I do remember a dog sticker from my crib. I know this because when I was 10, I visited a faraway aunt and asked my dad about the sticker on their bathroom wall. "I have seen this one before! Where did I see it?" He said they both bought a sticker pack when I was just born, and she put it in her bathroom and he put it on my bed.
I remember an absurd amount of things from 3 onwards, like not liking it how I was occasionally the last one to be picked up from Kindergarten, or that there were two parallel glass tunnels connecting buildings in my kindergarten, and I always wondered how to get to the other one (it was just for staff).
I do remember the first time I got brought to kindergarten, and how later I wished to go on my own and my mother was against it.
I do remember being told by my dad that I will lose most of my memories of this age, and it made me sad: how can I just erase all these wonderful memories of my friends and all the toys and things we have here? I wished for my last birthday, as I was turning towards 6, be remembered by me like it is, for the rest of my life.
I remember the way to my kindergarten from the flat we lived in, I remember the layout of the place, I remember a lot of the toys, I remember a climbing rack, I remember the carpets and other floor covering, I remember every room, including the long table they set up for birthdays with you sitting on one end.
All rooms are empty of people. I don't remember a single face.
There is also when you parents or family members tell you stories of when you were kids and many years later you remember them but now you can't tell if you actually remember them or someone told you about it
Which is also why I am more confident on my considered oldest retained memory being real, as it was a rather ordinary event that nobody else remembered. Other "memories" I have from when around 3 I don't really trust as they have been replayed by others too many times.
Of course, maybe I just remember the memory me replaying the memory to myself. Is there a meaningful difference even? Maybe all our memories after some time become blended with our re-narrating them and re-interpreting them.
Every memory is a "story" you re-tell yourself each time you "remember" it.
There's no meaningful difference on how you experience it as "real" even if its just a "re-enaction" of such reality, but it might help explain why so many humans remember things from their past slightly differently than they actually happened.
This can also serve as a trauma-recovery mechanism, allowing one to not remember stuff too traumatizing etc, the brain blocks it out or rewrites it as a dream, or whatever
I remember I grab and hold a vacuum cleaner and stand up and my parents are shouting "Look! He is standing the first time!" and I was puzzled what is so fuss about me standing.
But if it was my first time standing on my own, that must be 6-12 months old. If so how can I recognize my parents language so clearly?
Another memory was, There was a plush toy I really wanted, A gorilla holding banana, at a local supermarket called SATY. So I demanded my parents to buy it by speaking fluently.
Later, my parents told me a totally different story. Suddenly, I started shouting "Gori! SATY! Banana!" endlessly. It took them a while to figure out I wanted a plush of Gorilla holding banana sold at SATY.
My oldest memory is a clown holding a bunch of balloons flying over the fence at my first birthday party. I then tried to fly with the baloons when i got them.
I told my mom about it decades ago, and she said there was a clown that jumped over the fence. Then I spent the rest of the party running around the house holding the balloons.
Similar situation. I have no doubt that a large fraction of my childhood memories are fabricated, but there were a few that I kept to myself until I was over the age of 30 and were later confirmed by a parent or aunt or uncle.
There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.
> There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.
I have exactly the same thing. It can get very detailed, too, but it really feels like remembering reminiscing about those memories at like 7-10.
Yea, I have a couple of early memories that I can date from ~1-2 years old (early bday party, birth of sibling). And presumably a few more early memories are from that period but don't involve events I can assign a date to?
I kinda suspect this is true for a lot of people, but since memories aren't time-stamped, they don't realize how early they are.
I've had a very detailed memory of the surroundings of my childhood home, which changed when I was 3-4 (major construction in the neighborhood, rerouting a street).
We never had any family pics showing any of the stuff that I remembered, or remembered remembering... Well, some time ago I went searching for other people's pics and videos of the area from those years, and I actually found a couple, and they were exactly what I remembered.
But it all feels to me like I'm remembering reminiscing about these things at age 7-10, not really direct memories, a retelling. Surprisingly good one, too.
I'm not sure if the person you replied to edited their comment, but right now, yours looks totally out-of-line and ranting about nothing they brought up.
They didn’t edit it. This part is what I’m referencing and read as an obvious reference to circumcision:
> If kids remember, we could not do surgeries without anastesia on new borns, and could not marinate open wound in filthy diapers!
What other surgery is commonly performed sans anesthesia on newborns and also generates as they so eloquently put it -a wound that marinates in filthy diapers-?
That must've been traumatic! He's lucky to have survived this! Oh, the helicopter was in the film? Perhaps choose a different idiom...
I hope that English is not the native tongue of this blogger, because its poor writing quality (as a "blog carnival" entry, no less!) makes me pine for polished LLM-speak!
Remember how "grammar flames" and "grammar nazis" used to be extremely rude, but by the same token, many literate/educated people cannot stand to see writing like this, because of the way it grates on our nerves, and bogs down our cognition trying to understand what the hell ideas this person is trying to convey.
Elegant writing and good grammar are simply table stakes now in the age of LLMs, although I could also understand that there is a certain deliberate regression to these sorts of amateur "mistakes" just to try and "prove" we're not using LLM assistance!
Glad you noticed I’m not a native English speaker. The .cl tld is a small hint of that.
I’m trying to retake reading and writing since after joining the workforce I stopped reading books and writing and I noticed that my grammar skills were deteriorating.
I don’t know what’s wrong with that sentence to be honest or if this is sarcasm (I’m not good at reading sarcasm) but I’d love to know what’s the issue with it.
Your username is butlerian jihad, and yet you advocate FOR the tell tale LLM writing style that the rest of the internet seems to loathe?
So while I'm still on the fence about whether you're being meta-ironic or whatever, I am very certain that I will always prefer honest, human written blog posts (including wrong idioms, phrases etc) to slop that was "improved" or downright written in full by an LLM.
To be fully fully transparent I did use LLMs (asking stuff in the google search bar) in some phrases I was having trouble to find the right words since English is not my native language.
But I’m glad you noticed I did try to write it all by my own with my own style as flawed as it could be
It's kind of fascinating trying to think back of the earliest memories I still (or used to) remember. I'm not "old" at all but still these distant memories are literally from another world (in the sense that my mental model of the world was very different, as well as all the changes it went through)
I'm 33 and this is already happening to things I did at 31. But not much before that, because before that my life was much more boring, and most of my old stuff was saved on a computer where I could recall it at any time of I wanted to.
Man... I swear, my first time at Fusion Festival changed me and I'm not sure if it's for the better or worse. The curse of knowledge and experience. (This year I don't feel much about it. The change already happened.)
That's one festival i hope to join some day. Glad you found a transformative experience there. Some things are defined beyond "better or worse" I guess.
I have a memory of myself lying motionless for what felt like forever and staring at a wallpaper featuring Disney characters. Years later I found photos from when I was around 1 year old and the home had those wallpapers (we stayed there for a few months). I remember feeling somewhat self-aware, like I was trying to understand why I was lying there, what those characters on the wallpaper were, what I was doing there at all. And I strongly felt the passage of time, like the whole episode dragged on forever. Maybe I had just woken up while my mom was in the kitchen? It's like I suddenly became self-aware, maybe that's why I remembered it :)
Your memory encoder/decoder manager the hippocampus must be working otherwise you would not be able to be learn.
I reckon that these memories are pruned by not being recalled strengthening the neurons making it up because they are not as important and take up bandwidth for the more important stuff like surviving as an infant in a physical world filled with your care takers.
I do not remember the floor time much at all.
I do remember a dog sticker from my crib. I know this because when I was 10, I visited a faraway aunt and asked my dad about the sticker on their bathroom wall. "I have seen this one before! Where did I see it?" He said they both bought a sticker pack when I was just born, and she put it in her bathroom and he put it on my bed.
I remember an absurd amount of things from 3 onwards, like not liking it how I was occasionally the last one to be picked up from Kindergarten, or that there were two parallel glass tunnels connecting buildings in my kindergarten, and I always wondered how to get to the other one (it was just for staff).
I do remember the first time I got brought to kindergarten, and how later I wished to go on my own and my mother was against it.
I do remember being told by my dad that I will lose most of my memories of this age, and it made me sad: how can I just erase all these wonderful memories of my friends and all the toys and things we have here? I wished for my last birthday, as I was turning towards 6, be remembered by me like it is, for the rest of my life.
I remember the way to my kindergarten from the flat we lived in, I remember the layout of the place, I remember a lot of the toys, I remember a climbing rack, I remember the carpets and other floor covering, I remember every room, including the long table they set up for birthdays with you sitting on one end.
All rooms are empty of people. I don't remember a single face.
Ohh I don’t remember adult faces either. I do remember some my best friends face but nothing else
Very similar experience for me. Also no faces, but a feeling of who the person is relative to my self anyways.
There is also when you parents or family members tell you stories of when you were kids and many years later you remember them but now you can't tell if you actually remember them or someone told you about it
Which is also why I am more confident on my considered oldest retained memory being real, as it was a rather ordinary event that nobody else remembered. Other "memories" I have from when around 3 I don't really trust as they have been replayed by others too many times.
Of course, maybe I just remember the memory me replaying the memory to myself. Is there a meaningful difference even? Maybe all our memories after some time become blended with our re-narrating them and re-interpreting them.
Every memory is a "story" you re-tell yourself each time you "remember" it.
There's no meaningful difference on how you experience it as "real" even if its just a "re-enaction" of such reality, but it might help explain why so many humans remember things from their past slightly differently than they actually happened.
This can also serve as a trauma-recovery mechanism, allowing one to not remember stuff too traumatizing etc, the brain blocks it out or rewrites it as a dream, or whatever
I remember I grab and hold a vacuum cleaner and stand up and my parents are shouting "Look! He is standing the first time!" and I was puzzled what is so fuss about me standing.
But if it was my first time standing on my own, that must be 6-12 months old. If so how can I recognize my parents language so clearly?
Another memory was, There was a plush toy I really wanted, A gorilla holding banana, at a local supermarket called SATY. So I demanded my parents to buy it by speaking fluently.
Later, my parents told me a totally different story. Suddenly, I started shouting "Gori! SATY! Banana!" endlessly. It took them a while to figure out I wanted a plush of Gorilla holding banana sold at SATY.
My oldest memory is a clown holding a bunch of balloons flying over the fence at my first birthday party. I then tried to fly with the baloons when i got them.
I told my mom about it decades ago, and she said there was a clown that jumped over the fence. Then I spent the rest of the party running around the house holding the balloons.
Similar situation. I have no doubt that a large fraction of my childhood memories are fabricated, but there were a few that I kept to myself until I was over the age of 30 and were later confirmed by a parent or aunt or uncle.
There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.
> There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.
I have exactly the same thing. It can get very detailed, too, but it really feels like remembering reminiscing about those memories at like 7-10.
Yea, I have a couple of early memories that I can date from ~1-2 years old (early bday party, birth of sibling). And presumably a few more early memories are from that period but don't involve events I can assign a date to?
I kinda suspect this is true for a lot of people, but since memories aren't time-stamped, they don't realize how early they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_therapy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_and_perinatal_psychol...
I've had a very detailed memory of the surroundings of my childhood home, which changed when I was 3-4 (major construction in the neighborhood, rerouting a street).
We never had any family pics showing any of the stuff that I remembered, or remembered remembering... Well, some time ago I went searching for other people's pics and videos of the area from those years, and I actually found a couple, and they were exactly what I remembered.
But it all feels to me like I'm remembering reminiscing about these things at age 7-10, not really direct memories, a retelling. Surprisingly good one, too.
> Why can I remember this stuff? I’m not sure.
> It may have to do with some of the rough emotional stuff
There is a strong pressure to censor this.
If kids remember, we could not do surgeries without anastesia on new borns, and could not marinate open wound in filthy diapers!
Surgery on infants without anasthesia is not something done any longer in any country that particularly cares about the health of its citizens.
Yeah I'm not sure you should do surgeries without anaesthesia on newborns either way.
It was standard procedure to do invasive surgeries on newborns without anesthesia until the 1980s, on the theory that they can’t feel pain. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/long-life-early-pain
[flagged]
I'm not sure if the person you replied to edited their comment, but right now, yours looks totally out-of-line and ranting about nothing they brought up.
They didn’t edit it. This part is what I’m referencing and read as an obvious reference to circumcision:
> If kids remember, we could not do surgeries without anastesia on new borns, and could not marinate open wound in filthy diapers!
What other surgery is commonly performed sans anesthesia on newborns and also generates as they so eloquently put it -a wound that marinates in filthy diapers-?
Get a body piercing anywhere you want, nobody is banning that for adults! Problem is consent (I am big fan of that btw!)
Nobody consented to this conversation about very early memories being made about male genital mutilation.
An MRA failing to understand consent when they have an opportunity to make something about MGM in spite of being a “big fan”? what a shocker.
> and like yeah “boo-hoo they cut our dicks”
You don’t have a complete picture or empathy for how trauma works.
Ban this person from your fiefdom if they’re OT - but also look in the mirror.
>That night my family watched a war movie on the VCR, maybe saving private ryan or something similar, and the helicopter struck me.
If there was a helicopter in the movie, then we can confidently exclude Saving Private Ryan.
> and the helicopter struck me.
That must've been traumatic! He's lucky to have survived this! Oh, the helicopter was in the film? Perhaps choose a different idiom...
I hope that English is not the native tongue of this blogger, because its poor writing quality (as a "blog carnival" entry, no less!) makes me pine for polished LLM-speak!
Remember how "grammar flames" and "grammar nazis" used to be extremely rude, but by the same token, many literate/educated people cannot stand to see writing like this, because of the way it grates on our nerves, and bogs down our cognition trying to understand what the hell ideas this person is trying to convey.
Elegant writing and good grammar are simply table stakes now in the age of LLMs, although I could also understand that there is a certain deliberate regression to these sorts of amateur "mistakes" just to try and "prove" we're not using LLM assistance!
Glad you noticed I’m not a native English speaker. The .cl tld is a small hint of that.
I’m trying to retake reading and writing since after joining the workforce I stopped reading books and writing and I noticed that my grammar skills were deteriorating.
I don’t know what’s wrong with that sentence to be honest or if this is sarcasm (I’m not good at reading sarcasm) but I’d love to know what’s the issue with it.
This is the longest "you write like shit" I've ever read, congratulations
You should've seen Usenet, man: it was epic!
Your username is butlerian jihad, and yet you advocate FOR the tell tale LLM writing style that the rest of the internet seems to loathe?
So while I'm still on the fence about whether you're being meta-ironic or whatever, I am very certain that I will always prefer honest, human written blog posts (including wrong idioms, phrases etc) to slop that was "improved" or downright written in full by an LLM.
Refreshingly not llm generated
To be fully fully transparent I did use LLMs (asking stuff in the google search bar) in some phrases I was having trouble to find the right words since English is not my native language.
But I’m glad you noticed I did try to write it all by my own with my own style as flawed as it could be
It's kind of fascinating trying to think back of the earliest memories I still (or used to) remember. I'm not "old" at all but still these distant memories are literally from another world (in the sense that my mental model of the world was very different, as well as all the changes it went through)
Wait till most of your life feels "from another world"...
I visited places I lived in the past and it feels like a place somebody else lived, who were close to me, but still not "me".
I'm 33 and this is already happening to things I did at 31. But not much before that, because before that my life was much more boring, and most of my old stuff was saved on a computer where I could recall it at any time of I wanted to.
Man... I swear, my first time at Fusion Festival changed me and I'm not sure if it's for the better or worse. The curse of knowledge and experience. (This year I don't feel much about it. The change already happened.)
That's one festival i hope to join some day. Glad you found a transformative experience there. Some things are defined beyond "better or worse" I guess.
What about electric babies
I have a memory of myself lying motionless for what felt like forever and staring at a wallpaper featuring Disney characters. Years later I found photos from when I was around 1 year old and the home had those wallpapers (we stayed there for a few months). I remember feeling somewhat self-aware, like I was trying to understand why I was lying there, what those characters on the wallpaper were, what I was doing there at all. And I strongly felt the passage of time, like the whole episode dragged on forever. Maybe I had just woken up while my mom was in the kitchen? It's like I suddenly became self-aware, maybe that's why I remembered it :)
I am positive I have episodic memories from when I was two years old
Your memory encoder/decoder manager the hippocampus must be working otherwise you would not be able to be learn.
I reckon that these memories are pruned by not being recalled strengthening the neurons making it up because they are not as important and take up bandwidth for the more important stuff like surviving as an infant in a physical world filled with your care takers.
I've always doubted this stuff because I have some memories of things that happened when I was 2.
what a great artcle!