Heh. I've got memories from ages two and three that are pretty solid, and there were not photos or other records to prompt them. Some people really can do this. Some of my early memories were "filled in" by later experiences when I learned something that "explained" the earlier memory, and it was then reinforced, but the early memories are independent from the later ones.
My earliest memory was President Kennedy's assassination, but of course I had no idea of what a president was, life, death, etc. I was 16 months old. What I do remember was a bunch of strange people in and out of the house with the TV on and everyone very concerned, but what I remember most of that day was that it was the day I learned how to shake my crib and move it around the room while I was inside. I remember my parents not liking the fact that I was able to do that. I've never discussed that memory with them, and they're both gone now, so I never will.
I've got memories from when I barely knew how to talk, and didn't understand what the people around me were saying. My memory isn't good enough to decode what was said after I learned the language. I can clearly remember sitting in my high chair eating Alphabet cereal, and trying to make words with the letters I had not yet learned. I get sad when I think about how my parents would brush me off, probably thinking that I was too young to learn much. (My parents were both school teachers!)
Same. I'm always kind of shocked when people don't. My wife hardly remembers anything before she was 8.
We moved a couple months before I turned three and I have a bunch of memories that predate that. I remember being potty trained and lying to my parents about it so I could get a treat. I remember my dad coming home from the family farm and having injured his hand on some machinery. I remember stealing a pack of orange gum from the grocery store and chewing it all up underneath the piano in our basement. I could keep going and going.
My earliest memory was before I was two. Somewhere around 19-20 months. I know this because I had an ear infection and that's when it occurred. I'm sitting in my crib, crying due to the pain in my ear, and screaming "mom" at the door in the room. The room is mostly dark, but the door has been left open a crack to let in a little bit of light. From my vantage, looking through the slats in the crib, the door is open on the left. My mom comes in once, finally, and then leaves.
I also feel like I have an earlier one, being carried in a room which may have been my nursery, looking down on a changing table. I'm pretty sure I'm being held by my father, but I can't say for certain that this is real.
Around 2 tends to be the earliest limits that have been confirmed.
Memory scientists don't claim that no memory persists from infancy, its just that it hasn't been confirmed, and there's lots of evidence of infants failing to remember events from months back in infant memory experimental paradigms, and highly plausible scenarios of memory reconstructions, from pictures, or from stories.
5 year later show the same two balls and say you will give the kid an ice cream if it picks the same color. Obviously give the ice cream no matter the pick ...
What Rust helps with is memory safety, which is stuff like dangling pointers and use-after-free. Memory leaks are not a safety issue, they're an efficiency issue.
> Why are people so crazy about Rust?
The whole memory safety thing isn't actually the reason so many people love Rust. In the Rust 2024 community survey, 82% of users agreed that "Rust allows us to build relatively correct and bug free software." Memory safety is part of that, but there's a lot more to it.
So, for example, while Rust does not guarantee the lack of memory leaks, it does make them relatively hard to produce by accident in the first place. This is due to the intersection of a few different parts of Rust's overall design.
How do you know that is where you got the memory? Early birthdays can be tricky because it is common for families to record them on video and if you saw such a video a few years later that could create a memory that you would think was from the birthday itself.
Personally I don't trust most memories I have from before around 4 because my parents had around 20 reels of home movies from that time and I know that I saw several of those movies a few years later.
We didnt have anything to film with & there are no pictures from that day.
I remember only a specific moment: we went to pick up my grandpa and i recall the shirt he was wearing very precisely.
I can’t guarantee that the memory is genuine, but it is very specific and I had to reconstruct my age from discussing the memory with my mom.
I fell off a countertop and got a concussion when I was 2.5, it's a very vivid and painful memory. I also moved to a different state when I was 5.
I have a very clear delineation of before and after the age of 5, and I have hundreds of memories from before the move. Most are rather intense events, but I even remember the layout of my house, construction sites, my daycare, neighbors, friends houses, holidays, first bike ride, first lizard I caught, my pets, even some dreams I had, etc...
I didn't have a good idea of time yet, but I can retroactively tell when things occurred based on facts I later learned, like when certain neighbors moved, even my sister was born, etc...
I had memories as a toddler that I confirmed after meeting my mother for the first time in decades a couple of years ago. Specific things about where I lived, events that had happened and how someone else in our family had died. I had another conversation with an aunt that confirmed other things, including a word from another language that I knew from when I was little but didn't realize wasn't a made up word.
Memory is fallible and we have an imperfect understanding of it, but I know for a fact from personal experience that people can remember events from very early in life if the emotional impact is deep enough.
I have the same experience confirming memories with my parents. A few years ago they finally got garbage pick up service again and mentioned it to me.(Tiny area, roughly 1,000 people, so that service was not feasible until recently.) To which I replied, "Oh yeah, it's been like, 30 years since you last had it." They asked how I knew that. "I remember you carrying me up the driveway to drop the dirty diapers in the bin." They were both surprised that I remembered that and could confirm it.
However, the time that a giant plate glass mirror fall off a wall at a department store and crashed through me when I was about two years old? No idea. My parents had to tell me about that one later in life.
Ontologically, you can not say that definitively, you can only say that op's claim is highly unlikely. Only OP knows what OP knows and no amount of theory can disprove it, nor can any theory lay greater claim to ontological accuracy than he can.
One side says, "I remember this thing from when I was 1 year old".
Another says, "You cannot remember it, you must have reconstructed it from being told or from pictures."
The memory itself can certainly be falsified: if you remember your mom using an iPhone in 1998, then that memory is false. If you remember talking to your uncle but he died before you were born, the memory is false.
How do we know if the origin of the "memory" is the person's actual experience, or their imagination of it based on descriptions or pictures?
Well if it's an event that had pictures taken of it, if it's the kind of event which grown-ups talk about, then the simplest explanation is that it was reconstructed.
But my son, almost 5, is always coming out with random things that happened when he was 1 or 2, which are absolutely of no importance to us, and which we would have forgotten long ago if he didn't keep remembering them. Once, for example, my wife put a pair of his shoes on top of the car while she put him in the car seat, forgot they were there, and drove off -- obviously at some point they fell of and were completely lost. Every six months or so my son talks about that incident completely unprompted -- something of absolutely no significance to us, but obviously something that struck him. And about the time I lost my temper and sprayed him in the face with water -- definitely not a memory I'm eager to revisit and bring up.
Someone dogmatic person may still say, "You must be bringing that up yourself somehow." That is certainly an unfalsifiable assertion -- there's no way, other than my assertion and probability, to prove that I'm haven't talking about those shoes on a regular basis. But I think any person with an open mind is likely to agree that "he's remembering them" is a more likely scenario than "the grownups are talking about those lost shoes all the time".
Probably these "revisitations" are his brain's way of refreshing the memory as his brain grows, which probably means the memory as they exist in his brain will have been shifted over the years. But that's still an original memory -- that's how adult memories work as well.
If at any point he misses a "refresh", they'll probably be gone; but the memories he manages to do this for will probably stay with him into adulthood. If at any point he "misses" a refresh, they'll probably be gone forever.
The flip side of this, of course, is that many of the memories we think we have as adults are heavily edited too. A few years ago someone recounted to me an emotional conversation that they'd had with someone on their deathbed (as an adult, only a few years prior to that). As it happens, I was in the other room when this conversation happened, and my memory of that conversation was significantly different. Obviously at least one of us is "remembering" something untrue. As I had little "skin in the game" about the content of the conversation, and the memory this person has seems to me very consistent with this person's narrative about their life, I'm inclined to think my memory is more accurate. But who can tell.
This matches my experience also. Kids can "juggle" some of these extremely early memories into more permanent memories but the vast majority are dropped. It's only because of the early and possible frequent recall that the memories end up winning their mythic permanence.
I'd go as far as saying, memory fabrication happens all the time - we recompute our memories when we reference them, and that result is affected by all the other experiences and memories we accumulated between subsequent recalls. Or, in other words, humans always confabulate (in the exact same sense as LLMs "always hallucinate", and I'm invoking this comparison on purpose) - the difference between "correct" and "false" memory is a matter of degree.
I genuinely do have at least one memory from the age of two, because it was a completely banal event that no one told stories about (my grandmother moved to a new office, lol), nor certainly photographed, that I (because I remembered it) assumed had taken place when I was three. Turns out (crowd-sourced family chronology agreed, and documentary proof later corroborated) took place either 5 or 6 months after I turned two. (Memories differed as to the exact month, and the earliest letter we had was from the corroboratory year, but from a couple of months after when she would have moved.)
The matter came up because some time when I was in my twenties I said, apro pos of something or other, "[grandma] moved to [office] in year X", and they said "No, it was year X-1", and I said "well how come I remember [mundane sense-memory detail], if I was only two?" And they said, "yeah, [detail] is correct, but it was definitely year X-1", rinse-repeat, until they set out to prove me wrong about the year, which it turned out I was, which was a win for them, but then both I and my aunt with PhD in child-development were forced to conclude that I had a memory from when I was two.
Yeah. It blew my mind, too. I didn't think human memory worked like that, either.
Something-something only a Sith deals in absolutes. Alternatively, don't be such a jerk to that other guy. It's not really within the HN ethos.
You are way over confident. I definitely have memories from 2 onwards and I know I remember them because I remember relaying them to people at age 4 onwards, by which point my memory was very well formed.
I believe you. I have a few memories around my second birthday. People are often impressed with my recall of people and places. I have reasons to believe because of corroborations later in life that my memories were true.
