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That a 16-year old remembers such detail about age 3 seems… unusual. I don’t mean a memory here or there; this child remembers very specific experiences and the

That a 16-year old remembers such detail about age 3 seems… unusual. I don’t mean a memory here or there; this child remembers very specific experiences and the feelings he had about them when he was almost pre-verbal. Seems almost incredible.

smcameron 5y ago
I remember things from when I was that age (not a lot, but a more than most people for sure. And I'm in my 50's) I think it varies from person to person. My brother remembers nothing from that age.
nostrademons 5y ago
There's probably some genetic switch flipped or something. I can remember back to age 9 months. I tried writing out all my early-childhood memories (< age 5 years) once when I was in college and got to about 10 screenfuls worth (encompassing only up to age 3), at which point I got bored and figured I'd just post what I had to LJ. My sister has similar, though not quite as vivid, recollections. I'd heard all my friends saying they basically couldn't remember anything before age 10, and I thought "bullshit", but apparently they're the ones who are normal and I'm the one who's a psychological oddity. I have one therapist friend who said that early memories are a sign of trauma, but then I've also had therapists that say early memories are a sign of giftedness. Maybe these are one and the same, and developing consciousness and memory too early is its own form of trauma. It's been fascinating to watch long-term memory develop in my son, though. When he was about 20 months old, we went on a walk by a house in the neighborhood that had a half-eaten pizza box strewn across its yard. We went back two weeks later, and he asked "Where's the pizza?" I was like "What pizza?" until I remembered what it had looked like a couple weeks before, and was like "It got cleaned up. How did you remember there was a pizza there?"
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I'd heard all my friends saying they basically couldn't remember anything before age 10, and I thought "bullshit", but apparently they're the ones who are normal and I'm the one who's a psychological oddity. That doesn't seem normal, either. I mean, they couldn't even remember a friend they had from first grade? Maybe they weren't prompted adequately.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    Likely. When we first started dating, my wife said she couldn't remember anything before she was 10 (interestingly, this also included childhood friends), but after a few years of marriage I've definitely heard memories going back to age 3 or so. I suspect there's another cognitive difference at work here too, where my wife says she doesn't bother remembering things unless she thinks they'll be useful later, while I tend to store all sorts of random events and facts and figure I'll just sort through them later. As a result all of her early memories have to be "cued" (specifically asked about, or recalled in relation to some other similar situation that came to mind), while I could tell you about the time I got dropped off at a babysitter's house age 9 months or the pony ride I had for my 3rd birthday or how I'd go with my dad to the Veryfine juice factory in Littleton MA to pick up cases of juice bottles for my lunch.
    - hliyan 5y ago
      Agreed. What I think most people mean is that they can't recall events from those ages at will. Neither can I, but certain triggers can bring back a handful of vivid memories of events from when I was between 3-4 years old. For example seeing a house with the same architectural style as the one I grew up in.
      - pantalaimon 5y ago
        Reading this thread brings back memories from early childhood too, I just came up with several memories from kindergarten of which I haven't thought in years.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    It’s not unusual for adults to have quite poor recall of situations or events prior to age 10. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia
    - odiroot 5y ago
      I can remember quite well my first years, including Kindergarten but it's very very hard for me to remember my primary school and to some extent the secondary school periods. I wonder, whether it's still the same phenomenon, or just that that period was relatively boring and unremarkable to my brain.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ncmncm 5y ago
At that age I swore I would remember certain things into adulthood so I could tell somebody. 1. It is too hot. It is always too hot. Don't wrap me up so I can't get cool. 2. Fingernails shouldn't be used on scalps. 3. You aren't leaving now. Don't say you're leaving now when you will not leave for another half hour.
xwolfi 5y ago
Yeah it sounds weird, I lost most memory pre-6, except rare shocking events (the first time I met twins when I was 4, the first time my sister ate wallpaper when I was 3, when the cat died when I was 3 and my mom explained me what death was, things like that that I remember quite vividly but with no pre/post context)
tablespoon 5y ago
> That a 16-year old remembers such detail about age 3 seems… unusual. I don’t mean a memory here or there; this child remembers very specific experiences and the feelings he had about them when he was almost pre-verbal. Even today, I remember one "crazy conclusion" like the article talks about from I was very small (probably around 3). We lived near a river, which I inferred must be circular (like an ouroboros), because otherwise it would drain away. For some reason I can't exactly recall, I thought the town across the river was on the island this would form, and the town I lived in was along the outside edge. This of course meant that you could go to the center of the other town, but not to the center of our town. I also have memories that were certainly from before I was 2 1/2 (my family moved then, so they stuck with me because that made them distinct). One of these memories is obviously real, but got "patched up" with some peripheral details from a little later in life. The memory was set outside at the bottom of the stairs of the apartment where my parents lived when I was born, the peripheral details of the design of those stairs and the setting beyond my immediate vicinity got replaced with those of different apartment building near our new house). I only realized this when I was 10, and we visited the town where I was born and went back to that apartment building. Also, none of these memories were traumatic in the slightest. They were just little forgettable things to an adult that were new and unusual to me as a toddler.
erik_landerholm 5y ago
I felt the same way. I never buy it when people say they remember anything when they were two. I have 5 kids, one is only 2, but none of the other 4 remember anything from when they were two. I guess people can be different but I have a hard time believing it.
- mongol 5y ago
  I remember how a ladybug tasted because I crushed one with my finger and put it in my mouth. Don't know the exact age but I were as old as children are when they do those things.
  - posterboy 5y ago
    I guess your memory would describe it approximately as "not great", unless it had either been cause for panic, or an unreasonable desire for more of that polkadotted hotbod.
    - mongol 5y ago
      My memory is that it tasted awfully bitter.
- quantumsequoia 5y ago
  I'm 25 now and I have memories from when I was 2. I think it just varies from person to person
pram 5y ago
I buy the explanation that it’s trauma. When I was an infant I had a lot of surreal hallucinations, and I have many early memories because of that. It was like my brain was mixing dream imagery into my waking vision. Definitely some kind of mental illness, but it went away eventually! ;P
- pjerem 5y ago
  What are you writing on ? What is this Hacker News thing ?
plank_time 5y ago
He doesn’t. He remembers his mom telling him about the incident and it has morphed into him thinking he remembers it. My kid swears he remembers this one incident that my wife and I joke about, but what he remembers is the video of it. You physically don’t have the brain cells for long term memories until around age 5 which is why most childhood memories start around there.
- philipswood 5y ago
  Interested in the source for the "You physically don't have the brain cells for long term memories until around age 5" to go look at. I have some recall of a few, vivid, subjective, first person, "umwelt"-style memories of events that I can date to before I was five. These feel very different to my normal "episodic" memories. Having spoken to my dad about the same subject before, he has some that he can place to about age 2 or 3. I'm not arguing your point; granted, memory is reconstructive imaging from some engram and not a replay of some recording and I'm super convinced that our brains and mind go through several developmental stages that function quite differently. I also find it super interesting that people with hyperthymesia usually have a perfect recall start date a bit after age 10.
- karlshea 5y ago
  Well I have very specific memories from ages 3-5 and they couldn’t have been from someone telling me about it, so that can’t be right.
  - ScottBurson 5y ago
    They may not be from someone telling you about it, but what you're remembering is mostly the previous occasions of recalling it. The original impression would be gone if it hadn't been occasionally reinforced by reconstructing it.
    - karlshea 5y ago
      But that’s how all long term memory works, I don’t see what age 5 has to do with anything.
TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
It’s not unusual for adults to have good recall from about two years old onwards: Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories (memories of situations or events) before the age of two to four years, as well as the period before the age of ten of which some older adults retain fewer memories than might otherwise be expected given the passage of time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia
spoonjim 5y ago
A 3 year old can remember something at 16 if they regularly recall it. It gets refreshed like DRAM. I do this with my kids for special memories. They can remember everything they did at LEGOLAND the day after. So I have them tell me about it, regularly, and they remember it permanently.
- brutus1213 5y ago
  Want to echo this. I think we are remembering our remembering. There is bonafide scientific research on this. There was a Microsoft Research Cambridge project called SenseCam .. I think the first paper was helping a woman with memory loss. She was really remembering her memory of recalling a moment. When I encountered that research, I reflected on my own childhood memories and concluded that this DRAM mechanism is what is going on for me. On an alternate note, I'm in my 40s now and I hardly remember anything. I have two little kids and am often shocked when I see pictures from a year or two ago (can't remember when they were that young). A few other tech friends have suggested things are similar with them. I am constantly having to learn new stuff in my line of work (AI) ... stuff from 2017 is often referred to as "old". I'm a bit worried my memory capacity is finite and starting to overwrite on itself (sort of like a fake SD card that overwrites content or the Johnny Mnemonic movie)
- chriskanan 5y ago
  Spaced repetition is a technique for exploiting psychology's spacing effect for getting information to be stored longer [1]. That is (roughly) a memory needs to be recalled to be retained and the optimal time to do that recall is just before forgetting the material. This is implemented by Anki, which I loved using throughout my PhD and a few years afterwards with 20K+ flash cards on AI, math, and neuroscience. I started skipping doing it every day after becoming a professor, but I wish I had the time to pick it back up. Also, memories become plastic and maleable when recalled, so just because they can recall something does not mean the memory hasn't been twisted by doing so [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation (see section on reconsolidation)
viztor 5y ago
I actually remember a lot of things from age 3, less now, but likely more in details when I was sixteen. I got thrown over the shoulder out of nowhere while we are hanging out in the playground the first year I was in kindergarten (3 yo), then I was vomiting up blood, it wasn't entirely fluid with some kind of jelly texture, which clearly scared the kid and he ran away, I don't know that kid and I don't remember his face, but I remember the experience, the playground, the sun, there were two kids who'd come over and one of them throw me over his shoulder. I also remember when we went to the aquarium with my parents, where they had this stuffed dolphin and we bought it. Of course there are a lot more that I don't remember, but I'm aware of those things that I do. When I think about it is that the difference is when you ruminate over those things, it becomes a continuous experience. For the kindergarten incident, I was curious about the thickness of the blood, and I was thinking a lot why was it solid. And for the toy dolphin, every-time I was playing with it, I remember where we get it. A side note: my mother majored in education, so she actually talks about Childhood Amnesia, which other's have mentioned, to other parents or teachers mostly. She told it that kid don't remember anything before five. So when I tell her things about the experience of my younger self when I was well in to primary school, she was perplexed. Also: while I'm actively thinking about it, those memories came flooding in, and though I'm not going to put them here, I think it gives a valid point that yes one can remember at the age of three.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ggeorgovassilis 5y ago
I have (verified) memories from age 2. It took me a while to get used to most people not having memories from that early.
aaron695 5y ago
Normal theory is you don't remember anything before 3 years old. You will only have memories of memories before three. Given his belief seem to go to after 3 years it just fits with the current theory. Pop Science article - https://www.zmescience.com/research/why-we-cant-remember-before-age-3-05435/ https://www.zmescience.com/research/why-we-cant-remember-bef...
bambax 5y ago
Memory exists from the start of life. You can train an infant to recognize a signal (a sound, a light for instance) and associate it with a pleasant or unpleasant experience. The reason we don't have memories from our first months of life is because, it seems, when we learn to speak the previous experiences become somehow inaccessible to our cognition (but they're still there). It doesn't seem impossible that people who learn to speak early have more early memories. But of course, there is always the possibility that the memories are those of the adults who repeated them so frequently that the children began to treat them as their own.
- ben_w 5y ago
  > You can train an infant to recognize a signal (a sound, a light for instance) and associate it with a pleasant or unpleasant experience. And pre-birth, baby cries have distinct accents: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/babies-already-have-an-accent-09-11-06/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/babies-al... But there’s more than one type of memory, and learned associations are not the same as episodic memory.
odiroot 5y ago
I wish I had such "useful" memories. I just vividly remember having my diapers changed (before the modern "panty-style" ones) and really disliking it. The material had very rough surface (to a child), probably due to bleaching many times.
dopidopHN 5y ago
Yeah. I’m always skeptical of those memory. Often; in my case; I feel it’s me remembering that I did remember something like that. Or full on familly tradition about that thing you said or did. « Remember? »
wyldfire 5y ago
The child in the article seems especially unique in several ways.

smcameron 5y ago

I remember things from when I was that age (not a lot, but a more than most people for sure. And I'm in my 50's) I think it varies from person to person. My brother remembers nothing from that age.

nostrademons 5y ago

There's probably some genetic switch flipped or something. I can remember back to age 9 months. I tried writing out all my early-childhood memories (< age 5 years) once when I was in college and got to about 10 screenfuls worth (encompassing only up to age 3), at which point I got bored and figured I'd just post what I had to LJ. My sister has similar, though not quite as vivid, recollections. I'd heard all my friends saying they basically couldn't remember anything before age 10, and I thought "bullshit", but apparently they're the ones who are normal and I'm the one who's a psychological oddity. I have one therapist friend who said that early memories are a sign of trauma, but then I've also had therapists that say early memories are a sign of giftedness. Maybe these are one and the same, and developing consciousness and memory too early is its own form of trauma. It's been fascinating to watch long-term memory develop in my son, though. When he was about 20 months old, we went on a walk by a house in the neighborhood that had a half-eaten pizza box strewn across its yard. We went back two weeks later, and he asked "Where's the pizza?" I was like "What pizza?" until I remembered what it had looked like a couple weeks before, and was like "It got cleaned up. How did you remember there was a pizza there?"

tablespoon 5y ago
> I'd heard all my friends saying they basically couldn't remember anything before age 10, and I thought "bullshit", but apparently they're the ones who are normal and I'm the one who's a psychological oddity. That doesn't seem normal, either. I mean, they couldn't even remember a friend they had from first grade? Maybe they weren't prompted adequately.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Likely. When we first started dating, my wife said she couldn't remember anything before she was 10 (interestingly, this also included childhood friends), but after a few years of marriage I've definitely heard memories going back to age 3 or so. I suspect there's another cognitive difference at work here too, where my wife says she doesn't bother remembering things unless she thinks they'll be useful later, while I tend to store all sorts of random events and facts and figure I'll just sort through them later. As a result all of her early memories have to be "cued" (specifically asked about, or recalled in relation to some other similar situation that came to mind), while I could tell you about the time I got dropped off at a babysitter's house age 9 months or the pony ride I had for my 3rd birthday or how I'd go with my dad to the Veryfine juice factory in Littleton MA to pick up cases of juice bottles for my lunch.
  - hliyan 5y ago
    Agreed. What I think most people mean is that they can't recall events from those ages at will. Neither can I, but certain triggers can bring back a handful of vivid memories of events from when I was between 3-4 years old. For example seeing a house with the same architectural style as the one I grew up in.
    - pantalaimon 5y ago
      Reading this thread brings back memories from early childhood too, I just came up with several memories from kindergarten of which I haven't thought in years.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  It’s not unusual for adults to have quite poor recall of situations or events prior to age 10. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia
  - odiroot 5y ago
    I can remember quite well my first years, including Kindergarten but it's very very hard for me to remember my primary school and to some extent the secondary school periods. I wonder, whether it's still the same phenomenon, or just that that period was relatively boring and unremarkable to my brain.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ncmncm 5y ago

At that age I swore I would remember certain things into adulthood so I could tell somebody. 1. It is too hot. It is always too hot. Don't wrap me up so I can't get cool. 2. Fingernails shouldn't be used on scalps. 3. You aren't leaving now. Don't say you're leaving now when you will not leave for another half hour.

xwolfi 5y ago

Yeah it sounds weird, I lost most memory pre-6, except rare shocking events (the first time I met twins when I was 4, the first time my sister ate wallpaper when I was 3, when the cat died when I was 3 and my mom explained me what death was, things like that that I remember quite vividly but with no pre/post context)

tablespoon 5y ago

> That a 16-year old remembers such detail about age 3 seems… unusual. I don’t mean a memory here or there; this child remembers very specific experiences and the feelings he had about them when he was almost pre-verbal. Even today, I remember one "crazy conclusion" like the article talks about from I was very small (probably around 3). We lived near a river, which I inferred must be circular (like an ouroboros), because otherwise it would drain away. For some reason I can't exactly recall, I thought the town across the river was on the island this would form, and the town I lived in was along the outside edge. This of course meant that you could go to the center of the other town, but not to the center of our town. I also have memories that were certainly from before I was 2 1/2 (my family moved then, so they stuck with me because that made them distinct). One of these memories is obviously real, but got "patched up" with some peripheral details from a little later in life. The memory was set outside at the bottom of the stairs of the apartment where my parents lived when I was born, the peripheral details of the design of those stairs and the setting beyond my immediate vicinity got replaced with those of different apartment building near our new house). I only realized this when I was 10, and we visited the town where I was born and went back to that apartment building. Also, none of these memories were traumatic in the slightest. They were just little forgettable things to an adult that were new and unusual to me as a toddler.

erik_landerholm 5y ago

I felt the same way. I never buy it when people say they remember anything when they were two. I have 5 kids, one is only 2, but none of the other 4 remember anything from when they were two. I guess people can be different but I have a hard time believing it.

mongol 5y ago
I remember how a ladybug tasted because I crushed one with my finger and put it in my mouth. Don't know the exact age but I were as old as children are when they do those things.
- posterboy 5y ago
  I guess your memory would describe it approximately as "not great", unless it had either been cause for panic, or an unreasonable desire for more of that polkadotted hotbod.
  - mongol 5y ago
    My memory is that it tasted awfully bitter.
quantumsequoia 5y ago
I'm 25 now and I have memories from when I was 2. I think it just varies from person to person

pram 5y ago

I buy the explanation that it’s trauma. When I was an infant I had a lot of surreal hallucinations, and I have many early memories because of that. It was like my brain was mixing dream imagery into my waking vision. Definitely some kind of mental illness, but it went away eventually! ;P

pjerem 5y ago
What are you writing on ? What is this Hacker News thing ?

plank_time 5y ago

He doesn’t. He remembers his mom telling him about the incident and it has morphed into him thinking he remembers it. My kid swears he remembers this one incident that my wife and I joke about, but what he remembers is the video of it. You physically don’t have the brain cells for long term memories until around age 5 which is why most childhood memories start around there.

philipswood 5y ago
Interested in the source for the "You physically don't have the brain cells for long term memories until around age 5" to go look at. I have some recall of a few, vivid, subjective, first person, "umwelt"-style memories of events that I can date to before I was five. These feel very different to my normal "episodic" memories. Having spoken to my dad about the same subject before, he has some that he can place to about age 2 or 3. I'm not arguing your point; granted, memory is reconstructive imaging from some engram and not a replay of some recording and I'm super convinced that our brains and mind go through several developmental stages that function quite differently. I also find it super interesting that people with hyperthymesia usually have a perfect recall start date a bit after age 10.
karlshea 5y ago
Well I have very specific memories from ages 3-5 and they couldn’t have been from someone telling me about it, so that can’t be right.
- ScottBurson 5y ago
  They may not be from someone telling you about it, but what you're remembering is mostly the previous occasions of recalling it. The original impression would be gone if it hadn't been occasionally reinforced by reconstructing it.
  - karlshea 5y ago
    But that’s how all long term memory works, I don’t see what age 5 has to do with anything.

TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago

It’s not unusual for adults to have good recall from about two years old onwards: Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories (memories of situations or events) before the age of two to four years, as well as the period before the age of ten of which some older adults retain fewer memories than might otherwise be expected given the passage of time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia

spoonjim 5y ago

A 3 year old can remember something at 16 if they regularly recall it. It gets refreshed like DRAM. I do this with my kids for special memories. They can remember everything they did at LEGOLAND the day after. So I have them tell me about it, regularly, and they remember it permanently.

brutus1213 5y ago
Want to echo this. I think we are remembering our remembering. There is bonafide scientific research on this. There was a Microsoft Research Cambridge project called SenseCam .. I think the first paper was helping a woman with memory loss. She was really remembering her memory of recalling a moment. When I encountered that research, I reflected on my own childhood memories and concluded that this DRAM mechanism is what is going on for me. On an alternate note, I'm in my 40s now and I hardly remember anything. I have two little kids and am often shocked when I see pictures from a year or two ago (can't remember when they were that young). A few other tech friends have suggested things are similar with them. I am constantly having to learn new stuff in my line of work (AI) ... stuff from 2017 is often referred to as "old". I'm a bit worried my memory capacity is finite and starting to overwrite on itself (sort of like a fake SD card that overwrites content or the Johnny Mnemonic movie)
chriskanan 5y ago
Spaced repetition is a technique for exploiting psychology's spacing effect for getting information to be stored longer [1]. That is (roughly) a memory needs to be recalled to be retained and the optimal time to do that recall is just before forgetting the material. This is implemented by Anki, which I loved using throughout my PhD and a few years afterwards with 20K+ flash cards on AI, math, and neuroscience. I started skipping doing it every day after becoming a professor, but I wish I had the time to pick it back up. Also, memories become plastic and maleable when recalled, so just because they can recall something does not mean the memory hasn't been twisted by doing so [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation (see section on reconsolidation)

viztor 5y ago

I actually remember a lot of things from age 3, less now, but likely more in details when I was sixteen. I got thrown over the shoulder out of nowhere while we are hanging out in the playground the first year I was in kindergarten (3 yo), then I was vomiting up blood, it wasn't entirely fluid with some kind of jelly texture, which clearly scared the kid and he ran away, I don't know that kid and I don't remember his face, but I remember the experience, the playground, the sun, there were two kids who'd come over and one of them throw me over his shoulder. I also remember when we went to the aquarium with my parents, where they had this stuffed dolphin and we bought it. Of course there are a lot more that I don't remember, but I'm aware of those things that I do. When I think about it is that the difference is when you ruminate over those things, it becomes a continuous experience. For the kindergarten incident, I was curious about the thickness of the blood, and I was thinking a lot why was it solid. And for the toy dolphin, every-time I was playing with it, I remember where we get it. A side note: my mother majored in education, so she actually talks about Childhood Amnesia, which other's have mentioned, to other parents or teachers mostly. She told it that kid don't remember anything before five. So when I tell her things about the experience of my younger self when I was well in to primary school, she was perplexed. Also: while I'm actively thinking about it, those memories came flooding in, and though I'm not going to put them here, I think it gives a valid point that yes one can remember at the age of three.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ggeorgovassilis 5y ago

I have (verified) memories from age 2. It took me a while to get used to most people not having memories from that early.

aaron695 5y ago

Normal theory is you don't remember anything before 3 years old. You will only have memories of memories before three. Given his belief seem to go to after 3 years it just fits with the current theory. Pop Science article - https://www.zmescience.com/research/why-we-cant-remember-before-age-3-05435/ https://www.zmescience.com/research/why-we-cant-remember-bef...

bambax 5y ago

Memory exists from the start of life. You can train an infant to recognize a signal (a sound, a light for instance) and associate it with a pleasant or unpleasant experience. The reason we don't have memories from our first months of life is because, it seems, when we learn to speak the previous experiences become somehow inaccessible to our cognition (but they're still there). It doesn't seem impossible that people who learn to speak early have more early memories. But of course, there is always the possibility that the memories are those of the adults who repeated them so frequently that the children began to treat them as their own.

ben_w 5y ago
> You can train an infant to recognize a signal (a sound, a light for instance) and associate it with a pleasant or unpleasant experience. And pre-birth, baby cries have distinct accents: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/babies-already-have-an-accent-09-11-06/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/babies-al... But there’s more than one type of memory, and learned associations are not the same as episodic memory.

odiroot 5y ago

I wish I had such "useful" memories. I just vividly remember having my diapers changed (before the modern "panty-style" ones) and really disliking it. The material had very rough surface (to a child), probably due to bleaching many times.

dopidopHN 5y ago

Yeah. I’m always skeptical of those memory. Often; in my case; I feel it’s me remembering that I did remember something like that. Or full on familly tradition about that thing you said or did. « Remember? »

wyldfire 5y ago

The child in the article seems especially unique in several ways.