5 ms·

I have snapshot memories from before the age of 1 that I can certifiably say aren't false (no photographic evidence, no external testimony, being able to recoll

by Bayart 2y ago

I have snapshot memories from before the age of 1 that I can certifiably say aren't false (no photographic evidence, no external testimony, being able to recollect them regularly since infancy) and that can be pinpointed to that time due to specific details. They become a continuous stream around age 2 and everything around age 3 starts being as clear as anything else. In any case I've always found it interesting to have such a big delta with the people around me but not particularly significant until I seriously structured my introspection and got into cognitive behavioural therapy. With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience with extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't register as meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about that period. For example I've come to realize that as a toddler I was very aware of my surroundings, of myself, I had an overwhelming feeling of boredom and probably needed far more stimulation than kids that age ; hence behavioural patterns during adulthood that I previously couldn't explain.

pmontra 2y ago
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.
- thenthenthen 2y ago
  Before 1 is kinda absent, but from 2 I can remember factual stuff pretty clearly (dramatic events, fun and less).
- helboi4 2y ago
  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.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    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.
    - Gormo 2y ago
      > 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.
    - Bayart 2y ago
      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.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  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.
rolph 2y ago
have you ever had the experience of discovering evidence of your past activities, and remembering what you forgot you remembered? example , peeling away a chip or two of a bad paint job on the closet wall, to discover, its covering a big scribble,.,. memories then smash the floodgates, and you vividly recall , marker in hand, self in awe, at the ^majic^ marker how it makes lines so readily.
Gormo 2y ago
> They become a continuous stream around age 2 and everything around age 3 starts being as clear as anything else. I'm pretty much exactly the same, with the same age thresholds. I remember every detail of the house my family moved out of a couple of months after my fourth birthday, including detailed memories of events that took place there during the two years prior. I think a big factor might have been learning to read at around the age of two, possibly creating deep and regularly reinforced mnemonic links to my audiovisual recall. > With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience with extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't register as meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about that period. Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves?
- Bayart 2y ago
  > I think a big factor might have been learning to read at around the age of two, possibly creating deep and regularly reinforced mnemonic links to my audiovisual recall. That's very possible. Although it wouldn't explain much regarding me. I don't come from an educated family, my parents had me very young, they didn't know how to take care of children and for the most part left me to my own devices. I didn't learn any reading besides the letters of my own name before the age of 5. > Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves? To be clear I wasn't specifically looking for this. At that time I had the general feeling that there was something that existed in my life, something I could feel the shape of, large but hidden behind a veil. Something that was in front of my eyes but that my conscious mind avoided. And I knew it was strongly linked with stuff I was trying to unravel in therapy. I was intent on getting to the bottom of it but kept bumping into an invisible wall. So, one day, I just had the impulse to go on a deep and long DMT trip while being obsessed with that stuff in the background. Trying to follow the thread of what bothered me it brought me back to that moment in my life where my identity was still being formed. What's interesting, from what I can tell, is that the sensory content of the memory is unchanged. But what I got access to is the emotional and intellectual state I was in at the time which, in conjunction with my fully developed brain, made me able to understand a self that wasn't then able to understand itself. The way I see it, psychedelics are basically WD40 for the brain.

by Bayart 2y ago

pmontra 2y ago

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.

thenthenthen 2y ago
Before 1 is kinda absent, but from 2 I can remember factual stuff pretty clearly (dramatic events, fun and less).
helboi4 2y ago
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.
- danielbln 2y ago
  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.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    > 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.
  - Bayart 2y ago
    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.
mihaaly 2y ago
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.

rolph 2y ago

have you ever had the experience of discovering evidence of your past activities, and remembering what you forgot you remembered? example , peeling away a chip or two of a bad paint job on the closet wall, to discover, its covering a big scribble,.,. memories then smash the floodgates, and you vividly recall , marker in hand, self in awe, at the ^majic^ marker how it makes lines so readily.

Gormo 2y ago

> They become a continuous stream around age 2 and everything around age 3 starts being as clear as anything else. I'm pretty much exactly the same, with the same age thresholds. I remember every detail of the house my family moved out of a couple of months after my fourth birthday, including detailed memories of events that took place there during the two years prior. I think a big factor might have been learning to read at around the age of two, possibly creating deep and regularly reinforced mnemonic links to my audiovisual recall. > With the aid of psychedelics I've managed to re-experience with extreme clarity events that I remembered but didn't register as meaningful and gleaned a new understanding about that period. Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves?

Bayart 2y ago
> I think a big factor might have been learning to read at around the age of two, possibly creating deep and regularly reinforced mnemonic links to my audiovisual recall. That's very possible. Although it wouldn't explain much regarding me. I don't come from an educated family, my parents had me very young, they didn't know how to take care of children and for the most part left me to my own devices. I didn't learn any reading besides the letters of my own name before the age of 5. > Out of curiosity, what did you specifically do to trigger these "re-experiences"? Do you think doing this might have altered the sensory memories of your early experiences themselves? To be clear I wasn't specifically looking for this. At that time I had the general feeling that there was something that existed in my life, something I could feel the shape of, large but hidden behind a veil. Something that was in front of my eyes but that my conscious mind avoided. And I knew it was strongly linked with stuff I was trying to unravel in therapy. I was intent on getting to the bottom of it but kept bumping into an invisible wall. So, one day, I just had the impulse to go on a deep and long DMT trip while being obsessed with that stuff in the background. Trying to follow the thread of what bothered me it brought me back to that moment in my life where my identity was still being formed. What's interesting, from what I can tell, is that the sensory content of the memory is unchanged. But what I got access to is the emotional and intellectual state I was in at the time which, in conjunction with my fully developed brain, made me able to understand a self that wasn't then able to understand itself. The way I see it, psychedelics are basically WD40 for the brain.