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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
No these are not things people told me about. I know that. I mean from 3 onwards there is a steady stream of them that I remember clearly in exactly the same way I remember other things. My memories from 2 are very few and far between but they're still not things anyone told me about. They're not things that are significant enough for people to relay to me. I remember things like, my dad pointing out a crane to me out the car window, being confused about someone's name. Someone telling me the word "plumber" has a b in it, which I just found totally wild. Waiting for the toilet at nursery. One time they brought cardboard boxes to nursery and getting to crawl around in them like a cat but being really pissed off with this girl who was terrorising me. Hiding in the attic conversion with my cousin because I was terrified of the hoover. Some kid bullying me for having a temporary tattoo in nursery. My mum took me to the turn of the millenium celebrations when I was 2 and wants me to remember that. She's tried to remind me a lot, I don't remember shit about it. I don't remember anything notable that people would talk about like my first day at school. I remember my 3rds birthday I guess that counts.
I'm very aware of this and tend to examine my own memory critically while trying to avoid reinforcing some preconception I might have about them. I can clearly remember, for example :
- The exact look and shape of my feeding bottle.
- Starting baby food and good it was. I still remember the taste of the carrot and apple stuff.
- Being in my crib before being able to walk, by myself, just looking around, waiting for time to pass.
- Sticking poop on the bars of said crib. Dunno why I did that. It seemed fun.
- Our first cat (died when I was a year and a half).
- Receiving my first and second Christmas presents.
- Being brought to work by my grandma when she was keeping me (she retired when I was 1).
- The layout of my grandmother's kitchen that was redone when I was two.
- The day we spent at an attraction park when I was two and puking all over my aunt.
- The cotton cloth my mother used to wrap my butt with (I hated synthetic diapers), with the blue motifs drawn on it.
- Being laid on my back and having my ass cleaned. I really enjoyed that.
- The exact flour plan of my house, my school, my nanny's house, all the faces of the kids there, some of their names. The layout of the village. I left this place a few months after turning 3 and never went back.
All that stuff is stuff that's not documented at all and stuff I've told my relatives about, not the other way around.
It brings back another memory, from when I was 7 or 8, but that only makes sense now : we were doing a trip with kids from another school, incidentally kids I had been to school with when I was 4. I remembered them pretty well and I was quite happy to meet again two kids that had been my best friends at that time. They didn't seem to remember me at all.
That's impressive, sadly I don't recall any such moments when I was less than 5 years old. Just curious do you recall if you kept visualizing these memories over the years and hence maybe you still remember them so far?
Yeah man, when people say "your brain just made that up", it's like, no, this is stuff that wasn't suggested or "generated" and is verifiable (I love how many examples you have!) .. I especially relate to the "being in the crib" one. It took me getting a bit older to realize just how little other people remembered from their earliest years. Even today I have an uncanny memory for people and their names. My memory isn't so great in other areas, but still. Interesting stuff.
Same here. We moved when I was four, so I know I have a lot of memories from before then, because they're set in locations I never went back to after the age of 4.
