My family moved from cramped rented rooms to a spacious new house a few days before my third birthday. I remember the move in some detail; and I have half a dozen memories of the rented rooms.I am not sure what my earliest memory is, nor even when they came to be, but I do remember things that I can block out as being before five: the horrid shag carpet (of which I have recently discovered photographic evidence), swimming lessons at a very early age in a very public pool, a brown home with a hex sign on it that I was later told was in the old neighborhood.
At least I think I have. One of Fernyhough’s themes is the unreliability of memory. There are true things we remember; there are stories we were told that somehow end up among our memories; there are dreams and imaginative flights we take for true memories; and there are second-order memories—memories of having remembered one of the preceding.
I have a few early memories, and some later memories, but increasingly I find I have few or no memories at all of my early life. Even as a teenager -- a period I gather imprints carefully on most people -- it's hard for me to recall how things were, except for particular moments that were impressive. Even at the age of twenty, which Derbyshire's piece suggests is all-important, I can't readily remember anything: I'd have to chase it down, map it out, and see if anything occurred based on the data I could pull together.
And yet I have broad stories that aren't really memories, but must have been built out of them at some point: stories about how things were or what they meant.
Eyewitness testimonies are unreliable precisely because over time, people tend to fill in the blanks rather than remember that their memory even has blanks in it.
ReplyDeleteSome exceptions for people with savant abilities, like photographic black and white memory exists or people who concentrate and form a long term memory of their current short term memory to compare against later months or years down the road.
This also reminds me of how Leftist psychologists used regressive hypnotism to implant false memories in patients, in order to destroy the families by getting the patient to hate and file child molestation charges.
It's one reason why I developed my own line of psychological defense and anti hypnotic commands embedded in the software. No party hypnotic tricks going to work here, that's been firewalled off.
I can still remember being in my teens and having a nearly complete recall of all my prior years, back to three or four, and then finding to my surprise in my twenties that my recall of all those years was much more spotty. Now I'm scarcely surprised to find huge gaps even about fairly recent things that must have been important at the time. It takes an increasingly intense emotional charge to lay down a new memory.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I very clearly remember the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960, when I was 4, because I was confused by the word into thinking it was a footrace in a stadium. There was something about it on the black & white TV on the evening news. I have a handful of other vivid memories from between 3 and 3-1/2 that I can readily date by concrete events. I remember the shock of learning that reading wasn't something you had to do out loud to another person, but could do silently to oneself, which was disappointing and liberating at the same time. I can remember the pictures and many of the words of those first "Golden Books" as if I'd just seen them this morning, as well as the "Alice in Wonderland" stories that my father would read to all of us together at night.
I have a few fairly clear memories from as early as age 2.
ReplyDeleteIt takes an increasingly intense emotional charge to lay down a new memory.
Yep.
I find that pictures help a lot. I have lots of pictures from the last seven years, because my family sent me a small digital camera in Iraq as a present. That got me in the habit of taking photos here and there. I find that I can usually look at the image and remember exactly where it was taken and lots of circumstances from that day. But if I don't see the image, I may forget it happened entirely -- at least to the ability of my conscious mind to recall.
ReplyDeleteNot long ago I visited my mother, and she produced some photo albums from my childhood. Some of the images brought back memories in what feels like a similar way; others I couldn't remember at all.