converted to child day care, where I
| first encountered Cosmic Encounter on a table (probably left
| out from the night before). I had no idea what that was until
| my teens.
|
| Age 4-6, a rather large number of memories like beginning to
| formally write with my left hand, almost choking on a sea shell
| I had been sucking on, Jimmy Carter was president, my first
| memorable Halloween, etc. All at a Kindercare facility, which
| is a national pre-school chain.
| resters wrote:
| I remember back to age 2, fwiw.
| kingofheroes wrote:
| The earliest memory I have, that I actually consider a memory and
| not just a weird dream, is a sensation of feeling very warm and
| comfortable and then suddenly feeling very cold and upset and
| wanting to go back to the warm place. I'd like to say this was a
| memory from when I was born, but I honestly have no clue when
| this happened as I couldn't see anything. I think the reason this
| memory stuck with me was just the stark contrast between "this is
| nice" to "this sucks, put me back".
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| Same here! My wife did some research recently and it seems like
| some people really have a memory of this sensation
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I'm curious - could you describe one of the weird dreams your
| had from earlier then this? It'd be interesting to know.
| rtkwe wrote:
| So many of my early memories feel almost 3rd person because I
| mostly remember them as the stories told. Mostly around injuries
| I had as a kid though I know the memories are at least a little
| warped because the way I "remember" laying while I was getting
| stitches in my hand would mean it was on my left hand but I have
| the scar on my right hand. (Most likely I wasn't looking at the
| doctor/surgeon like I remember but facing the other way or
| something.)
| Bayart wrote:
| I have snapshot memories from before the age of 1 that I can
| certifiably say aren't false (no photographic evidence, no
| external testimony, being able to recollect them regularly since
| infancy) and that can be pinpointed to that time due to specific
| details. They become a continuous stream around age 2 and
| everything around age 3 starts being as clear as anything else.
|
| In any case I've always found it interesting to have such a big
| delta with the people around me but not particularly significant
| until I seriously structured my introspection and got into
| cognitive behavioural therapy.
|
| With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience with
| extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't register as
| meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about that period. For
| example I've come to realize that as a toddler I was very aware
| of my surroundings, of myself, I had an overwhelming feeling of
| _boredom_ and probably needed far more stimulation than kids that
| age ; hence behavioural patterns during adulthood that I
| previously couldn 't explain.
| pmontra wrote:
| Your experience is more or less my experience. I even know a
| person that remembers from well before being 1 year old. That
| person started speaking very early, maybe that's related to
| having early memories. Different people develop at different
| times. The ages in the articles are averages of their
| respective populations so these data points are offset, for
| example, by the daughters of a friend of mine that told me that
| they don't remember anything before being 5 or 6 years old.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Before 1 is kinda absent, but from 2 I can remember factual
| stuff pretty clearly (dramatic events, fun and less).
| helboi4 wrote:
| Yeah I'm always shocked that there's a general assumption
| that people don't remember things before the age of 5. I
| remember some things from 2 years old and everything is
| pretty clear from 3 onwards. I do assume this is a sign of
| advanced development.
| danielbln wrote:
| Memories are notoriously unreliable, pliable, subject to
| induction etc. You may absolutely have retained memories
| from that age, but it's just as likely that someone told
| you and your turned it into a memory.
| Gormo wrote:
| > You may absolutely have retained memories from that
| age, but it's just as likely that someone told you and
| your turned it into a memory.
|
| I suppose this is possible, but I personally have many
| extremely detailed _visual_ memories of places and events
| that happened well before I was five years old --
| including memories that didn 't involve anyone who could
| have reminded me of anything subsequently -- all of which
| are consistent directly with each other.
|
| If I had any painting skills, I could paint you a picture
| of interior of the house I moved out of when I was 4,
| including furniture, appliances, artwork on the walls,
| even things like a green and yellow cardboard storage box
| that we had on a shelf in the living room.
|
| When I encounter small bits of information from the same
| time and place, they always seem to corroborate my
| memories, e.g. finding notes my dad wrote, which I'd
| never read before, or finding a photo focusing on one
| object in a larger room.
|
| This seems to indicate that on the whole, my memories are
| mostly accurate. Perhaps they were _reinforced_ by
| conversations with family and varying other reminders,
| but I 'm fairly certain that what was being reinforced
| were real memories in the first place.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I have little patches being a little bit more than a feeling
| starting around 3, having reliable ones from 5 upwards.
| Having memories starting 1 sounds both amazing but also
| scary.
| rolph wrote:
| have you ever had the experience of discovering evidence of
| your past activities, and remembering what you forgot you
| remembered?
|
| example , peeling away a chip or two of a bad paint job on the
| closet wall, to discover, its covering a big scribble,.,.
| memories then smash the floodgates, and you vividly recall ,
| marker in hand, self in awe, at the ^majic^ marker how it makes
| lines so readily.
| Gormo wrote:
| > They become a continuous stream around age 2 and everything
| around age 3 starts being as clear as anything else.
|
| I'm pretty much exactly the same, with the same age thresholds.
| I remember every detail of the house my family moved out of a
| couple of months after my fourth birthday, including detailed
| memories of events that took place there during the two years
| prior.
|
| I think a big factor might have been learning to read at around
| the age of two, possibly creating deep and regularly reinforced
| mnemonic links to my audiovisual recall.
|
| > With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience
| with extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't
| register as meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about
| that period.
|
| Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these
| "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered
| the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Much of human evolution is about the tension between our big
| brains making us smarter, but also killing our mothers more often
| during birth.
|
| The hack evolution landed on is that we're born 1-2 years
| premature compared to most mammals.
|
| From that perspective, this isn't especially weird.
| darkhorn wrote:
| It is interesting that many people do not remember events when
| they were two years old. But much more interesting that some
| people do not believe that there are people who can remember
| events from age two.
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| This is my educated guess on the topic having spent time
| investigating the intersection of poor memory, human growth
| patterns etc where this topic intersects:
|
| Norepinephrine is a key regulatory of memory. Before a certain
| age the body is much more in parasympathetic activation v.s.
| sympathetic activation, very low Norepinephrine, lower cortisol
| response needs, etc. Once growth slows down and this can flip
| over then mammals will start to form memories. Human curves for
| the curious: https://obgynkey.com/growth-and-puberty-3/
|
| Some fun notable mentions such as many earliest memories are
| "super scary" and those with poor ability to produce
| Norepinephrine and slower growth velocity will have later "first
| memories" than everyone else.
| fipar wrote:
| > Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by
| themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of agency.
| They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on the
| kindness of their parents and other older humans in their
| environment. They lack language so have no other way of
| communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of
| great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic
| need (and on that note, even knowing what those needs are half of
| the time, given that the ability to make sense of ones own senses
| is still being developed).
|
| While mine did certainly scream when they were hungry (or
| annoyed, or bored, or I picked the wrong red crayon, etc.), they
| also had non-screaming verbal communication.
|
| Both my kids started "talking" very early (I wanna say within the
| first or, at most, second month of being born, but "and we'll
| remember this when we are old and ancient though the specifics
| might be vague". In any case, definitely while babies), it's just
| that we (obviously?) didn't understand them. But they had a very
| definite "language" of different sounds, which was also different
| between them if we compare it.
|
| Screaming is a good way for babies to get attention, but it's
| certainly not the only one!
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > Both my kids started "talking" very early (I wanna say within
| the first or, at most, second month of being born...
|
| Well sure if you just redefine what talking is...
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