Been thinking a lot about memories and how I process them.
Assumption of normal experience and being a normal human, having a thing occur to one's mind or body, and just trundling along with it, because you're a normal human, just normal humaning, is a bitch.
Neural pruning differences is also a bitch. I'm learning that not everybody has memories going back to less than six months old, and most peoples memories of important events and times and things in their life don't also come tagged with readouts on experience of weight, pressure, smell, texture, sound and similar metadata with that memory that give a lot more hooks for sudden intense recall of specific events and things in one's life.
Thinking about early childhood memory and so forth again - Among my friends, most I talk to seldom have any detailed memories before age 3 or 4, some before age 5 or 6. Some don't really remember much before age 10-12.
I definitely remember being in my mum's fabric back carrier she used, one of the square chinese style ones with 4 straps, how her jersey felt and smelt against my cheek, the texture of the corduroy back carrier against my thighs, and being too small to reliably lift or move my head to change the feelings and textures I'm experiencing, and not being able to see more than a few feet, so I'm probably only two or three months old.
Earliest memory, which was also a returning nightmare until early teens, is entirely pressure/temperature/texture/falling.
Pretty sure it's a birth memory: I'm somewhere dark, warm, confining, comfortable, then there is terror, intense, overwhelming pressure, followed by massive, Baroquely intricate texture and then I'm falling. This is both a memory, and it returned as a nightmare I'd experience from my earliest childhood (which again seems to be that I have memories from my first year of life) right up to my early teens, and I still remember this memory very well. It's older than anything else I remember, and the later memories have visual component with objects I recognise, and qualia that tell me I'm in and around what I later know to be our family house, and feedback on body position, control, or clothing that means I'm somewhere between 2-3 or 6-12 months old.
There's more like this that's non specific to time, but is definitely in the first year of life: The feeling of being swung up into that back carrier, for example. Memories from the first year or so, can't place within that year, but they're texture or smell or motion that when repeated causes intense emotion, often pleasant, but also sad or disabling because it's so important. For everything from that first year, right into my present time, a smell or taste or or other input that matches these fragments can punch me back into a memory from my childhood so strong, that even though it may be a happy memory (but some of them are also not, and also very traumatic, I got badly injured a lot and punished a fair bit) that I'll suddenly break down and cry at the intensity.
It also means that all these things could have been just _last_week_ they're so intense.
None of this was in the user manual or appendices.
What do you mean you don't remember not being able to hold your head up or control your arms and move away from the texture that's too strong or too sharp, or conversely, not be able to burrow more closely and comfortably into it?
jacobvanloon
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gummygunk
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