8 ms·

Perhaps 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

by extr 10y ago

Perhaps 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 ago
Yep 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 ago
It 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
  When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew. I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage. Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash. Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real". Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.
cgriswald 10y ago
My earliest memory is from about the same age. I remember looking down from the balcony at the apartment complex where we lived. We moved from that complex before I was three-years-old and I don't remember anything else about it. I brought it up at some point and was told that they ended up putting up chicken wire because I was always trying to look through the iron bars. But I'm fairly certain the memory came first (and I have no memory of the chicken wire).
soperj 10y ago
I have something very similar, but I know that I didn't hear the story from anyone. I would have been under 27 months because my brother wasn't alive. In my early 20's I asked my mother when we had a brown honda, and she replied that we never did. I said I was sure that we did because I remember being in a brown Honda, driving on the highway and that we got a flat tire, and the police came, and that there were Palm trees. The part that didn't make sense is that I thought we were going to Alberta beach(in Alberta) and there are clearly no palm trees there. After talking about it for a while and giving some more details of my memory, we figured out that it was a trip to hawaii that we did before my brother was born and that the brown honda was a rental car.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  How would you know the car was a honda at that point?
  - soperj 10y ago
    I don't know that I knew that it was a honda at that point, I remember the shape of the car and it looked like an early 80s honda accord in my mind. That being said, my 2 year old kid can tell what kind of car it is by the symbol on the front.
- rhizome 10y ago
  I have a similar story where I remembered being small and our family having a white landboat, like Ford Galaxie sized, which my mom didn't remember. I thought I dreamed it until I digitized my dad's Super-8 movies and found some frames shot in our front yard where a car just like I remembered was sitting in our driveway. Now, I'm not sure what its provenance was, and my mom still didn't really remember, it could have been a neighbor's car that we borrowed once or I otherwise rode in (my memory was of a hot vinyl rear seat) but I had proof of my memory at last.
kem 10y ago
Don't be so sure that its from something you heard and imagined that you later incorrectly recalled as a memory. You can also have retroactive interference, which is when a real memory gets contaminated by events that happened later. So it's possible you do have a "real" memory of your mom telling your father she was pregnant, but that your brain substituted details from later. Retroactive interference is a very established phenomenon. My guess is a lot of things like what you described are real memories, and people assume they're imagined events recast as memories because they simply don't believe in early memories. I doubt your parents were discussing details like that later, but you'll probably never really know.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  That happened to me. I have a very early memory of a trivial thing (eating a radish and not liking it) from when I about two. It happened at my family's apartment, before we moved into our first house. I later visited that apartment when I was ten, and a lot of the details match my memory(e.g. the location of my Dad's little garden relative to the stairs) EXCEPT the actual visualization of the apartment building, which got replaced with an image of one near our new house twisted to fit the memory.
- flippyhead 10y ago
  In the context of witness testimony, this kind of thing is terrifying!
cyxxon 10y ago
have similar visual memories from a very early age - I remember two (not too specific) scenes from the house I grew up in, when it was being built (no wallpapers, stairs were simple concrete and not yet with handrail etc). The trouble is, we moved into that house when I was ~18 months old, so I "visited" the construction site with what, 16, 17 months of age? It is hard to believe even for me that I remember images from that time, but my parents clearly never "told" me how it looked. I am not sure what to make of these memories myself, but I have them.
vanderZwan 10y ago
A few years ago I went back to the house where I spent the first few years of my life; I had not been there since the age of four. At one point I entered a room and I heard myself say out loud "my sister was born here..." To be clear, my parents had no photos of that room or anything growing up. There were pictures of my baby sister, sure, but they were all too zoomed in to make any sense of the surroundings. I took a photo with my phone and sent it to my parents, and they confirmed that that was the room where my sister was born. I just knew somehow; there was no visual memory but as I walked through the door I instantly had this feeling of seeing my sister for the first time. It was really strange, but then again, it makes sense that a moment like that is pretty impressive.

by extr 10y ago

bluesign 10y ago

Yep 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 ago

It 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
When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew. I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage. Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash. Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real". Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.

cgriswald 10y ago

My earliest memory is from about the same age. I remember looking down from the balcony at the apartment complex where we lived. We moved from that complex before I was three-years-old and I don't remember anything else about it. I brought it up at some point and was told that they ended up putting up chicken wire because I was always trying to look through the iron bars. But I'm fairly certain the memory came first (and I have no memory of the chicken wire).

soperj 10y ago

I have something very similar, but I know that I didn't hear the story from anyone. I would have been under 27 months because my brother wasn't alive. In my early 20's I asked my mother when we had a brown honda, and she replied that we never did. I said I was sure that we did because I remember being in a brown Honda, driving on the highway and that we got a flat tire, and the police came, and that there were Palm trees. The part that didn't make sense is that I thought we were going to Alberta beach(in Alberta) and there are clearly no palm trees there. After talking about it for a while and giving some more details of my memory, we figured out that it was a trip to hawaii that we did before my brother was born and that the brown honda was a rental car.

oh_sigh 10y ago
How would you know the car was a honda at that point?
- soperj 10y ago
  I don't know that I knew that it was a honda at that point, I remember the shape of the car and it looked like an early 80s honda accord in my mind. That being said, my 2 year old kid can tell what kind of car it is by the symbol on the front.
rhizome 10y ago
I have a similar story where I remembered being small and our family having a white landboat, like Ford Galaxie sized, which my mom didn't remember. I thought I dreamed it until I digitized my dad's Super-8 movies and found some frames shot in our front yard where a car just like I remembered was sitting in our driveway. Now, I'm not sure what its provenance was, and my mom still didn't really remember, it could have been a neighbor's car that we borrowed once or I otherwise rode in (my memory was of a hot vinyl rear seat) but I had proof of my memory at last.

kem 10y ago

Don't be so sure that its from something you heard and imagined that you later incorrectly recalled as a memory. You can also have retroactive interference, which is when a real memory gets contaminated by events that happened later. So it's possible you do have a "real" memory of your mom telling your father she was pregnant, but that your brain substituted details from later. Retroactive interference is a very established phenomenon. My guess is a lot of things like what you described are real memories, and people assume they're imagined events recast as memories because they simply don't believe in early memories. I doubt your parents were discussing details like that later, but you'll probably never really know.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
That happened to me. I have a very early memory of a trivial thing (eating a radish and not liking it) from when I about two. It happened at my family's apartment, before we moved into our first house. I later visited that apartment when I was ten, and a lot of the details match my memory(e.g. the location of my Dad's little garden relative to the stairs) EXCEPT the actual visualization of the apartment building, which got replaced with an image of one near our new house twisted to fit the memory.
flippyhead 10y ago
In the context of witness testimony, this kind of thing is terrifying!

cyxxon 10y ago

have similar visual memories from a very early age - I remember two (not too specific) scenes from the house I grew up in, when it was being built (no wallpapers, stairs were simple concrete and not yet with handrail etc). The trouble is, we moved into that house when I was ~18 months old, so I "visited" the construction site with what, 16, 17 months of age? It is hard to believe even for me that I remember images from that time, but my parents clearly never "told" me how it looked. I am not sure what to make of these memories myself, but I have them.

vanderZwan 10y ago

A few years ago I went back to the house where I spent the first few years of my life; I had not been there since the age of four. At one point I entered a room and I heard myself say out loud "my sister was born here..." To be clear, my parents had no photos of that room or anything growing up. There were pictures of my baby sister, sure, but they were all too zoomed in to make any sense of the surroundings. I took a photo with my phone and sent it to my parents, and they confirmed that that was the room where my sister was born. I just knew somehow; there was no visual memory but as I walked through the door I instantly had this feeling of seeing my sister for the first time. It was really strange, but then again, it makes sense that a moment like that is pretty impressive.