Whats your earliest memory?

[Peter Deadpan]

3 or 4, pushing a Barbie car across what seemed like the longest living room ever, and breaking it. It was a disappointing moment. I also distinctly remember running around naked on the back deck in the Texas sun with my younger brother, presumably an interesting way to dry us after bath time.

[Sacrophagus]

Four years old.

My elder sister was taking me to Kindergarten, and I remember struggling and crying to not leave my mother. I was also scared by the sight of many children put in one place, and horrified when my sister put me in the arms of the nanny. It's as though I felt forsaken or something.
I had a teddy bear hat, a transparent backpack full of sweets, color pencils, and other cool toys inside. I can vividly recall how happy I was when my parents came to pick me up.

[Firebird 8118]

I don't care if anyone calls BS on this one, but I swear it's true:

My earliest memory is of my mom playing with me, when I was a baby.

Obviously I didn't understand a word she was saying, I just remember laughing while she was tickling my belly and smiling down at me. A lot of my happiest memories were with my mom, now that I think about it...

[magpie]

I can remember being in the womb and what my mom ate while pregnant with me.

I googled "fetal memory" and there are others who report similar. Also, this:

Here's how scientists at the University of Helsinki went about discovering if babies could remember life before they were born: The researchers asked a group of mothers-to-be to periodically play a track with the nonsense word, "tatata." They also had a control group who played nothing to their babies in embryo. After the babies from both groups were born, they tested the babies' brain activity in response to the word. The first group of babies - those who heard the word "tatata" while in their mothers' wombs - registered brain activity when they heard that word. The group that wasn't exposed to "tatata" registered no brain activity when they heard the word.

It's interesting. Most people don't remember their infancy because those memories were made without language. You lose some arguably purer and more direct connection to the world once you are taught how to use language, because it's indirect. It's representation.

I can't say what my earliest memory is but the most potent memories I have tend to be ones where I am remembering the feel of an emotion or the vibe or emotional energy of some incident, period, person, or circumstance. Also, scents. There is nothing like a smell to instantly transport you back.

[highlander]

The next door neighbor was a landscaper and most of his back yard was used for growing trees that he used in his landscaping business. Behind those trees was a big pile of rocks. I remember climbing on the rocks and collecting ones that I thought looked cool. I did it more than once which is probably why I remembered it.

It's interesting to look back as a kid at the things I used to do. We built a hole and tunnel in the back yard. For several years I was into gardening - tried flowers, corn, radishes, green beans. I used to love to swim. I used to take my own money and buy Christmas lights and decorate the trees outside and stuff. I don't do any of those things anymore. I mean gardening doesn't appeal to me in the slightest and I don't really love swimming anymore.

[Ingrid in grids]

Prenatal memory is real, but it's more a form of learning/habituation that prepares the fetus for postnatal development. At that stage of development, the fetus lacks the neural complexity to form lucid memories that we would recall in adulthood, even if one has an eidetic memory.

There's a great book by Alison Gopnik, in which she talks about some of this (and so much more) - The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.

There's evidence that babies learn to recognise their mother's voice and scent in utero, which helps to facilitate bonding and breastfeeding after birth. Exposure to the mother's voice also sets a foundation for later speech and language learning. There's a lot of motor learning during that stage of development. There is some evidence that exposure to certain foods during pregnancy affects the baby's food preferences after birth, and so on.

But no, we can't faithfully "remember" that our mother ate spaghetti during pregnancy in any lucid sense.

It's interesting. Most people don't remember their infancy because those memories were made without language. You lose some arguably purer and more direct connection to the world once you are taught how to use language, because it's indirect. It's representation.

Also memory requires re-exposure to stimulus. A lot of our earliest memories are so soon lost because there's no reinforcement.

[magpie]

Prenatal memory is a real, but it's more a form of learning/habituation that prepares the fetus for postnatal development. At that stage of development, the fetus lacks the neural complexity to form lucid memories that we would recall in adulthood, even if one has an eidetic memory.

There's a great book by Alison Gopnik, in which she talks about some of this (and so much more) - The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.

There's evidence that babies learn to recognise their mother's voice and scent in utero, which helps to facilitate bonding and breastfeeding after birth. Exposure to the mother's voice also sets a foundation for later speech and language learning. There's a lot of motor learning during that stage of development. There is some evidence that exposure to certain foods during pregnancy affects the baby's food preferences after birth, and so on.

But no, we can't faithfully "remember" that our mother ate spaghetti during pregnancy in any lucid sense.



Also memory requires re-exposure to stimulus. A lot of our earliest memories are so soon lost because there's no reinforcement.

I've read some psych books about the development of a sense of "self" and how babies lack ego boundaries, which they suggest is another component necessary for making and retaining memories. A cursory internet search shows a lot of articles and forum posts about people who claim to remember things like what their mother ate when they were in the womb. I recognize that the science isn't there to back that up right now and I think maybe for the claims that are legitimate, where a person just knows something that should be impossible because they were still a fetus, it's more spiritual, for lack of a better word. Meaning it defies our current ability to comprehend or measure yet still somehow happens. It's like people who report near death experiences despite having been brain dead. Impossible to understand but not impossible in itself.

[Stigmata]

I meant it as a serious post. I can remember what my mother ate on quite a few accounts and how the food tasted. I remember she ate a lot of Seasame chicken and how the green onions tasted. I remember her eating lots of rice and the taste of garlic. Apparently fetal memory can be a thing.

It's going to take a more dynamic mutant power than that to get in Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters -- While you're battling for the fate of the universe and everyone else is flying around, reading minds, and shooting lasers out of their eyes and brandishing knives out of their hands, I don't think being able to vividly recall your mother eating Panda Express 20+ years ago is going to help the team much.

[biohazard]

It's going to take a more dynamic mutant power than that to get in Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters -- While you're battling for the fate of the universe and everyone else is flying around, reading minds, and shooting lasers out of their eyes and brandishing knives out of their hands, I don't think being able to vividly recall your mother eating Panda Express 20+ years ago is going to help the team much.

I'm sorry I'm such a damn failure. I'm so sorry mommy. 😞😞😞

[Ingrid in grids]

I've read some psych books about the development of a sense of "self" and how babies lack ego boundaries, which they suggest is another component necessary for making and retaining memories. A cursory internet search shows a lot of articles and forum posts about people who claim to remember things like what their mother ate when they were in the womb. I recognize that the science isn't there to back that up right now and I think maybe for the claims that are legitimate, where a person just knows something that should be impossible because they were still a fetus, it's more spiritual, for lack of a better word. Meaning it defies our current ability to comprehend or measure yet still somehow happens. It's like people who report near death experiences despite having been brain dead. Impossible to understand but not impossible in itself.

Yes, interestingly there are also accounts of some small children being able to recall their own birth, including information that they have not been told by their parents, and simply could not have known otherwise. There's still a long way to go in memory studies.

Another thing to consider in all of this is the nature of memory/remembering itself. Remembering is not retrieval, but a creative process—a bit like retelling a story afresh each time, rather than re-reading the same story. We might feel that we know something, or that we remember something, but that does not mean that it is a faithful record of our earlier experiences. It is more likely to be the creative product of multiple inputs. Developing language capacity to describe these also complicates things. Like you mentioned, sense of self is critical to the development of autobiographical memory, which generally develops at around 2. There are types of memory at play prenatally and in early infancy, but the organisation is simply not there to generate autobiographical memory. My thinking on this is that the autobiographical memories have been created at a later age, and are not the direct transferral of that early prenatal learning, but rather a creative product of external inputs, social influences, family accounts, and so on.