5 ms·

>And, people just can't or won't believe me. It seems to me that not believing you is the right thing to do. Childhood amnesia is well-studied; false memories

by tedks 13y ago

>And, people just can't or won't believe me. It seems to me that not believing you is the right thing to do. Childhood amnesia is well-studied; false memories are equally well-studied and are easily formed; since the former is more probable than an exception to the latter, unless you have additional evidence (which you can't really produce), I have no reason to believe your claims. It's more probable that you reconstructed those memories from stories told by other people, even if you forgot hearing those stories before remembering the event, than that you're an exception to a well-studied and widely documented event. Cognitive psychology is hardly psuedo-science, and in this instance, there were no polls conducted. This was a longitudinal study that took considerable resources to conduct and involved a seemingly well-designed experimental test. The findings are entirely in line with what the rest of the data in the field suggests, so it shouldn't be controversial. There were no polls involved, either. It's frustrating to believe something that contradicts most available evidence, and it must be even more frustrating to not have a way to demonstrate the truth of such a belief. You'll notice that even this article doesn't claim that all memory prior to age 7 is irretrievably erased, and it's fully possible you truly have the memories you have -- but it's nonetheless improbable, and it isn't wrong to disbelieve you.

crygin 13y ago
Seriously. It's pretty funny to see a community that normally goes straight for the jugular on dismissing personal experience in favor of demands for data completely abandon that when it's /their/ personal experience being questioned (and, in this case, it's one of the few that we actually have great science on).
- downer86 13y ago
  It's pretty funny to see one person claim dominion and authority over another person's inner state. We have as much proof that his memories are false as he might that they are true. The only position one can rightfully claim in this situation is agnostic skepticism. There is no certainty that his memories are false. After all, the primary form of evidence for any given memory is the verbal recounting of detailed information. Without language, there aren't many ways to externalize a memory. Whether one is describing the experience of a memory, or reciting a coached, scripted tale ...if all the facts are correct what hope is there of disproving a dyed-in-the-wool memory? Case in point: The drunkest I ever got was during a drinking game in college. I was black-out drunk. My memories are truncated about halfway through act one, and the next thing I honestly remember is waking up to the stench of my own vomit covered bed in my dorm room, but such an adventure it was for my roommates, and such a bardic tale it was for them to recount, over and over again, ad nauseum, that now, I too, can recite the tale, moment by moment from when I blacked out until I woke up. But, to the outsider, my recall seems accurate, and is vigorously affirmed by my roommates, and based on my ability to tell the story, a listener has no honest means of determining whether I was too drunk to remember or not. So, while I buy into the mechanisms for how OP's claims to memories could be false in that he is perhaps only remembering the plot of the story, and not the experience itself, I'm still open to believing OP's claim to certain vivid memories. I don't think childhood amnesia is a bottomless black pit from which nothing ever returns. Very obviously, certain aspects of learning must survive, and I think the keystones of our emotional development are indelible. Early traumatic experiences stay with people for very long periods of time. Being bullied, humiliation, loss of a pet. Those are foundational learning experiences. The detail of the bulk of our day-to-day experiences may get lost, but set pieces, scenes that perfectly encapsulate a profound learning experience are different from the tangential recall of banal routine. I think animals are wired to retain certain types of experiences, even from very young ages. The phenomenon of memory is not necessarily constrained by hard statistical numbers. At least that is my opinion. I'd offer up similar evidence of my own experiences, although I'm sure they'd be readily dismissed as subjective and unsubstantiated.
  - crygin 13y ago
    > It's pretty funny to see one person claim dominion and authority over another person's inner state. Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large. In a perfect world, I'd expect each and every person who responded in a noncritical way to this post to respond similarly to future posts (if they're still active on HN) in which they're not the discouraged party. But... I think we all know the odds of that happening.
    - tedks 13y ago
      >Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large. I hadn't even noticed this irony! Thanks for pointing it out. It's pretty hilarious.
  - onetwofiveten 13y ago
    "We have as much proof that his memories are false as he might that they are true." This isn't really how evaluating evidence works is it? Suppose I told you that I have a magic flying carpet but I am unable to let you see ever it. You have as much evidence that I am lying as that I am telling the truth. It is still very likely that I am lying, because of all the other data you have available on the plausibility of magic flying carpets.
jasonzemos 13y ago
> it's nonetheless improbable, and it isn't wrong to disbelieve you. Is this the right assumption about the meaning of "improbable" in the context of this data and category of studies? One way we could interpret improbable is the way David Hume does in the "Of miracles" chapter of his 1748 treatise: that is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely not the case. The other way would be that the parent post either himself, or the memory to which he is referring is simply an outlier -- that is, a lottery winner of people or memories simply not clustered around the mean of being lost to this amnesia phenomenon. In the case of the former, I would totally agree with the conclusions of your comment and the professor cited in the parent. In the case of the latter I think it merely points out that we're applying the wrong kind of skepticism over these claims. Somebody always, eventually wins the lottery. I think this is a valid distinction that can be made, and if so, doesn't hold us to discounting anecdotes as summarily false.
- onetwofiveten 13y ago
  I think here 'improbable' means 'unlikely' and 'disbelieve' means 'not believe true' rather than 'strongly believe false'.
logicchains 13y ago
"Children aged 5, 6, and 7 remembered 60% or more of the early-life events. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 years remembered fewer than 40% of the early-life events". It is wrong to disbelieve him without knowing the standard deviation of the results. 40% is an average! For all we know (I can't check, as I don't have access to the original paper), there could have been two kids who had 90% recall and eight kids who had less than 40% recall. Knowing the standard deviation (and the nature of the distribution of results, whether it's a bell curve or whatever), would allow us to determine the probability of somebody having 90% recall post-childhood amnesia. Even if that probability was only 1/100, considering more than 100 people frequent this site it's expected that a few of them would have said 90% recall.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Even if the deviation were zero, 40% recall (or 20%, or 2%) of early-life events is more than enough to remember one thing. It's very definitely wrong for someone to take the position attributed to the history professor, "that this is impossible, because children can't remember anything before the age of 3". To the contrary, we know that they can.
electrograv 13y ago
> It seems to me that not believing you is the right thing to do. I'm sorry, but you have your science backwards. You don't dismiss evidence because it doesn't fit your current hypothesis. Most significantly though, you grossly misunderstand statistics/surveys if you think it's possible to extract definitive physiological truths out of a subjective "how do you feel about remembering X?" survey. For what it's worth anecdotally, I also can access memories from when I was 3-4 years old, and I can easily prove they're not fabricated memories because the memories in particular were not retold, and in some cases took some effort to actually confirm when I was the only one remembering them (even parents forgot). Usually the memories are misc. trivia -- e.g. the design of the wallpaper of a house I only lived in until I was 4, a certain set of kids' cups I only used until I was 6, etc. There is no way these are false memories, because nobody told such things to me. I also remember some of my thoughts as a very young child, which is interesting, because they're very different from adult thoughts (though obviously I can't really "confirm" this in the same way I can physical memories). Anyone saying childhood amnesia occurs completely is completely misguided. Of course, I have "childhood amnesia" like everyone else in the sense that most of those memories I haven't accessed in a long time, and can't recall them instantly at will. But they're still there, and I can access them with meditation if I want.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tiatia 13y ago
  I remember when I learned to walk (man, the chairs were as tall as me). I know the exact place were it happened. Actually, I could not walk but "run" a few steps before somebody had to grab me and prevent me from falling. I also might remember having laid in a children's push chair but I am not 100% sure about this memory.
  - timdiggerm 13y ago
    Great, but how do you know that you didn't re-create that memory based on your parents telling you about it?
mililani 13y ago
Fair enough. However, I believe my circumstances are starkly different. My parents are native Koreans, and they couldn't speak English worth a damn until I was much older. I really can't see how they could convey these stories to me at such a young age when I couldn't even understand them most of the time.
einhverfr 13y ago
At best you could say that such memories would not be normal, though, right? Just as the fact that the two times I was hypnotized I did not suffer post-hypnotic amnesia would also not be the normal experience, right? It seems to my mind that your disbelief should be qualified with an understanding of how common the exceptions are. When you assume that everyone is the same, you are going to miss out on differences. My earliest memory was, I think, from when I was 1. I think we were moving from California to Michigan and I remember looking out the window and seeing a bank of grass. However, I could be wrong. It could have been later. What I can tell you though for certain is that I have precise, detailed memories of things from when I was 2 to 3 that are not details that people describe. I can tell you most of the details of the apartment we lived in there, including the flooring, how my mother cooked dinner, what she often cooked, and so forth (I don't know the name of what she cooked. All I know is it included both lamb and eggplant and was cooked on a hotplate). I could probably draw for you the pattern on the linoleum in the bathroom. What's really funny is that the level of detail I remember about the living spaces I lived after the age of about 4 drops off considerably. But then I won't claim to be normal in this regard. The next house we lived in, I remember mostly the yard. The house after that I hardly remember at all. The house after that we lived in for seven years, but I still remember the yard and to a less extent than the others. Now I remember some things from those early years my parents don't, for example what motivated some of my temper tantrums at the age of about 2 (pinkeye medication meant I couldn't see the all-important train passing behind the house). And I couldn't tell you anything beyond probably what I could see from indoors. But I can describe in near perfect detail large parts of the apartment, and those details are not really ones people talk about, at least in my family.
caprad 13y ago
> It's more probable that you reconstructed those memories from stories told by other people, even if you forgot hearing those stories before remembering the event, than that you're an exception to a well-studied and widely documented event. People want to feel that they are special, together with the fact that the other people involved, the parents, have probably forgotten talking about it as well, since they forgot about the even happening.

by tedks 13y ago

crygin 13y ago

Seriously. It's pretty funny to see a community that normally goes straight for the jugular on dismissing personal experience in favor of demands for data completely abandon that when it's /their/ personal experience being questioned (and, in this case, it's one of the few that we actually have great science on).

downer86 13y ago
It's pretty funny to see one person claim dominion and authority over another person's inner state. We have as much proof that his memories are false as he might that they are true. The only position one can rightfully claim in this situation is agnostic skepticism. There is no certainty that his memories are false. After all, the primary form of evidence for any given memory is the verbal recounting of detailed information. Without language, there aren't many ways to externalize a memory. Whether one is describing the experience of a memory, or reciting a coached, scripted tale ...if all the facts are correct what hope is there of disproving a dyed-in-the-wool memory? Case in point: The drunkest I ever got was during a drinking game in college. I was black-out drunk. My memories are truncated about halfway through act one, and the next thing I honestly remember is waking up to the stench of my own vomit covered bed in my dorm room, but such an adventure it was for my roommates, and such a bardic tale it was for them to recount, over and over again, ad nauseum, that now, I too, can recite the tale, moment by moment from when I blacked out until I woke up. But, to the outsider, my recall seems accurate, and is vigorously affirmed by my roommates, and based on my ability to tell the story, a listener has no honest means of determining whether I was too drunk to remember or not. So, while I buy into the mechanisms for how OP's claims to memories could be false in that he is perhaps only remembering the plot of the story, and not the experience itself, I'm still open to believing OP's claim to certain vivid memories. I don't think childhood amnesia is a bottomless black pit from which nothing ever returns. Very obviously, certain aspects of learning must survive, and I think the keystones of our emotional development are indelible. Early traumatic experiences stay with people for very long periods of time. Being bullied, humiliation, loss of a pet. Those are foundational learning experiences. The detail of the bulk of our day-to-day experiences may get lost, but set pieces, scenes that perfectly encapsulate a profound learning experience are different from the tangential recall of banal routine. I think animals are wired to retain certain types of experiences, even from very young ages. The phenomenon of memory is not necessarily constrained by hard statistical numbers. At least that is my opinion. I'd offer up similar evidence of my own experiences, although I'm sure they'd be readily dismissed as subjective and unsubstantiated.
- crygin 13y ago
  > It's pretty funny to see one person claim dominion and authority over another person's inner state. Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large. In a perfect world, I'd expect each and every person who responded in a noncritical way to this post to respond similarly to future posts (if they're still active on HN) in which they're not the discouraged party. But... I think we all know the odds of that happening.
  - tedks 13y ago
    >Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large. I hadn't even noticed this irony! Thanks for pointing it out. It's pretty hilarious.
- onetwofiveten 13y ago
  "We have as much proof that his memories are false as he might that they are true." This isn't really how evaluating evidence works is it? Suppose I told you that I have a magic flying carpet but I am unable to let you see ever it. You have as much evidence that I am lying as that I am telling the truth. It is still very likely that I am lying, because of all the other data you have available on the plausibility of magic flying carpets.

jasonzemos 13y ago

> it's nonetheless improbable, and it isn't wrong to disbelieve you. Is this the right assumption about the meaning of "improbable" in the context of this data and category of studies? One way we could interpret improbable is the way David Hume does in the "Of miracles" chapter of his 1748 treatise: that is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely not the case. The other way would be that the parent post either himself, or the memory to which he is referring is simply an outlier -- that is, a lottery winner of people or memories simply not clustered around the mean of being lost to this amnesia phenomenon. In the case of the former, I would totally agree with the conclusions of your comment and the professor cited in the parent. In the case of the latter I think it merely points out that we're applying the wrong kind of skepticism over these claims. Somebody always, eventually wins the lottery. I think this is a valid distinction that can be made, and if so, doesn't hold us to discounting anecdotes as summarily false.

onetwofiveten 13y ago
I think here 'improbable' means 'unlikely' and 'disbelieve' means 'not believe true' rather than 'strongly believe false'.

logicchains 13y ago

"Children aged 5, 6, and 7 remembered 60% or more of the early-life events. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 years remembered fewer than 40% of the early-life events". It is wrong to disbelieve him without knowing the standard deviation of the results. 40% is an average! For all we know (I can't check, as I don't have access to the original paper), there could have been two kids who had 90% recall and eight kids who had less than 40% recall. Knowing the standard deviation (and the nature of the distribution of results, whether it's a bell curve or whatever), would allow us to determine the probability of somebody having 90% recall post-childhood amnesia. Even if that probability was only 1/100, considering more than 100 people frequent this site it's expected that a few of them would have said 90% recall.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
Even if the deviation were zero, 40% recall (or 20%, or 2%) of early-life events is more than enough to remember one thing. It's very definitely wrong for someone to take the position attributed to the history professor, "that this is impossible, because children can't remember anything before the age of 3". To the contrary, we know that they can.

electrograv 13y ago

> It seems to me that not believing you is the right thing to do. I'm sorry, but you have your science backwards. You don't dismiss evidence because it doesn't fit your current hypothesis. Most significantly though, you grossly misunderstand statistics/surveys if you think it's possible to extract definitive physiological truths out of a subjective "how do you feel about remembering X?" survey. For what it's worth anecdotally, I also can access memories from when I was 3-4 years old, and I can easily prove they're not fabricated memories because the memories in particular were not retold, and in some cases took some effort to actually confirm when I was the only one remembering them (even parents forgot). Usually the memories are misc. trivia -- e.g. the design of the wallpaper of a house I only lived in until I was 4, a certain set of kids' cups I only used until I was 6, etc. There is no way these are false memories, because nobody told such things to me. I also remember some of my thoughts as a very young child, which is interesting, because they're very different from adult thoughts (though obviously I can't really "confirm" this in the same way I can physical memories). Anyone saying childhood amnesia occurs completely is completely misguided. Of course, I have "childhood amnesia" like everyone else in the sense that most of those memories I haven't accessed in a long time, and can't recall them instantly at will. But they're still there, and I can access them with meditation if I want.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tiatia 13y ago
I remember when I learned to walk (man, the chairs were as tall as me). I know the exact place were it happened. Actually, I could not walk but "run" a few steps before somebody had to grab me and prevent me from falling. I also might remember having laid in a children's push chair but I am not 100% sure about this memory.
- timdiggerm 13y ago
  Great, but how do you know that you didn't re-create that memory based on your parents telling you about it?

mililani 13y ago

Fair enough. However, I believe my circumstances are starkly different. My parents are native Koreans, and they couldn't speak English worth a damn until I was much older. I really can't see how they could convey these stories to me at such a young age when I couldn't even understand them most of the time.

einhverfr 13y ago

At best you could say that such memories would not be normal, though, right? Just as the fact that the two times I was hypnotized I did not suffer post-hypnotic amnesia would also not be the normal experience, right? It seems to my mind that your disbelief should be qualified with an understanding of how common the exceptions are. When you assume that everyone is the same, you are going to miss out on differences. My earliest memory was, I think, from when I was 1. I think we were moving from California to Michigan and I remember looking out the window and seeing a bank of grass. However, I could be wrong. It could have been later. What I can tell you though for certain is that I have precise, detailed memories of things from when I was 2 to 3 that are not details that people describe. I can tell you most of the details of the apartment we lived in there, including the flooring, how my mother cooked dinner, what she often cooked, and so forth (I don't know the name of what she cooked. All I know is it included both lamb and eggplant and was cooked on a hotplate). I could probably draw for you the pattern on the linoleum in the bathroom. What's really funny is that the level of detail I remember about the living spaces I lived after the age of about 4 drops off considerably. But then I won't claim to be normal in this regard. The next house we lived in, I remember mostly the yard. The house after that I hardly remember at all. The house after that we lived in for seven years, but I still remember the yard and to a less extent than the others. Now I remember some things from those early years my parents don't, for example what motivated some of my temper tantrums at the age of about 2 (pinkeye medication meant I couldn't see the all-important train passing behind the house). And I couldn't tell you anything beyond probably what I could see from indoors. But I can describe in near perfect detail large parts of the apartment, and those details are not really ones people talk about, at least in my family.

caprad 13y ago

> It's more probable that you reconstructed those memories from stories told by other people, even if you forgot hearing those stories before remembering the event, than that you're an exception to a well-studied and widely documented event. People want to feel that they are special, together with the fact that the other people involved, the parents, have probably forgotten talking about it as well, since they forgot about the even happening.