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I remember visiting my moms house in my 20s and seeing an old dresser I had as a baby. I immediately had a flash of the feeling of chewing on the drawer handle.

I remember visiting my moms house in my 20s and seeing an old dresser I had as a baby. I immediately had a flash of the feeling of chewing on the drawer handle. My theory is that the memories are there but they just don’t make a lot of sense to us once we start to use language for storage and recall.

tiffanyh 4y ago
Are you sure it’s a memory you formed in first-person, or is it a memory of you seeing a photo of yourself chewing on that drawer?
- bicx 4y ago
  I’ve had similar memories, and remember a specific taste of the furniture.
  - ksaj 4y ago
    Likewise, I think most people remember the taste of crayons. Yet, when was the last time you actually tasted one?
- mod 4y ago
  I have a memory of falling off a dock when I was 3 while fishing. I think half the memory might be imagined, which is while I was underwater. I remember it being green and seeing fish nearby, which seems a little unlikely to adult me (I would scare the fish away presumably). The rest of my memory is being rescued. I'm relatively certain it's a real memory, because I can describe to you what it feels like to have your entire body weight pulling against your scalp, as my dad lifted me out by a handful of hair onto the dock. It was not painful, as you might imagine. It was rather nice.
magicalhippo 4y ago
I recall reading about a paper where they ran a test on kids just as they had started to learn language, and again a year later after they had learned a lot more. They did a vocabulary test and played a game. A year later they did another vocabulary test and memory recall challenge. They found that for the kids that remembered the game they played, if they didn't know the word for something at that point, they wouldn't use that word when recalling, even if they had subsequently learned that word in the meantime between tests. Their conclusion was that memories were closely linked to the vocabulary the kids knew at the time the memory formed. Been trying to find it again to no avail, sadly.
- xeromal 4y ago
  That is so interesting. It's almost like learning a word is a snapshot of the entire brain.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    More like an index, in a database sense. You have the record, but for it to be accessible by a newer index you need to rebuild it from scratch.
sva_ 4y ago
I have this vivid memory of listening to a conversation between my parents, and they said something (I don't remember what) was going to happen on "Saturday". I did not know what "Saturday" means, so I tried to ask them about it. They could not understand my question though. I sometimes wonder about this memory, if perhaps I was at an age where I could understand some, but not speak. Pretty weird.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tiffanyh 4y ago

Are you sure it’s a memory you formed in first-person, or is it a memory of you seeing a photo of yourself chewing on that drawer?

bicx 4y ago
I’ve had similar memories, and remember a specific taste of the furniture.
- ksaj 4y ago
  Likewise, I think most people remember the taste of crayons. Yet, when was the last time you actually tasted one?
mod 4y ago
I have a memory of falling off a dock when I was 3 while fishing. I think half the memory might be imagined, which is while I was underwater. I remember it being green and seeing fish nearby, which seems a little unlikely to adult me (I would scare the fish away presumably). The rest of my memory is being rescued. I'm relatively certain it's a real memory, because I can describe to you what it feels like to have your entire body weight pulling against your scalp, as my dad lifted me out by a handful of hair onto the dock. It was not painful, as you might imagine. It was rather nice.

magicalhippo 4y ago

I recall reading about a paper where they ran a test on kids just as they had started to learn language, and again a year later after they had learned a lot more. They did a vocabulary test and played a game. A year later they did another vocabulary test and memory recall challenge. They found that for the kids that remembered the game they played, if they didn't know the word for something at that point, they wouldn't use that word when recalling, even if they had subsequently learned that word in the meantime between tests. Their conclusion was that memories were closely linked to the vocabulary the kids knew at the time the memory formed. Been trying to find it again to no avail, sadly.

xeromal 4y ago
That is so interesting. It's almost like learning a word is a snapshot of the entire brain.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  More like an index, in a database sense. You have the record, but for it to be accessible by a newer index you need to rebuild it from scratch.

sva_ 4y ago

I have this vivid memory of listening to a conversation between my parents, and they said something (I don't remember what) was going to happen on "Saturday". I did not know what "Saturday" means, so I tried to ask them about it. They could not understand my question though. I sometimes wonder about this memory, if perhaps I was at an age where I could understand some, but not speak. Pretty weird.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]