Childhood amnesia kicks in around age 7

I have distinct memories of when I was 2-3 y.o. that have astounded my parents. I was raised in Korea till I was about 3, then we all flew to Hawaii to immigrate to the U.S. I remember the flight, I remember my life in Korea, I remember going to the public spa&#x27;s with my dad, I remember feeling ashamed of my nudity in front of many older folks around me. I told all of this to my parents later in life, and they were amazed. I even distinctly remember the time when I thought I was lost, being scared, walking through a tunnel only to emerge to find a statue of some Korean soldiers. My parents found me and took a picture of me pointing at that statue. I asked my mom about that time, and I said, &quot;How did I get lost? I was scared.&quot; My mom said that they were following me from afar, making sure I didn&#x27;t see them, and they wanted to see how I would explore the world.<p>I&#x27;ve told people about this many times. And, people just can&#x27;t or won&#x27;t believe me. A history professor told me that this is impossible, because children can&#x27;t remember anything before the age of 3. He was adamant about it, and completely dismissive of my claims. I think these kinds of pseudo-scientific research (you know, taking polls and applying statistics) should be taken with a grain of salt. One should NOT draw definitive conclusions from them.

I remember several things from before I was 3 (and plenty more after that), but I&#x27;m always unsure if it is an actual memory, or a memory of a memory.<p>I was a pretty introspective kid. I thought about my past and tried to recall my childhood even at the young age of 5. So perhaps my earliest memories are really just memories of being 6 or 7 and thinking back to when I was 2. Second hand memories, so to speak.

I see two other people commenting about framing memories based on moving at a young age. I have the same thing, and I wonder if moving at a young age correlates with higher childhood memories.<p>I moved when I was 7, and it&#x27;s a <i>very</i> distinct transition in the quality of my memories. I have tons of pre-move memories, including one confirmed by my parents as my 2nd birthday party, but they&#x27;re primitive. No sense of time, just a jumble of memories that I can&#x27;t place chronologically, and most are very brief moments. However, I remember the move and everything after it vividly and in chronological order.<p>I would suppose that the move made me reminisce about my old home during the period when my childhood memories were fading, and saved many of them from being lost.

All I remember about when I was young is due to looking at photo&#x2F;video of the event, and then later on, when I&#x27;m &quot;remembering&quot; the event, I&#x27;m really remembering the photo&#x2F;video. I&#x27;d say I have close to 0 legitimate memories of when I was young. Anyone else?

The opening to the article:<p>&gt; You could travel the world with an infant aged under 3 and it&#x27;s almost guaranteed that when they get older they won&#x27;t remember a single boat trip, plane ride or sunset. This is thanks to a phenomenon, known as childhood or infantile amnesia, that means most of us lose all our earliest autobiographical memories. It&#x27;s a psychological conundrum because when they are 3 or younger, kids are able to discuss autobiographical events from their past. So it&#x27;s not that memories from before age 3 never existed, it&#x27;s that they are subsequently forgotten.<p>This is obviously tremendously overblown. I could just as easily point out that people who are over 60 frequently have no memory of things (even significant things) that happened in their 20s. It&#x27;s a &quot;psychological conundrum&quot; because people in their 20s are able to discuss current events!<p>Memories, no matter when they originate from, fade with disuse. We have plenty of people, here and outside, who can attest to preserving early memories. Attacking them on the grounds that those memories could be reconstructions instead of strengthened &quot;true&quot; memories doesn&#x27;t make any sense -- all memories are reconstructions; there is no possible way to distinguish between a &quot;true memory&quot; and a &quot;reconstructed memory&quot; <i>at any age</i>.<p>All that said, the coolest experiment I know of in this area concerned visiting children still in the process of language acquisition with a &quot;marvelous machine&quot; designed to be highly entertaining and memorable. The experiment showed that though the children remembered the machine a (couple?) years later, when asked about their memories of it, they would describe it using only words they knew at the time of the visit.

I remember one event from back when I was a bit over 1.<p>My mom took me to her friend&#x27;s shop, they had 2 daughters and a chihuahua. One of the daughters (~5 years old) picked up the chihuahua and held it in front of my stroller, within reach. She urged me to pet it, and when I did, the dog bit the first joint of my left ring finger off. I remember that part, I remember crying, but I don&#x27;t remember having it sewn back on.<p>To this day, I&#x27;m irrationally horrified of tiny dogs (I like big ones as long as they don&#x27;t bark and show teeth).<p>Sidenote: Whoever sewed it back on didn&#x27;t do a very good job; you can see it&#x27;s slightly slanted and a bit rotated too. =( I&#x27;m thankful for getting it back though.

My earliest memory is of riding on my mother&#x27;s lap in a tank. My older sister tells me I must have been less than 18 months old as this would have been a family day event at Fort Benning Georgia in the fall before we left for Germany. I was born in June, so this puts me around age 15 to 17 months. So the tank must have made a really big impression on me.<p>While in therapy in my twenties, at some point, I spontaneously remembered my own birth. In my teens, I knew a woman who claimed to remember her own birth. I think she was born outside and there was snow on the ground, so perhaps the shock of it made an impression?<p>My oldest son is able to access his early childhood memories. He is a visual and kinesthetic thinker and had trouble learning to talk. It took practice for him to be able to access them reliably and it involved him essentially translating them into English for the first time. I accidentally tripped across the fact that he had memories from infancy, which is a longish story that I don&#x27;t have time to type out.<p>Short version: I think there is still lots to be learned about how early memories are formed, accessed, etc.

My earliest (or one of the earliest) memories is of a guy in a mascot costume coming to our preschool to promote a bank. I think they gave us some money boxes, and I guess they were trying to teach us about the importance of saving money. I would have been 3 or 4 at the time.<p>35+ years on I can still vividly remember the mascot, which bank it was, etc.<p>It saddens me that my earliest memory is of a form of advertising.

My earliest memories are very clear, and I astounded my father when I recounted them as a teenager. I remember riding in the car by my dad&#x27;s work at the University, and seeing owls on the facade of some of the buildings. We always stopped at one building in particular. Obviously some of the context for the memories is pieced together from when I was older -- e.g. The fact that I was riding in the car. I distinctly remember my dad pointing out the owls and saying the word for &quot;owl&quot; but being unable to remember&#x2F;grok the word, for example.<p>Anyway when I was a teenager we drove by the building we used to stop at and I told my dad about these early memories. It turns out that my mother had been seeing a therapist in that building on campus and once a week we would drive by to do a pickup and drop off. He was so shocked because they never discussed the matter with anyone, so he figured it was a real memory.<p>According to my dad I was six months old.

I had meningitis when I was 2, and I clearly remember a flash of when I was in the hospital bed, with all the gear monitoring me, trying to reach out for my blanket. My mother confirmed my story when I was ~20.<p>It&#x27;s pretty vivid actually, and not only do I remember the &quot;scene&quot; but also how I felt and what I thought.<p>I have a few others like that, but this is the most ancient.

Now they need to test for the type of memory recalled, is there a difference in emotionally laden memories vs non emotional &#x27;moment&#x27; or experience based memories?<p>And what is the recall on &#x27;pure&#x27; emotional memories?(Where the memory is primarily about the emotion, not what was occuring at the time).<p>This would be incredibly useful in counseling psychology (and possibly neuropsych), where emotional based memories can get corrupted or ingrained into a person&#x27;s overall personality. (Think of getting burned by a stove becoming anything from a subconscious jerk away from a stove to full phobias).

Like many people, I have a few early memories (3.5, 4 yrs old).<p>But I can&#x27;t stop wondering - do I <i></i>really<i></i> remember them, or do I only remember remembering them?<p>I mean, is it a &quot;direct&quot; memory? Or is it an act of recollecting a previous recollection of it?<p>Like, I remembered what I did at 4 when I was 6, fine. And then, if I happened to remember it still when I was 8, I actually remembered how I recalled the event being 6.<p>This is (I believe) how distortions gradually crawl in. And I believe it persists in adult life as well; every refreshing of a memory is actually rewriting it, thus damaging it in a way

If I had to make an uneducated guess, it&#x27;s probably because at early ages our recall is vastly different compared to years later. Older memories aren&#x27;t as easily accessible because they&#x27;re on different neural pathways that haven&#x27;t been used in a while.<p>The earliest I can remember is probably riding my first bicycle at around age 7-8, and everything after that is a flurry of memories that I have no idea where they came from. Little bits of conversations or of rooms that used to be in the house before they were knocked down and rebuilt, etc.

&gt;<i>In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 recalled fewer than 40 per cent of the events they&#x27;d discussed at age 3, but those memories they did recall were more adult-like in their content.</i> &#x2F;&#x2F;<p>If the memories recalled were more adult like at a later age that suggests children recalled things at a later age that they didn&#x27;t (couldn&#x27;t?) recall at an earlier age.<p>This seems to me the most important insight in the article in respect of recall, that one would need greater understanding in order to recall details that one couldn&#x27;t recall earlier. But mostly that recall is not [completely] limited by cognition.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that the results didn&#x27;t really show that though ...<p>These sorts of articles just make me want to do research to rigorously address the obvious questions that don&#x27;t appear to be addressed.

Does anyone know of other research about how to promote increased retention of early childhood memories?

I remember my parents dropping me at the neighbors when they went to hospital to give birth to my brother. I was a month shy of 3. Then I have nothing until I&#x27;m about 5.

I have had a smell trigger a memory from my pre-seven-childhood. It was a smell that I hadn&#x27;t smelt in the intervening years.<p>It was upon meeting a distant relative that made a dish the first time I met them and then again when I met them in my mid-twenties.<p>The second I smelled the smell of the dish I remembered an incident that I alone witnessed -- getting jalapeño oil in my eye when I was sneaking some of the dish.

I have tons of memories of age 2 and 3. My mother would often ask me, &quot;What did you do today?&quot; before I went to sleep, and so perhaps that is why I can recall so much.<p>Interesting memories are: the day I saw light shine on dust particles, watching my sister miss her first bus, and eating lint off the floor.

I have a large number of memories from age 2 and going forward. I can even remember the details of conversations I heard and the physical appearance, location and orientation of various objects that were in my environments, and can accurately recall the floor plans of places I lived in or visited. I can&#x27;t recall a single thing prior to my second birthday, though. I&#x27;m age 37, presently.<p>I&#x27;ve met people who, if the subject of very early memories came up in conversation, thought it was completely normal as they have similar ones. I&#x27;ve talked to other people, though, who insist that I can&#x27;t possibly be telling the truth, perhaps because they can&#x27;t even imagine remembering anything that far back.

There&#x27;s also parental amnesia where as soon as a person has a child, they completely forget what it was like to be a child and get very frustrated that their children aren&#x27;t adults. I see it all the time in colleagues.

I wonder about other thing. I don&#x27;t remember when (circa 10?), but I remember that some day I fully get a very sad tougth: I can&#x27;t dream anymore as a child.<p>I have the tendency to run the same kind of &quot;history&quot; in my dreams (obviously, awake!) before sleep then continue it later. I remember that I was playing a kind of war history or something (I forgot), and for the life of me, I can&#x27;t do it like before. Now I only get stuck, and things are not fluid.<p>Exist some info about this? When is not possible anymore to have (on command) the same vivid dream bending as a child?

Isn&#x27;t there also a phenomenon of elderly people recovering childhood memories? I&#x27;ve always heard of this, and relatives in their 60s and 70s have told me of vivid memories of their early life. In the same age range, they have less memory of more recent events. It&#x27;s as if the transition to childhood amnesia is reversed. If some of this is true, it should provide clues for researchers to pursue.

I remember a few things that happened to me when I was 2 years old. Mostly some events when I used to play with my cat or with legos in my room.<p>I&#x27;m fairly sure those aren&#x27;t constructed memories, not sure why some specific memories have stuck with me compared to others from such an early age (they were nothing particular, really, no special events). The human brain is such a fascinating thing.

My earliest memory it&#x27;s me in the high chair (seggiolone, in italian) at age 1.5, doing that game of the plane which is a spoon with food.<p>After that, all dark until age 2 with a lot - a lot - of kindergarden memories and so on till yesterday.<p>Always thought it was the norm.

My 5 year old daughter has great memory and recollection of her entire childhood, reminding us of things we had forgotten about when she was 2, 3, etc.<p>I thought it was remarkable, since I can&#x27;t recall any of my own memories from younger than 10 years old.

Any Study that claims to know what someone remembers to thinks is inherently unreliable and has a potential for falsehood. Until mind reading is perfected, there is just know way to test what someone else is thinking for sure.

What about forgetting your 20s? I can barely remember what I used to eat before I learned how to cook. I assume that it was a lot of macaroni and cheese, pasta and mashed potatoes, but I can&#x27;t really remember.

I recall very very little specific memories before 12 even. I know flashes...

Heh, I think some significant memories can be retained. I know that my 4 year old son will forever remember what happens when you play with a loaded mouse trap.

I have little memories when I was below five and I can still remember how I felt during those times. Thanks for posting this! Great info!