Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? | Hacker News Reader

Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory?

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180 pointslogikblok73 comments

The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and then as we get older we forget them again.

If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the early memories are completely lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memor...

Things learnt that early simply dont have value later on, that's how I would see it from the body's perspective.

Episodic memory is not really learned, is it? There's a semantically confusing syllogism in there. If a memory is pondered often enough, there might not be much more to learn from, thus you stop thinking about it and as with muscles, it deteriorates if not used. But what you have deduced from that memory might have value. Eventually you might learn later on that episodic memory is a valuable thing to keep as much as possible, thus we reminisce. On the other hand, maybe early childhood is just so terrible that it needs to be suppressed.

Even if you aren't able to recall useless events in your life, you still have memories of most of them with the appropriate cues. Tgat doesn't hold for early childhood.

>If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2

That is news to me, but then again I find it hard to ask a 5 year old about anything.

I have quite a few memories before 4, going back to 2 years of age, more than I can remember. I will say that one thing that is a little different for me was that we moved every year until I was 7 so that had helped me place things and maybe retain memories a little better for some reason.

Am I just weird or is it unusual to have scant memories from between the age of one and two?

How can you have more memories than you can remember? Isn't that a contradiction?

There are more things from that time he can recall than he can name at this moment, that's how I interpreted it.

Theres no way to iterate all your memories, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. My guess is that I have about ~50 before the age of 3, 150 before the age of 4

Maybe most of them are non verbal too, so differently stored, associated, and harder to communicate.

I also imagine the first 4 years as a massive influx of raw stimuli to be processed, from which only a few abstraction will remains. Kinda like learning anything knew, the first period is mostly wrong perceptions, and you only remember the valuable bits after an integration period.

My hypothesis (along with your observation) is that as we age, the way we remember things is different. At a young age, it's all sounds and images. Then language gets added to it, and we start seeing events in different ways. Our old ways of accessing information (in the brain) are used less often, and we forget.

This touches on an interesting aspect of my very early childhood memories. Do you ever have dreams where you "know" you're in a familiar location, like your old high school or childhood home, but they have a completely different feeling to them, and may or may not have the same layout as in real life? My very early childhood memories have a similar sort of dreamlike quality. I know objectively the memory takes place in the neighborhood I grew up in, but there is a certain atmosphere or feeling that isn't the same and that I can never quite relay or capture today. I've wondered if this isn't due to the way these early memories are formed and stored.

Sometimes, while dreaming I will recognize and recall that I've had this dream before, maybe many many times...then I feel a sense of loss, like losing a friend. A moment of de ja vu I guess. It is a weird feeling though, and I don't even know if I truly had the dream before, or if it is a false memory!!

I recall as a teenager catching a whiff of tar and instantly recalling a memory from when I was very young (somewhere between 2 and 5) of being in a parking garage with the same smell. I can still "see" the garage and even smell it, but that's it. I have no other contextual clues to know when or where it happened (unlike my earliest memory of being in a large city---it was Chicago where we lived when I was 2, but I only know that because of what my parents have said over the years).

I'd toss out an evolutionary argument that for the last million years memory is mostly useful for who owes what to who so we can play well known small tribe politics games...

Given that as a (possibly obvious?) starting point, a subgroup that remembered every time some a 2-year old kid stole their pet dinosaur from another 2-year old kid, would mostly result in senseless adult strife. So we're better off not remembering our childhood as we get older. Subgroups that forget childhood animosity will outperform subgroups with perfect, but useless, memories.

I'd even toss out the hypothesis that all relationships change at puberty so toss out all memories at puberty because its a whole nother ball game. However the same system that stores "how to hunt dinosaur" also stores "Little billy stole my toy dinosaur when I was 2-years old" so the erasure system optimizes at a certain relatively high level of forgetting stuff.

And yes I know my years are all made up and the non-overlapping relative timespans of dinos and humans so I wrote in a very general flippant sunday afternoon sense.

Agree. Let me add. Infantile/childhood amnesia has many causes, but being unable to form a memory is not one of them. Memories in infancy are fragile, and context dependent, and even if retained through life are likely fragmentary, non-verbal, non-conceptually embedded, that we'd not recognize it as an episodic memory. Moreover, the medial temporal lobes and hippocampus (brain region critical to relational memory formation) are still immature before age 2, before which time the dentate gyrus in the tri-synaptic circuit of the hippocampus may not be fully operational, potentially leading to massive interference between similar memories from less efficient representational separation and a bias towards pattern completion. The last tidbit is particularly interesting as such a bias to pattern completion may support the rapid semantic knowledge acquisitions occurring early in life, which may benefit from layering of similar representations to extract reoccurring key features about the world, as opposed to the more efficient pattern separation later in life that allows more fine grained memory distinctions to be retained and allowing individual events to be better remembered.

Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew.

But I realized a few years ago that the memory, despite having true elements and feeling legitimate, takes place in the wrong location: the house that we moved into shortly after he was born. So I'm sure at some point I either was told this story and confused it for a memory, or I held onto the "gist" of the original memory long enough and then recalled/rewrote it enough times that the setting was changed to the place where the majority of my childhood took place. But I find it amazing that I still feel like it's a real memory.

Yep i have similar memory about playing with a toy, but somehow rewritten to new home. But i am sure noone 'told' about this, seems more like i have fragment of memory, and mind filled the missing information with something and rewritten the memory

It seems like the brain fills in fragments of memories it deems unimportant, can't locate, or that have been otherwise lost. It doesn't make sense for an event to take place without a location so your brain picks a likely location and injects that into the memory.

Knowing that memories are like Flash and subject to being rewritten when recalled is a bit unsettling but the research seems clear that it definitely happens. It also explains why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable: the brain ignores trivial and unimportant details (the boring shirt some random person was wearing) but when pressed to recall the details your brain fills in (I would have remembered him being naked so he must have been wearing something boring). Even tiny hints can produce fake memories. Once this process takes place people will swear that their memory is correct because for them it is the way things happened!

When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew.

I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage.

Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash.

Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real".

Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.

My earliest memory is from about the same age. I remember looking down from the balcony at the apartment complex where we lived. We moved from that complex before I was three-years-old and I don't remember anything else about it. I brought it up at some point and was told that they ended up putting up chicken wire because I was always trying to look through the iron bars. But I'm fairly certain the memory came first (and I have no memory of the chicken wire).

I have something very similar, but I know that I didn't hear the story from anyone. I would have been under 27 months because my brother wasn't alive. In my early 20's I asked my mother when we had a brown honda, and she replied that we never did. I said I was sure that we did because I remember being in a brown Honda, driving on the highway and that we got a flat tire, and the police came, and that there were Palm trees. The part that didn't make sense is that I thought we were going to Alberta beach(in Alberta) and there are clearly no palm trees there. After talking about it for a while and giving some more details of my memory, we figured out that it was a trip to hawaii that we did before my brother was born and that the brown honda was a rental car.

How would you know the car was a honda at that point?

I don't know that I knew that it was a honda at that point, I remember the shape of the car and it looked like an early 80s honda accord in my mind. That being said, my 2 year old kid can tell what kind of car it is by the symbol on the front.

I have a similar story where I remembered being small and our family having a white landboat, like Ford Galaxie sized, which my mom didn't remember. I thought I dreamed it until I digitized my dad's Super-8 movies and found some frames shot in our front yard where a car just like I remembered was sitting in our driveway. Now, I'm not sure what its provenance was, and my mom still didn't really remember, it could have been a neighbor's car that we borrowed once or I otherwise rode in (my memory was of a hot vinyl rear seat) but I had proof of my memory at last.

Don't be so sure that its from something you heard and imagined that you later incorrectly recalled as a memory. You can also have retroactive interference, which is when a real memory gets contaminated by events that happened later.

So it's possible you do have a "real" memory of your mom telling your father she was pregnant, but that your brain substituted details from later.

Retroactive interference is a very established phenomenon. My guess is a lot of things like what you described are real memories, and people assume they're imagined events recast as memories because they simply don't believe in early memories. I doubt your parents were discussing details like that later, but you'll probably never really know.

That happened to me. I have a very early memory of a trivial thing (eating a radish and not liking it) from when I about two. It happened at my family's apartment, before we moved into our first house. I later visited that apartment when I was ten, and a lot of the details match my memory(e.g. the location of my Dad's little garden relative to the stairs) EXCEPT the actual visualization of the apartment building, which got replaced with an image of one near our new house twisted to fit the memory.

In the context of witness testimony, this kind of thing is terrifying!

have similar visual memories from a very early age - I remember two (not too specific) scenes from the house I grew up in, when it was being built (no wallpapers, stairs were simple concrete and not yet with handrail etc). The trouble is, we moved into that house when I was ~18 months old, so I "visited" the construction site with what, 16, 17 months of age? It is hard to believe even for me that I remember images from that time, but my parents clearly never "told" me how it looked. I am not sure what to make of these memories myself, but I have them.

A few years ago I went back to the house where I spent the first few years of my life; I had not been there since the age of four.

At one point I entered a room and I heard myself say out loud "my sister was born here..."

To be clear, my parents had no photos of that room or anything growing up. There were pictures of my baby sister, sure, but they were all too zoomed in to make any sense of the surroundings. I took a photo with my phone and sent it to my parents, and they confirmed that that was the room where my sister was born.

I just knew somehow; there was no visual memory but as I walked through the door I instantly had this feeling of seeing my sister for the first time. It was really strange, but then again, it makes sense that a moment like that is pretty impressive.

I'm not an expert, but I have read few books about brain development. It's amazing that we can remember things from the childhood. Retained memories have likely result of multiple recall-rewrite cycles.

Human brains practically rebuild themselves few times during development. Neural migration stops when the child is born, but synaptic pruning, myelination, synaptogenesis, apoptosis continues years after the birth. Cortical white matter continues to increase until the child is 9-12 years old, grey matter development continues in phases. Superior temporal cortex is not mature until the child reaches adulthood 17-18 years. Our first memories are from brains that were very different.

This is why child neurologists are their own specialty among neurologists. Child brain and adult brain are different things.

Could you list some of those books?

Adolescent Brain Development: Implications for Behavior. 978-0123979162

Fundamentals of Brain Development http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674026742&co...

I actually did some casual research into this 3 years ago before my kids were born. All the theories and speculation in the article have been disproven - specifically theories about autobiographical memory or narrative memory being important. What actually happens is the brain undergoes periods of shift/growth/change that nuke the ability to recall earlier memories. Most of the incorrect explanations come from adult-oriented bias: The memories are so far gone we can't even remember that we were once capable of remembering earlier times.

Children can remember events clearly from before they acquired language. No adult has ever been shown to have this ability (it is always due to mis-remembering the time period or making educated guesses based on other knowledge). As children get older and gain a better mastery of language they can often describe _more_ memories from very early childhood, indicating that the memories exist even when kids lack the ability to describe them in words. These abilities to remember early childhood (even <1 yr old) begins fading around ~10 yrs old. By your teenage years those early memories are mostly gone.

Where have you read about the very early memories, like <1 year? There is a thing that puzzles me most of my life. When I was a teenager we had a family discussion about early memories. I have described several ones I've always assumed to be my earliest, but I've never knew what age they are related to. In one of them my cradle was involved and I was told by my mom that I was removed out of cradle at the age of 3 months.

I wonder what kind of effect today's technology has.

I mean, my son is 3, and already has hours of videos stored. And he likes watching those videos of himself and family even now.

How is this going to affect memory formation later in life? Should we hide those videos from him to avoid some kind of a feedback-loop that can somehow mess with his memory?

I wonder the exact same thing, our boy is 2 and as soon as he could hold a phone his favourite videos were of himself. Going to be interesting "do you really remember X happening or is the video something that you rewatched so much you couldn't help but recall?"

We mostly recall only what we photograph. I'm conscious of this every time I take photos.

I'm not sure that's true. I barely took any photos until I was about 20 but have a rich memory of unphotographed periods of my life and experiences.

How did people remember before cameras?

I participated in a study in college that tested something similar to this. If someone knows information is stored somewhere it is easier for them to remember the location of it, rather than the actual information. (Its easier to google a math formula's name than to remember the actual formula).

Really children now could 'remember' a whole lot more, and a lot clearer, if they just remember where the video is rather than the actual video.

I read recently that our memories are us recalling the last time we remembered it. They did a study which showed those that intoduced errors in their memories later recalled them as facts the next time.

So my thought is that childhood amnesia could be down to children living in the moment and simply don't spend time recalling past events. Only later do we consider events as being past, present and future.

They absolutely do though. I only see my nieces and nephews a few times a year, and they always remind me of things we did the last time I visited.

That's sort of the point. You're seeing them giving them a reason to recall the memory. They will then carry those memories into adulthood.

My first memories are roughly when I was 3 years old. So recalling the first 2-3 years of my life is pretty much impossible. That also happens to be the age when I probably didn't communicate previous experiences to anyone else.

But lets face it, I actually have no clue on this topic, just trying to piece together what I've read about and my own understanding.

Isn't it simply because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning ?

I think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories from before we could talk.

It seems to me that we can go a layer deeper than words and language. An infant has an incredibly shallow model of the world in their brain. At birth, it is almost entirely blank. As we become toddlers, we build up our model of the world at an astonishing rate. I wonder if it most memories don't survive this process. Perhaps the world model grows too quickly, and the old memories are unable to be integrated. I do agree that language plays a role in this, but I would guess that most of this happens at a level beneath language.

At some point though, the existing model is robust enough that new memories more firmly take root and can be better integrated into future changes of the model (even though it is still being developed at a rapid rate throughout childhood). Naturally, this point occurs at different ages.

My earliest memory was from 13 months old. It was the second surgery I had on my foot, and I woke up towards the end of the surgery. Apparently anesthesia for small children is quite difficult. I have a couple other very faint memories from 2 and 3 years of age, but none nearly as strong as my first.

I remember my 1 year old birthday party and plenty of stuff before that. I remember finding an unprotected outlet and putting a butter knife in it. It made me involuntarily fling the knife across the room. My mom came in and got mad at me for crying for "no reason".

I remember one distinct memory from when I later figured I was 1.5 years old (18 months).

My great grandmother (mom's mom's mom) was on her deathbed. I remember meeting her, with my parents one last time before she passed away. I distinctly remember the tile on the wall was robin's egg blue up to about 5 feet tall. She had such frail skin, it was like tissue paper.. I held her hand knowing that she was nearing the end.

I was later (years later) told that my parents were terrified that I was going to do something and rip her skin. I also found out she stayed alive long enough to see me off. She died by away the next morning.

By all accounts, I shouldn't remember this. But I told them details from what my own parents forgot.

My theory is that memory is more about the stories that we tell and retell ourselves, than any sort of objective reflection of reality. If you're not refreshing the stuff in your cache, it ages out and goes away.

My understanding is that's correct - memories are reformed when you retrieve them. This is also how you can introduce errors in to your recall.

Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? My guess is it's because human memories are ideas and like all our ideas they depend on other ideas for their meaning.

However when we were young our ideas about the world were very different from what they are now: much simpler and with many falsehoods. So our earliest memories don't make sense to us and can't be recalled.

What we call our 'first memory' may just be the earliest thing we can recall and make sense of now.

I have a memory of age one, bathing in a tin tub in the garden of father's boss. No language, but the impression that life can be good had such an impact that I remembered.

I find this mystifying. I have numerous memories from being a toddler. Among friends' children, some have more fully-formed personalities than others. My favorite one has an excellent memory (like she remembers where things are in our house even though she only visits every 2 or 3 months) and also highly developed preferences on clothing (colors, acceptable combinations of what to wear etc.).

I'm pretty sure most of my early memories are not of the actual event, but of the times I thought of the memory.

Like others have mentioned, at 5 years old I could remember details of being 2-3yrs. I think I'm now going back to the 5-year-old rather than the 2-year-old.

The article also goes into some detail on false memories. There have been some horrific instances of injustices caused by this, particularly false memories of child abuse and sex abuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memori...

Louis CK on the subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU

Calvin & Hobbes also: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/01

First memory when I was about 1.5 years old, where my family, specifically the man who I now called father is having a dinner.

Could this working of the brain be related to how, when you're sleeping, something happening in the real world is incorporated in real time into a dream you're having? That always amazes me, how our brains do that.

I still have a few memories from when I was 2.

Nothing from ages 1,3,4. I can actually recall things from every other year.

Including year/age 0?

No, not 0 either.

The hypothesis that natural language acquisition "restructures our memories" is promising one. We cannot recall what has been stored using a different "encoding". There are no associated labels (which is what words are) attached to earlier experiences, so "search" returns nothing, or something we mistakenly attributed to the prior-language experiences.

Another item in the long list of obvious stuff so called experts in intelligence purport not to know.

simple answer you wont get from her majesties propoganda channel.

"memory" is a learnt skill. just like everything else, it takes a few years to learn it.

Not everything is a learned skill, and you have absolutely nothing to base that opinion on other than obviously loathing those pesky experts and... the BBC?

no, i loath the "experts" rolled out by the bbc as experts.

that memory is something we learn is not a new thing (technicallly the skill of forgetting, which is where autism comes from), the second post even pointed out synaptic pruning.

its not just known to be a learnt skill, we know the exact biologic process by which it manifests itself.

the "experts" are the ones building the ai that will take all your jobs. and you wont find them giving interviews on the beeg.

You speak as if you know quite a bit about this subject. I'm curious, what makes you an expert rather than an "expert"?

i have been building such stuff for the last 20 years.

even had stuff stolen by darpa. which is why i dont share much now.

http://www.theborgmatrix.com

I should point out that your link doesn't work for me. I should also point out that it is unwise to claim absolute authority in science, especially the biological sciences.

Yeah I saw, rogue c&p in the "hide it from most of the internet" script.

It's an old site migrated from my first machinations back in the early 2000s.

And I make no claim to "absolutely authority".

But take your pick which "expert" you want to listen to.

The experts rolled out by the "love thee blue blooded leader appointed appointed by god" channel.

Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwYAv--inN0

> Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day.

It says on your site you graduated in 2007. I'd take the experts any day.

finished electronic engineering in 98, just as all the sensible engineers f'd off to south korea and china.

2007 was the second time round.

around the time of

http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagarism

and

http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagiarism-2

its now valuable enough capital that i dont technically have to work anymore and can spend my time flying helicopters and enjoying luxury yachts.

Although life isnt exactly that simplistic. It does give me some pleasure to know for certain the outcome was the us and uk loosing the world leadership.

And now you got Trump and May as your top representatives.

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