
Studying how the brain relinquishes childhood memories - johnny313
http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/this-is-where-your-childhood-memories-went-rp
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notahacker
Aside from the changes to the brain hardware, I'd imagine the way in which we
construct memories changes to a much higher level of abstraction in early
childhood (e.g. building "photographic" memory from a set of concepts around
location, lighting and types and condition of objects rather than simply
colours and shapes, building our memory of human interaction from a mental
model which assumes the other people have motivations and personality traits
not just tones of voice etc). So even if some of the information from earlier
years is actually preserved, our older brains may not be able to parse it
unless it was important enough to reconstruct with a different mental model.

~~~
abtinf
Young children deal with memories on perceptual level - images, smells,
feelings. Adults deal with memories on a conceptual level - words.

My wife is a clinical psychologist specialized in the treatment of adult
survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For her dissertation, she developed a new
treatment that takes these memory processes into account, and it is
extraordinarily effective.

Adults in this population are often totally unable to articulate and reason
about their childhood experiences, acting out emotionally and developing
secondary psychological issues. But it turns out they are able communicate and
treat terrible deeply held beliefs through art.

It is not my subject area and I can't explain it with justice, but just wanted
to point out that your intuition is on the right track.

~~~
pritambaral
Could we get a link, perhaps? I'd like it very much to read more about the
method.

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ggm
I try very hard to avoid making myself special in amongst the general case.
But, I came here to observe I had verified memories from close to pre-verbal
times, something I am told is not common.

If these were subsequent implants from conversation or comment from my elders,
it was pretty subtle. The memories are far weaker now, but up to my twenties
they were strong, lasting visual impressions of three specific locations.

(I'm in my fifties now)

~~~
messel
I believe I remember potty training but my parents said I learned at 13
months. I'm likely misremembering using a tiny plastic toilet in the bathroom
from that age to 2-3.

I can almost certainly remember the daunting climb onto a full sized toilet
between age 3-4.

~~~
RandomInteger4
I think my earliest memory was standing at the door to my basement with one
hand on the door knob and the other hand counting, saying something along the
lines of "I'm 3 now" or something. Either that or it was some sort of daycare
visit. Order is difficult to remember.

As I began typing this I just remembered this football toy chest I used to
have in my basement.

The earliest thing I don't remember for which there is (was?) recorded
evidence of, is me as a toddler picking up giant carpenter ants and trying to
put them in my mouth before a parent came over and stopped me.

~~~
phyllostachys
Football toy chest! I had one of those. I remember climbing inside it -- being
able to fit inside it even. I remember, when I was older, trying to climb
inside but backing out because I was afraid of getting stuck in there (and
trying to imagine how they would cut me out of the thing, that kind of gives
me the heebie jeebies even now).

~~~
RandomInteger4
Lol, yeah, I think everyone that had one of those must have climbed in at some
point. Me and my cousins used to put the lid on and roll each other around
probably giving us brain damage in the process. I think the last time I got in
was after one time when my older cousins were torturing me by sitting on the
lid and not letting me out.

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RandomInteger4
I've been remembering a lot of my childhood lately. Perhaps it's due to
recently adding DHEA to my supplement stack, though not exactly sure what the
cause is, but it feels good and sad at the same time.

I've wasted a lot of my life due to reasons both within and out of my control.

In any case, one memory that came to mind recently was the ponzi scheme I
tried starting around 4th grade -- I think it was? -- when playing around with
Print Master Deluxe's fun "ye olde" paper background template. I called it
"Joe's Money Club". The point of the club was that people would join and pay
dues on a certain schedule, and we'd use those funds to try to make money. I'm
joking partly about it being a ponzi scheme ... I think; the story is more fun
if I play it up that way, but as I think about it, I don't think it was
technically a ponzi scheme, because I do remember trying to sell ear plugs (my
dad worked in a factory and had a ton of these packs of orange ear plug
pairs). In any case, the club disbanded around a week later due to lack of
interest, and I tried to give the money back from dues, but everyone just let
me keep it.

~~~
technovader
Ok

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InInteraction
wow, this article explains why I don't remember my childhood and the most part
of my teenage years, and even later memories are registered as some facts, not
actual memories. I always thought it's a protective mechanism my brain
developed to get rid of all the negative things, but the authors say it is
just the price for being physically active (I run 10k every day, play
Ultimate, + martial arts, mountaineering/alpinism and other extreme sports) =>
growing new neurons:

"A few years back, Frankland and his wife Sheena Josselyn—also a
neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children—started to notice that the
mice they studied performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after
living in a cage with a running wheel. As the couple knew, exercise on a
running wheel promotes neurogenesis—the growth of whole new neurons—in the
seahorse-shaped hippocampus, a brain region that is essential for memory. But
while neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus likely contributes to the ability
to learn and remember, Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and others had
suggested5 that it might also necessitate a certain amount of forgetting. Just
as a forest has room for only so many trees, the hippocampus can hold only so
many neurons. New brain cells might crowd the territory of other neurons or
even replace them altogether, which could in turn break or reconfigure the
small circuits that likely store individual memories. Perhaps, then, the
especially high rate of neurogenesis in infancy was partly responsible for
childhood amnesia."

And this also explains why I always try to schedule my long runs after the
calls to my mother (they are stressful), and add more miles if I have more
stress in my life in general:

"when adults ran on a hamster wheel after the shocks—thereby stimulating
neurogenesis—they started to mirror infants in their forgetfulness. Prozac,
which also encourages neural growth, had the same effect. Conversely, when the
researchers hindered neurogenesis in infant mice with drugs or genetic
engineering, the young animals formed much more stable memories."

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pledess
My anecdotal observation is that very smart people have few early childhood
memories, whereas less smart people have many early childhood memories.
Possibly the brains of the smarter people accomplished a more efficient
restructuring in which essentially all storage resources became available for
adult memories.

If this were true, I wonder if anyone would try to exploit it in contexts such
as job interviews. Specifically, could the ELI5 concept be repurposed? Do I
ask an applicant to "Explain When You Were 5" and, if they have a coherent
response, put that person at the bottom of the pile?

~~~
FooBarWidget
That assumes that "smart" is what you need. What about things like discipline,
consistency, honesty, cooperativeness, etc? For example some smart people
think that only they are right, and if you task them to do something they
don't fully agree with they lose all motivation, even if the "right" in that
context is subjective and/or a matter of taste. In some organizations and
jobs, the ability to work together as to allow business continuity and
redundancy is more valuable than the heroic contributions of any one person.
Some smart people also hate unchallenging work, but not all work can be
challenging -- indeed a lot of my work as an entrepreneur and supervisor is
boring but it is necessary.

You also assume that "smart" has a single definition -- or a good definition
at all. What about two different people who are smart in different ways, but
only one of those ways is correlated to childhood memories?

What if you are simply observing someone's communication style, and merely
interpreting a certain communication style as "less smart"? For example, some
people are extraverted and respond really quickly, but on the other hand they
didn't really think things through, miss details and change their minds often.
Other people could be described as more introverted, don't respond quickly and
need to think about something for a couple of nights, but when they come back
to you they've really given it a thought and understand all the details and
don't change their mind quickly. People in the former group and more easily
perceived as "smart" and "a leader" while people in the other less so.

I've seen the definition of IQ. I've studied a bit of psychology. The more I
know about those two the more I think that the concept of "IQ" and "smart" are
bullshit. There is often no "more/less smart", there is only "different".

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proverbialbunny
I did some meta-learning where I wrote out my thought process while learning
and then came back 3 months later to verify retainment as well accuracy.

From doing this I have a few theories about memory (All from my mind. We could
record memory different.):

\- Memory is read once write many. That is, every time we retrieve a memory we
rewrite it back, modifying it slowly.

\- The emotional state of the recorded memory combined with the last few
recalls determines how easy the memory will automatically pop up, without
digging for it. This is based on the emotional state while retrieving the
memory. (eg, studying in a class room increases test scores do the environment
being the same. Depression, manic depressive, DID, and many other emotional
states determine what memories or thoughts will arise in the mind next in
relation to the current moment.)

\- Memories of just the individual moment (usually slices in time or elements
of spacial awareness) are in a sort of tree structure. Details of an event are
recursively retrieved while the most important parts to that moment to the
individual usually sit higher in the tree. (eg, near photographic memory shows
a person who constructs a deep tree, and usually recurses it quickly.)

\- The key aspects of a "concept" (a unconscious part of a knowledge instance,
not the whole piece) are retained through the distance of neighboring similar
concepts (metaphor, or literal), and by how many neighboring concepts there
are. This makes a graph. I originally suspected you'd want 3 neighboring
concepts, but 2 seems to work perfectly fine for long term memory retainment
(if not 1 neighboring node), as long as the neighboring concepts are not too
distant. The distance between concepts strongly determines the "pressure" on
the mind during learning, the resolution of the knowledge learned, and
ultimately if it is retained or not. Oddly, this seems to be somewhat black
and white for long term memory: you either retain the concept or you do not,
even if that concept is not used, as long as the mind has some level of
importance tied to it enough to record it to begin with.

\- The finer details of what the patterns the mind processes is a difference
between two or more patterns in space and/or time. This functions similar to a
video codec where the entire detail is not recorded, but just the relational
change. Without this difference between two or more patterns, we may not be
able to record anything. (eg, the static on an analog tv. The difference to
'not-static' is recorded, but it is a higher level concept. The individual
squares on the screen are not recorded into memory, but instead only the
details that can be pattern matched to a neighboring pattern.)

\- Neighboring aspects within concepts can and do bridge multiple domains of
pattern matching sensory experience, but usually do not unless necessary. I've
labeled these axoms and they take longer to learn / more pressure on the mind
than normal concepts. (eg, learning addition is more difficult than learning
multiplication, because addition crosses from the abstract into the concrete,
but multiplication only requires the knowledge of addition to be learned.)

\- The name of word that represents a concept can be learned through
neighboring word concepts, as it is somewhat like a concept on top of a
concept, but I've found the easiest way to remember the name of a thing or the
vocabulary word coupled with the concept is to build a story for it. So far
I've found two kinds of stories that work best: 1) Humorous metaphors, as
humor for some sort of reason creates a strong memory. and 2) An interesting
story about it. This could be a mythology, usually a fiction with metaphors to
tie it together (see Memory Palace) but for me, my personal interest is
etymology: _Why_ is that thing called what it is called? If I have a story for
the thought process of why it is called that, the name is recorded. This can
be fiction or nonfiction, but I find nonfiction to have the added benefit of
understanding the thought process of others or a moment in time, which is a
cool added bonus.

\- When written down or said out loud during a memory record, it solidifies
far better. I have a few theories as to why that is. One of them is akin to
'rubber duck debugging', where writing it out unchunks assumptions and forces
one to walk over the entire structure.

\- If within a single domain over 220-250 concepts are recorded, either
headaches can happen, or old concepts will fall out, much like an LRU. This
most likely ties into the size our brain, as that determines how many people
we remember (roughly ~250) and the numbers seem to line up here too. By
creating categories for subjects this 250 element restriction no longer
applies.

This, as mentioned above, is a tree structure being recursed upon and written
out in list format, but because there are subtle details beyond these points,
I'm probably forgetting a lot that is there in my memory, but I don't have a
reason to dive into more detail. (eg, how examples can concrete abstract
thoughts solidifying them, ...most etymology for vocabulary is visual, if you
go far enough back, ...)

My recall of 300 concepts learned in 3 months is easily above that of 95%. Two
years later, with no use of the concepts and retainment is still clearly above
90%, but the etymology of the vocabulary in certain domains (namely logic)
seems to fade for me.

~~~
tmpmov
I've been considering my mind's data structures as well recently.

I find it, normal?, that humorous metaphors work best. I assume it's easier on
the psyche and 'funner' to recall.

~~~
proverbialbunny
Some of the people I know who naturally retain memory the best are some of the
brightest and clear headed people. (Not including near perfect memory
recording individuals, who do not have humor associated with their memories.)

I on the other hand suck at humor. I find if I try to make a humorous
association it seems forced, which does work to some extent, but leaves me
feeling a bit forced during recall, so I don't find that worth it. However,
when it is naturally funny or amusing, you better believe it sticks.

I suspect this has to do with anxiety. Humor isn't the opposite of anxiety
(that would be closer to hypnosis, I would guess) but humor breaks tension
like cutting melted butter. So much so, if you get pulled over, and if you can
make the officer laugh within a minute, your chances of getting a ticket are
nearly zero.

There is clearly something going on here, but what it is, I admit I'm in the
dark.

If you're the kind that can find humor in everything, especially puns and
similar, you've very lucky.

~~~
tmpmov
>Some of the people I know who naturally retain memory the best are some of
the brightest and clear headed people. (Not including near perfect memory
recording individuals, who do not have humor associated with their memories.)
>I on the other hand suck at humor. I find if I try to make a humorous
association it seems forced, which does work to some extent, but leaves me
feeling a bit forced during recall, so I don't find that worth it. However,
when it is naturally funny or amusing, you better believe it sticks.

For me, I find that unless the joke has been expressed to others I simply
forget the attempted association. Even if it's a bad joke or bad association,
the expression portion helps to make the association of humor with the
concept/memory more concrete.

>I suspect this has to do with anxiety. Humor isn't the opposite of anxiety
(that would be closer to hypnosis, I would guess) but humor breaks tension
like cutting melted butter. So much so, if you get pulled over, and if you can
make the officer laugh within a minute, your chances of getting a ticket are
nearly zero.

This is a good point. I seem to recall reading somewhere that there a variety
of reasons we find things funny but a large one has to do with inhibiting
flight/fight response after a close call.

>There is clearly something going on here, but what it is, I admit I'm in the
dark.

>If you're the kind that can find humor in everything, especially puns and
similar, you've very lucky.

If I take an extreme view (one which I don't fully believe but will use for
illustration), then humor of a particular variety helps us to recognize
situations that are dangerous/seemingly dangerous, but survivable, if we can
recall what decisions extricated us from that situation previously. I feel
like that's heading in the direction of creating strong, positive,
associations.

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scotty79
At 38, given, how little I remember about the details of events of last two
decades, places I've been, people I met, things I've done... I'm surprised I
have any memories of events from my childhood.

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mattdeboard
What I have been curious about for some time is if there's a neurochemical
basis for actively hiding away memories or feelings from your conscious brain,
aka compartmentalization.

