Earliest childhood memories examples11/4/2023 My grandmother came into the room and comforted me and said my parents would be home soon. I remember waking up in my room when I was a baby or toddler, standing up in my crib, and crying. And I still have the baby retainers in my jewelry box, so there’s a physical token of the memory as well. It was also one of the first instances when I felt genuine hate. But I think a lot of the vividness of the memory had to do with its physical effects on me - it was so physically painful. There are some details my parents have caught me up on over the years: My dress, where we were going, the fact that we were going on vacation at all, those were things I didn’t remember. My parents came racing to pick me up to visit the dentist, who was able to make me a retainer to pop into my mouth with fake baby teeth while my others grew in. As I stood up, I had my four front baby teeth dangling from my mouth, with a stream of blood running down the front of my dress. But at snack time, a boy named Charlie shoved me down, slamming my face onto the metal leg of the table. I was in a brand new baby blue needlepointed dress, and they asked me to do my best to keep it clean, as we would be racing to the airport after pick-up. My earliest memory is from age 4, when my parents dropped me off at pre-K the morning before our annual trip to Florida. I think it is - I remember where we were sitting in relation to the elephant - but if you showed me a picture of the elephant amphitheater and it was different from what I have in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m not even sure my visual memory of it is real. In my head I can see the arena, but also, for years, my parents could make me laugh by telling this story, so I don’t think I would remember it at all if they didn’t repeat it a lot. And the guy got up covered in shit, said I quit and swore a lot, and the show went to chaos. And the audience was supposed to be all, Wow, they didn’t get stepped on!, but this time, the elephant stopped over the guy … and pooped … and kept walking. They’d do tricks, and for one of the tricks the trainer would lie down and the elephant would walk over him. My family and I were at the elephant exhibit, which was more like a show, with a trainer and his elephants. That part’s real, but I was there as a 2- or 3-year-old, so I’m not certain how this next part actually happened. ![]() Redwood City, California, used to have this theme park called “Marine World, Africa, USA,” and it had animals. The Cut asked eight women to describe their own first memories - what happened, how old they were, and how certain they are, in light of what we know about the science of long-term memory formation, that they actually took place. It’s one thing, though, to hear that most memories before a given age are likely false it’s another thing entirely to apply that theory to yourself, and to question whether something you’ve long understood as autobiographical fact is just a construction of your imagination. The study, appropriately, is titled “Fictional First Memories.” Which is what makes the results of a new study on memory so puzzling: From a survey of more than 6,600 people, nearly 40 percent claimed to remember something from when they were 2 or younger, and roughly 13 percent said they remembered something from before their first birthday - both stats that defy the odds to the point of impossibility. ![]() By the time we hit adulthood, it’s rare to remember much from before that point the very earliest memories that we have tend to start at around age 3 and a half. In fact, we carry those earliest memories with us long after we begin walking and talking and get our teeth: Research has shown that most people don’t really lose their earliest memories until around age 7 or so, the beginning of a process known as childhood amnesia. For a while, we remember them very well: A 4-year-old can recall things that happened to them at age 3 a 2-year-old may still know what it was like to be a baby. It’s not quite accurate to say we never remember the first few years of our lives.
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