I don’t and I’m 30. Almost anything before the age of 7 and quite little between 7 and 14.
But AFAIK most people do remember quite some stuff from their childhood for the rest of their life. And forget some of course. I guess it varies.
I remember age 8 to 12 a lot, but I barely remember before age 8… but I had a traumatic event in the city I lived in from birth to 8 years old so maybe those memories got repressed idk. Age 12 - 17 was so uneventful I kinda not have much. I’m in my early 20s btw
I have this recurring paranoia that I’ll eventually forget everything, and that thought just troubles me a lot. I hope I finish my memoir before I forget it lol.
CW existential dread
Spoiler
It’s a very hard thing to accept. The grief of your own death.
All of this: the people you love, you hate, friends, partners, families, is temporary. Even the memories. Even the journal you wrote, the picture you took fades away. Nothing can beat the heat death of the universe.
The only thing meaningful and beautiful is the positive experience you and you can bring to other people. At some moments of spacetime, someone is happy because of you.
It’s hard. Because the death takes our lifetime. That’s why we cherish it, we express how we feel. And also, it’s hard to just say goodbye even though we know it’s inevitable. But we have to learn to let it go.
If anything makes you feel better, all the memories are still there, becoming part of You.
I spent a lot of time with my grandfather in his final days, and he was hitting me with stories from when he was like 4-on. A lot of good memories and a lot of bad memories.
I’m 31 and remember a ton from my childhood. Which makes sense bc I have to remind myself that I’m a grown man and not a kid in social situations all the time. (like when I have to go to my child’s school and my brain flips where I’m overly respectful to the teachers and almost raise my hand to speak to them)
My wife had a rough childhood and can barely remember anything from those years due to mental blocks I guess.
Tldr idk it depends I guess
You can still be overly respectful to the teachers – I’m sure they appreciate it!
(Especially when there are parents who seem to treat the teachers as retail workers…)
True. I guess I mean my brain goes back into student mode and I tense up talking to them.
For me I have only some memories from before I got my fist smartphone. From that my brain can recall much more when I look at old pics that from before that age.
I think kids born after say 2005 will have so many photos that they will remember much more than any of the previous generations.
I’m 39…there are some things that I remember vividly, some cloudy and most I just don’t know
I may or may not be Old, depending on your definition, but I’m 43 and I remember my childhood very well.
I asked my mom (75) about something a while back related to the late 50’s and while her memory is getting a bit “senior”, she had no problem answering my question.
Everyone loses a lot of memories. The brain only stores what’s important. You’ll keep your most defining memories until Alzheimers starts destroying your brain.
Like usual with us humans and our fickle minds, YMMV.
There are many factors that can impact this, though I would clarify - you aren’t losing memories, they’re there, just harder to access. You aren’t losing your sense of self, it’s evolving - who you are as a person is constantly changing.
For me personally, as someone with aphantasia I’ve never really been in touch with my memories in the first place. I’ve been very much a “in the moment” person - despite that my past experiences do define me, even if I don’t know why.
This is a good question and I’ll be interested to see what others have to say. One thing I’ve noticed is that memories can transform into ‘memories of memories’. What I remember is not the felt impression of something but what I subsequently told or showed myself about it. And it doesn’t even just apply to childhood - I have same thing for big events in my life from last couple of years.
I do find that it’s possible to consciously dig deeper and unearth forgotten memories though.
I’ll also add that I think what constitutes a sense of ‘self’ is more than just memory.
it seems like they mostly remember the ‘vibe’ along with some hazy memories. kinda unrelated to OP but my grandparents started showing me AI generated pics/vids claming it’s “just like his childhood”…
AI generated pics/vids
Ngl this AI stuff is why I’m kinda sus of writing a journal/diary digitally…
feels like someone can easily manipulate it to implant a false memory when I go back to read it
as long as you keep it safe i still think it’s better than not having one though. it’s much easier to manipulate memory when there’s nothing to compare/verify against. tho, the journal being leaked or modified is a big issue, maybe a git repo inside some encrypted drive would do…
There’s a video I watched that demonstrated VHS quality degrading by generation. And that to me was the accurate depiction of how human memory can work like. Every waking hour, we are making new memories and those new memories have a chance of overwriting the old ones as we grow older. New experiences, new people, new places, even going different routes than your usual all can have that impact.
Some people’s memories are better than others. In my case, I can’t really recall a lot from my earlier childhood, it is all just bits and pieces. My teenage years is about as far back as my memory goes, my young adulthood is more remembered and the last 5 years are like yesterday to me at times.
I’m almost 50 and I remember a lot of my childhood. I remember riding in a car with my mother down the main street in town and not being able to read signs. So like 1983-84. I remember a bunch of other things from that far back. Sights, sounds, feelings. More the later you go. A lot of the late 80s and beyond.
I don’t really but have always been bad at that. My wife on the other hand has countless memories I think from as early as 3-4. I mostly forget everything before grade 5 or 6.
You start your life by forgetting your past. All the times you fell over, were hungry or overtired, or shat your pants as a baby or toddler. You don’t remember that time unless something happened that’s traumatizing in the extreme. Somewhere between that age and when you start school you start retaining memories. Not all of them but enough to reminisce. You’re growing still so every day is a new experience and not everything makes the cut. And then you age. Once you cross 40 you’ll notice a lot more that you cannot remember why you went to the garage but you can remember all the teachers from your elementary school days. Most of your classmates too but that guy’s name in Accounting who you talk to every other day is nowhere to be found. And when you reach an age where death is becoming likely every day, you reminisce and you remember lots of stuff from ages ago but not what you had for breakfast. Dementia fucks with you but they remember their moody teenage music tastes and react more to that than their own offspring.
Memory retention is not a linear thing.
I remember breastfeeding, learning to crawl and walk, the intense frustration I felt while trying to communicate before I learned how to speak.
I remember breastfeeding, learning to crawl and walk
No way.
Howwww.
My earliest memory was something… I think was when I was like 3, I remember seeing photos dated 2005… (probably still in some drawers somewhere) so I was visiting Hong Kong from Guangzhou…
I think we went there to vacation(?) + meet with relatives from abroad in the US
I really only remember
- cable cars
- the hotel room that you need a special card thing to access and turn on the electricity in the room (I think it must’ve been some rfid thing)
- Double-deck buses
- Trolleys(?)
That’s about it
I remember it kinda feel “western”? (I mean of course it felt western after 99 years of british rule lol)
I think I already knew how to say basic words in Cantonese at this point so I remember asking a question about the weird rfid hotel card thing…
But like… nah how the f do you remember breastfeeding and being a toddler?
I have zero memories of pre-speaking age of myself.
I guess having a language make it easier to form memories? Or maybe vice versa? Being able to form memories make it possible to retain a language? Idk.
I just never forgot.
I have lots of memories from when I was a baby, a toddler. Mundane things, like sitting in a high chair eating Cheerios and drinking juice from a sippy cup, playing with my toys, crawling around the house. More impactful ones, like when my parents were trying to get me to walk, which I didn’t want to do, but couldn’t argue yet, so I kept attempting to show them that walking was foolish because I could crawl much faster. My first word, “trash,” which I picked up from watching my mother sort the mail, and initially thought applied to everything made of paper. How I figured out how to escape my drop-side crib, and would wander around the house at night while my parents slept. When my mother came home from the hospital with my younger sister and I first held her, and promptly dropped her, when I was just shy of 2. How jealous I was that my mother weaned me because of the new baby. Teaching my sister how to escape the crib, so she could play with me at night. Being angry that she wasn’t careful like me, and got caught escaping the crib. My first day of pre-school, which I desperately did not want to attend. Starting a fight in pre-school, I beat a boy with a wicker basket because he tried to play with the building blocks I was using.
You don’t need language to think, or form memories. Small children often are able to remember and recount these sorts of things, they just forget them as they age.
Oh, I just recalled a good one. A memory of a word from before I could speak.
My mother had gestational diabetes, and I was born a very large and fat baby. For the first few months of my life, my parents called me “Baby Huey,” a reference to a 1950s cartoon character. They stopped calling me that long before I could speak, and then forgot they ever had.
I brought this up later in my childhood, because I wanted to know what a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, the only Huey I knew about then, had to do with baby me.
While I’m a bit skeptical about your memories of learning to crawl, I’ll accept those pre-speaking memories, because I have those too. My two earliest memories I wasn’t speaking real words yet, just babbling, and I remember the frustration; both with being understood as well as with anyone actually trying to figure out what the hell I was saying. I remember it was especially frustrating as I could understand others around me, I just couldn’t be understood myself.
I also remember how big I was; in the one memory I was standing beside a chair, and it was the perfect height for me to lay my head down in the seat while standing up. So, standing but not yet talking. That would put me in the range of 10-14 months old, give or take
Not if they have Alzheimer’s otherwise probably yes. The first thing I remember is from like 3 years old.
Most people with Alzheimer’s actually tend to loose more recent memories first. So they can tell you all about their childhood pets, but nothing about their children.
The way memory works, your brain constructs the memory based on stuff from the last time you thought about it, mixed with other random shit.
You’re never remembering “the” event. You’re retelling yourself a story like a game of telephone. The past is gone.
I don’t feel like this is entirely true. I have some memories that play out more like shorts, that have always been very clear and never change in detail. They’re just engraved there, some of them can be easily corroborated among multiple people and/or video footage
Various studies have shown this to be true. When you access memories, they become malleable. The brain makes various minor updates and repairs. It fixes holes, where bits have been forgotten, and pulls in new data, that wasn’t known at the time.
The core of the memory is often intact, it’s generally self referencing, and fairly stable. It’s the small details around it that can shift.
