Huh.
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.
Hmm.
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?
There's a dividing point memory of being held in my mothers arms, I think, and watching huge lumps of snow being pushed off the roof, which is probably the big snowfall of 1973, when I was exactly a year old, when a metre of snow threatened to collapse the relatively low angle roof of our house. That would have been at the front door in it's old configuration, and there's a photograph of that taken shortly after, showing the drifted snow that Dad swept off the roof:
I don't remember this photo being taken. But I'm pretty sure I remember the hole in the house from the window missing there to the right as Dad was rebuilding that room. I remember the cold air coming through it. That's me there being held by mum.
Here's one for the numerologists and significant date people out there - I was born at around dawn or just before, mum specifically noted that she could still see the dark sky and the stars out the window. The day that I was born was exactly, to almost the hour and minute, 57 years after the whistle blew for the dawn attack on Hill 60 at Gallipoli, same date, same time, just years apart, when my grandfather and his regiment were detailed to assault and take the machinegun position that controlled the ground there. He was shot by that gun in the opening dawn assault that day. This is the gun that shot him, later captured during the continuing assault, by the Harper Brothers from the machinegun section of his regiment:
It's now in Te Papa, I've stood and looked at it. My father has held it. To my knowledge grandad never mentioned that my birthday was the day he almost died and saw so many of his comrades die.
The world is a very strange, intense, beautiful, horrible place.
Anyone else got this really, really early memory thing? I mean memories not just from two or three years old, but memories from when you were _definitely_ a baby, when you couldn't reliably move, control your head, etc.
Because I've only found two other people in the last 50 years who also have this, and although I've known both of them for decades, we all just mutually realised this as they read my various posts about this topic the past few days.
Pretty much every medically qualified Head/Brain person I've ever talked to has denied that memory from that young is even possible.
Anyone else?
Bueller?
I have some memories from before 8 months, when I could stand but not yet walk, and a fair amount from about a year onward. I started kindergarten at age four with a few years of autobiographical memory under my belt already. Very sensory rich memories, including the scale of my body wrt the environment, scents, textures, quality of light, proprioception.
