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Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?
- scotty79 10y agoIsn't it simply because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning ?
- mSparks 10y agoAnother item in the long list of obvious stuff so called experts in intelligence purport not to know. simple answer you wont get from her majesties propoganda channel. "memory" is a learnt skill. just like everything else, it takes a few years to learn it.
- orf 10y agoNot everything is a learned skill, and you have absolutely nothing to base that opinion on other than obviously loathing those pesky experts and... the BBC?
- mSparks 10y agono, i loath the "experts" rolled out by the bbc as experts. that memory is something we learn is not a new thing (technicallly the skill of forgetting, which is where autism comes from), the second post even pointed out synaptic pruning. its not just known to be a learnt skill, we know the exact biologic process by which it manifests itself. the "experts" are the ones building the ai that will take all your jobs. and you wont find them giving interviews on the beeg.
- daveguy 10y agoYou speak as if you know quite a bit about this subject. I'm curious, what makes you an expert rather than an "expert"?
- mSparks 10y agoi have been building such stuff for the last 20 years. even had stuff stolen by darpa. which is why i dont share much now. http://www.theborgmatrix.com http://www.theborgmatrix.com
- cknoxrun 10y agoI should point out that your link doesn't work for me. I should also point out that it is unwise to claim absolute authority in science, especially the biological sciences.
- mSparks 10y agoYeah I saw, rogue c&p in the "hide it from most of the internet" script. It's an old site migrated from my first machinations back in the early 2000s. And I make no claim to "absolutely authority". But take your pick which "expert" you want to listen to. The experts rolled out by the "love thee blue blooded leader appointed appointed by god" channel. Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwYAv--inN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwYAv--inN0
- orf 10y ago> Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day. It says on your site you graduated in 2007. I'd take the experts any day.
- mSparks 10y agofinished electronic engineering in 98, just as all the sensible engineers f'd off to south korea and china. 2007 was the second time round. around the time of http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagarism http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagarism and http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagiarism-2 http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagiarism-2 its now valuable enough capital that i dont technically have to work anymore and can spend my time flying helicopters and enjoying luxury yachts. Although life isnt exactly that simplistic. It does give me some pleasure to know for certain the outcome was the us and uk loosing the world leadership. And now you got Trump and May as your top representatives.
- vilhelm_s 10y agoThe thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and then as we get older we forget them again. If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the early memories are completely lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memor...
- hubert123 10y agoThings learnt that early simply dont have value later on, that's how I would see it from the body's perspective.
- posterboy 10y agoEpisodic memory is not really learned, is it? There's a semantically confusing syllogism in there. If a memory is pondered often enough, there might not be much more to learn from, thus you stop thinking about it and as with muscles, it deteriorates if not used. But what you have deduced from that memory might have value. Eventually you might learn later on that episodic memory is a valuable thing to keep as much as possible, thus we reminisce. On the other hand, maybe early childhood is just so terrible that it needs to be suppressed.
- laxatives 10y agoEven if you aren't able to recall useless events in your life, you still have memories of most of them with the appropriate cues. Tgat doesn't hold for early childhood.
- posterboy 10y ago>If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2 That is news to me, but then again I find it hard to ask a 5 year old about anything.
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- martin-adams 10y agoI read recently that our memories are us recalling the last time we remembered it. They did a study which showed those that intoduced errors in their memories later recalled them as facts the next time. So my thought is that childhood amnesia could be down to children living in the moment and simply don't spend time recalling past events. Only later do we consider events as being past, present and future.
- thret 10y agoThey absolutely do though. I only see my nieces and nephews a few times a year, and they always remind me of things we did the last time I visited.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- martin-adams 10y agoThat's sort of the point. You're seeing them giving them a reason to recall the memory. They will then carry those memories into adulthood. My first memories are roughly when I was 3 years old. So recalling the first 2-3 years of my life is pretty much impossible. That also happens to be the age when I probably didn't communicate previous experiences to anyone else. But lets face it, I actually have no clue on this topic, just trying to piece together what I've read about and my own understanding.
- jack9 10y agoI still have a few memories from when I was 2. Nothing from ages 1,3,4. I can actually recall things from every other year.
- nabla9 10y agoI'm not an expert, but I have read few books about brain development. It's amazing that we can remember things from the childhood. Retained memories have likely result of multiple recall-rewrite cycles. Human brains practically rebuild themselves few times during development. Neural migration stops when the child is born, but synaptic pruning, myelination, synaptogenesis, apoptosis continues years after the birth. Cortical white matter continues to increase until the child is 9-12 years old, grey matter development continues in phases. Superior temporal cortex is not mature until the child reaches adulthood 17-18 years. Our first memories are from brains that were very different. This is why child neurologists are their own specialty among neurologists. Child brain and adult brain are different things.
- woliveirajr 10y agoCould you list some of those books?
- nabla9 10y agoAdolescent Brain Development: Implications for Behavior. 978-0123979162 Fundamentals of Brain Development http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674026742&content=toc http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674026742&co...
- gingerlime 10y agoI wonder what kind of effect today's technology has. I mean, my son is 3, and already has hours of videos stored. And he likes watching those videos of himself and family even now. How is this going to affect memory formation later in life? Should we hide those videos from him to avoid some kind of a feedback-loop that can somehow mess with his memory?
- ljf 10y agoI wonder the exact same thing, our boy is 2 and as soon as he could hold a phone his favourite videos were of himself. Going to be interesting "do you really remember X happening or is the video something that you rewatched so much you couldn't help but recall?"
- visarga 10y agoWe mostly recall only what we photograph. I'm conscious of this every time I take photos.
- ljf 10y agoI'm not sure that's true. I barely took any photos until I was about 20 but have a rich memory of unphotographed periods of my life and experiences. How did people remember before cameras?
- soared 10y agoI participated in a study in college that tested something similar to this. If someone knows information is stored somewhere it is easier for them to remember the location of it, rather than the actual information. (Its easier to google a math formula's name than to remember the actual formula). Really children now could 'remember' a whole lot more, and a lot clearer, if they just remember where the video is rather than the actual video.
- dschiptsov 10y agoThe hypothesis that natural language acquisition "restructures our memories" is promising one. We cannot recall what has been stored using a different "encoding". There are no associated labels (which is what words are) attached to earlier experiences, so "search" returns nothing, or something we mistakenly attributed to the prior-language experiences.
- douche 10y agoMy theory is that memory is more about the stories that we tell and retell ourselves, than any sort of objective reflection of reality. If you're not refreshing the stuff in your cache, it ages out and goes away.
- jackvalentine 10y agoMy understanding is that's correct - memories are reformed when you retrieve them. This is also how you can introduce errors in to your recall.
- Stenzel 10y agoI have a memory of age one, bathing in a tin tub in the garden of father's boss. No language, but the impression that life can be good had such an impact that I remembered.
- extr 10y agoPerhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew. But I realized a few years ago that the memory, despite having true elements and feeling legitimate, takes place in the wrong location: the house that we moved into shortly after he was born. So I'm sure at some point I either was told this story and confused it for a memory, or I held onto the "gist" of the original memory long enough and then recalled/rewrote it enough times that the setting was changed to the place where the majority of my childhood took place. But I find it amazing that I still feel like it's a real memory.
- bluesign 10y agoYep i have similar memory about playing with a toy, but somehow rewritten to new home. But i am sure noone 'told' about this, seems more like i have fragment of memory, and mind filled the missing information with something and rewritten the memory
- xenadu02 10y agoIt seems like the brain fills in fragments of memories it deems unimportant, can't locate, or that have been otherwise lost. It doesn't make sense for an event to take place without a location so your brain picks a likely location and injects that into the memory. Knowing that memories are like Flash and subject to being rewritten when recalled is a bit unsettling but the research seems clear that it definitely happens. It also explains why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable: the brain ignores trivial and unimportant details (the boring shirt some random person was wearing) but when pressed to recall the details your brain fills in (I would have remembered him being naked so he must have been wearing something boring). Even tiny hints can produce fake memories. Once this process takes place people will swear that their memory is correct because for them it is the way things happened!
- mncharity 10y ago
- anigbrowl 10y agoI find this mystifying. I have numerous memories from being a toddler. Among friends' children, some have more fully-formed personalities than others. My favorite one has an excellent memory (like she remembers where things are in our house even though she only visits every 2 or 3 months) and also highly developed preferences on clothing (colors, acceptable combinations of what to wear etc.).
- xenadu02 10y agoI actually did some casual research into this 3 years ago before my kids were born. All the theories and speculation in the article have been disproven - specifically theories about autobiographical memory or narrative memory being important. What actually happens is the brain undergoes periods of shift/growth/change that nuke the ability to recall earlier memories. Most of the incorrect explanations come from adult-oriented bias: The memories are so far gone we can't even remember that we were once capable of remembering earlier times. Children can remember events clearly from before they acquired language. No adult has ever been shown to have this ability (it is always due to mis-remembering the time period or making educated guesses based on other knowledge). As children get older and gain a better mastery of language they can often describe _more_ memories from very early childhood, indicating that the memories exist even when kids lack the ability to describe them in words. These abilities to remember early childhood (even <1 yr old) begins fading around ~10 yrs old. By your teenage years those early memories are mostly gone.
- absurdmind 10y agoWhere have you read about the very early memories, like <1 year? There is a thing that puzzles me most of my life. When I was a teenager we had a family discussion about early memories. I have described several ones I've always assumed to be my earliest, but I've never knew what age they are related to. In one of them my cradle was involved and I was told by my mom that I was removed out of cradle at the age of 3 months.
- kefka 10y agoI remember one distinct memory from when I later figured I was 1.5 years old (18 months). My great grandmother (mom's mom's mom) was on her deathbed. I remember meeting her, with my parents one last time before she passed away. I distinctly remember the tile on the wall was robin's egg blue up to about 5 feet tall. She had such frail skin, it was like tissue paper.. I held her hand knowing that she was nearing the end. I was later (years later) told that my parents were terrified that I was going to do something and rip her skin. I also found out she stayed alive long enough to see me off. She died by away the next morning. By all accounts, I shouldn't remember this. But I told them details from what my own parents forgot.
- Joyfield 10y agoLouis CK on the subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU
- crummy 10y agoCalvin & Hobbes also: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/01 http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/01
- Dramatize 10y agoI'm pretty sure most of my early memories are not of the actual event, but of the times I thought of the memory. Like others have mentioned, at 5 years old I could remember details of being 2-3yrs. I think I'm now going back to the 5-year-old rather than the 2-year-old.
- eva1984 10y agoFirst memory when I was about 1.5 years old, where my family, specifically the man who I now called father is having a dinner.
- dwaltrip 10y agoI think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories from before we could talk. It seems to me that we can go a layer deeper than words and language. An infant has an incredibly shallow model of the world in their brain. At birth, it is almost entirely blank. As we become toddlers, we build up our model of the world at an astonishing rate. I wonder if it most memories don't survive this process. Perhaps the world model grows too quickly, and the old memories are unable to be integrated. I do agree that language plays a role in this, but I would guess that most of this happens at a level beneath language. At some point though, the existing model is robust enough that new memories more firmly take root and can be better integrated into future changes of the model (even though it is still being developed at a rapid rate throughout childhood). Naturally, this point occurs at different ages.
- robotjosh 10y agoI remember my 1 year old birthday party and plenty of stuff before that. I remember finding an unprotected outlet and putting a butter knife in it. It made me involuntarily fling the knife across the room. My mom came in and got mad at me for crying for "no reason".
- joggery 10y agoWhy does it take so long for us to form our first memory? My guess is it's because human memories are ideas and like all our ideas they depend on other ideas for their meaning. However when we were young our ideas about the world were very different from what they are now: much simpler and with many falsehoods. So our earliest memories don't make sense to us and can't be recalled. What we call our 'first memory' may just be the earliest thing we can recall and make sense of now.
- senorsmile 10y agoMy earliest memory was from 13 months old. It was the second surgery I had on my foot, and I woke up towards the end of the surgery. Apparently anesthesia for small children is quite difficult. I have a couple other very faint memories from 2 and 3 years of age, but none nearly as strong as my first.
- DavidWanjiru 10y agoCould this working of the brain be related to how, when you're sleeping, something happening in the real world is incorporated in real time into a dream you're having? That always amazes me, how our brains do that.
- SeanDav 10y agoThe article also goes into some detail on false memories. There have been some horrific instances of injustices caused by this, particularly false memories of child abuse and sex abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memories-abuse-convict-innocent https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memori...