I have a few very specific memories from when I was really young.

I can remember walking into church raising my skirts and telling one of the Elders I wore "big-girl panties now." I must have just been potty trained. I can also remember, again in church, my mom telling me I couldn't nurse anymore. I can even remember the wallpaper.

But if what this article says is true, it makes sense. They were significant events in my toddler/childhood.

Am i the only one who has a hard time remembering if something is a childhood memory or a dream?

Very interesting post! And it generally fits with what I've learned during my training in terms of neurodevelopment and memory abilities. It's good to see articles like this with truth to them, rather than something along the lines of "Baby formula leads to malnourished brains that can't remember the first three years of life. Add these 5 herbal extracts to your baby's formula to guarantee they'll become a genius!"

I'm actually fascinated by memory and the brain. I wonder how much of what we forget is truly lost, and what exactly the other however much percent of our brain is for (the parts that scientists don't quite know what they do yet)

Thank you for sharing. In my case, all this is absolutely true. My first memory, at three years old, was when a pane of glass fell on my little face, scarring my nose for ever. What is amazing is how much I remember about this event. I was on the living room table playing the taxi driver in front of a glass cabinet. My two older sisters were coloring some drawings in a corner and they invited me to join them. I didn't want to; I was a boy, my job was to drive. In the next following minutes, I remember a pane of glass falling on my face. However, what made me cry wasn't the pain, but seeing all the blood pouring off my face.

When I think about it, this article's quote:

For the memory of my brother’s birth, I have to understand the meanings of concepts like “hospital” and “brother.”

stands false in my case. I remember I was doing the "I'm moving the wheel" movement. And I remember I would stop from time to time to embark and disembark clients. Did I really understand the concept of "taxi driver"? Heck, did I even understand the concept of "driving", or was I simply imitating what I'd see around me? Then, eventually, I would grow up to understand those concepts and make the connections with my memories?

Memories are a captivating phenomenon IMO. Are they linked with our intelligence? Can we even be sure about the integrity of any of them?

Very fascinating article, and it makes a lot of sense about not being able to remember things before I had the right context to remember. It's always interested me, too, because when I was younger I believed I had the ability to remember as far back as 3 years old, but now after discussing it with my parents most of my early memories, except for maybe 5 very early memories, are from 4.5-5 years old, though there are many of them so that I felt I remembered longer. The article also makes me wonder, then, if pre-language societies (or, at least, pre-sophisticated language) remembered their childhoods much better than we do. Fascinating stuff.

I don't know how, but my wife can remember a startling amount of details from when she was a kid, even younger than three. I think some people just have this gift with memory that I can't match.

My memories tend to be about things, rather than events. Especially movie and TV quotes, though I have lost that ability over the last few years.

For me, I pretty much only remember things from 4-5 and up. Everything before that is mostly a haze.

My first memory is from visiting some rich guy's house. It was actually two regular houses built as one. They had a huge swimming pool in the basement and three year old me liked it so much that the memory stuck. I also remember visiting the UK and Sweden later that summer.

So I guess that means memories from when they're even younger (say like 2 years old) must have had high levels of emotional salience? What does that mean for those people that claim they can remember their own births?

My earliest memory for me was right around when I must have been two years old. I was about to undergo dental surgery because one of my premolars had come in completely cracked and broken. I still have the fake like placeholder tooth they gave me to prove that this actually happened! It's a weird memory, because all the proportions are whacked out (baby vision?). I always remember sitting on my mom's lap in this gigantic room, but I know that room could not have been as big as my mind says it is.

Something I find strange about my memory is that I either remember the content or the experience of learning but never both and I am not sure if it's just me. For e.g., I remember that Water is a compound of Hydrogen and Oxygen and I think I learned it somewhere in 4th or 5th grade but I don't remember the exact moment when I learned it, on the other hand I have a vague memory of my 4th grade and 5th grade classroom, the friends I made in that period of time and even the teachers who used to teach me but have no specific memory of learning something inside the classroom. It's like I can either retain the memory of the content or an experience but not the experience of learning the content.

There's one exception though, I do remember the exact moment when I learned what is sexual intercourse!