What is the oldest memory you can remember?
 

If you think back as far as you can remember, and I mean period, like the age of 1 even. What is your oldest memory you can ever remember? It can be a detailed or undetailed memory.

I remember being at the hospital when I was like 3 I think, and my mom was giving birth to my sister. I remember peering through one of the hospital windows when my dad lifted me up. I don't remember what I saw. That's as far back as I can remember I think.

I believe I was two years old and it was Christmas. My parents made me wake up early in the morning with my brother so we could open presents. Being a little kid, I wanted to sleep. I cried for a little while after they dressed me up in this stupid little red and black dress. I kept trying to fall asleep while they were doing that.

After my brother and I opened our presents, my parents wanted to take pictures. They had me stand by the tree, and of course, I wasn't happy with that either. The moment the camera stopped flashing, I crawled under the tree and fell asleep on the floor.

First day of preschool, age 3. My mom deposited me at this Catholic run montessori and I ran to the rug, where someone asked me if I knew how to tie my shoelaces. I didn't and she showed me how, bunny ears style.

Best story ever. This one time it was recess and I snuck up to our classroom because the teacher said the sticker fairy was coming. And I swear to god, I saw a fairy in our room, it was dark even though it was mid-day and she was all bright with light shining all around her and she was dropping little packs of stickers on every table.

It was probably our teacher and the sun coming in through the windows but I still say it was a sticker fairy princess, who doled out stickers at a private suburban preschool.

i think my earliest memory is from when i was 2 or 3, and i had my head on my mum's tummy trying to hear/feel my sister who wasn't born yet. either that or when i was at my aunt's place and she told me to get a pillow for my parents (most likely i was 2 then). or when i first went to a nursery when i was 2 i think, was a private one and we were going on a trip to a park of some sort, everyone had lunches made by their parents while all i had was some snakcs my parents bought in a cornershop in a plastic bag T_T made me feel left out.

Hm... There's a couple of things that might be my first memory, since I don't remember how old I was when they happened. There's one from when I was three or so. I threw all the toys out of my toybox one by one in a search for blocks, and I decided to scare my mom for fun. So I crawled into the toybox and stayed there for a loooooong time, until she came looking for me. And it worked; I jumped out and gave her a bit of a start.

I also have vague memories of sitting on a blanket in the back yard, trying to get off it but crying whenever I touched the grass because I hated how it felt. So I was trapped on my little blanket island, and didn't like that one bit. There's also an even vaguer memory of being at my grandmother's house and trying to eat a fistful of grass and having my mom rush over and stop me. Both probably earlier memories than the toybox thing, but much, much less clear.

I think I might have remembered a time while I was in the womb actually. I have this vague memory of an instant where I saw some faint light through a veined membrane.

If that is in fact not a valid memory, I also remember this one time where I was just crawling around in our TV room. Nothing significant happened that I am aware of. Obviously, I was just a toddler.

And if that even is not valid, I remember this one time I crapped my diaper. I think might have just started walking about this time.

My earliest memory is very fuzzy because I'm old and stuff, but I remember going to this old lady's house who lived next door to us, and she had a white Poodle. Her name was Opal, I remember that. Also, she had white carpet in her house. I think I was maybe 2 or 3.

Very cool thread idea, by the way.

I was 3 when my sister was born. I remember vividly how that day went.

It was snowing out, and I was sitting (in my snowsuit) on the windowsill, watching my father talk to my mother. I was given chocolate from France for some reason. Maybe it was left over from Christmas.

I remember seeing my little sister and being completely indifferent to her. I was like "O. A baby. Is that sticking around?"

My oldest memory (I can precisely date) is from when I was two years old. I remember something about pancakes, and then I'm in a car with my dad. We're on our way to see my mother at the hospital. I think she'd just given birth to my sister, but I was far more interested in playing with some closets. Damn those closets were funny. I could zip in and out, and my parents looks in mock suprise at me every time I re-appeared....

Same here, except I was 1 year and almost 3 months old at the time. However, it may have been because that was the very first day I was actually able to walk (I could barely walk before, but this was my official first day). I was running around the hospital like a maniac and the hospital was very big since it was connected to a University Medical Center. It had a wall that was an entire window and I was on the second floor walkway where someone could look over the railing and see the first floor.

I was in a blue dress and my daddy was trying to hold my hand in order to keep up (he didn't expect me to start running on the first day). I stopped and I saw a juke box and it had a whole bunch of pretty rainbow colors on the inside. I looked at it and said, "Look, Daddy! It's the Wheel of Fortune!"

How the media impacts the young mind.

The oldest memory I can consciously recall is barely a fragment, I just remember looking up at my dad from by crib. Aside from that, probably presenting my new Ninja Turtles watch for Show and Tell in Kindergarten.

I was about this old:



some kid I used to be friends with would come over and he could never pronounce my name properly. I honestly can't remember anything before the age of four.

I can't say for sure. I have a lot of memories from when I was three years old and since I don't know the order of them, I cannot be sure which one was the earliest. But some time around when I was three.

The earliest memory I can recall was shortly after my little sister was born and brought home from the hospital. I was three years old at the time. We were sitting outside in the back patio, and our two cats were continuously parading around my mother and sniffing at the baby. I suspect they were upset that she wasn't paying attention to them. I remember thinking the same thing.

I'm almost sure I remember being born....although is that even possible?

I just remember being in a hospital being picked up and thinking WTF?!

I don't see any reason why it would be impossible. I've always felt that we remember mostly everything or, at the very least, like a computer it's very difficult for or brains to erase anything entirely from our minds. I think that if we had the right techniques we could probably remember a lot of things we consider completely forgotten.

Actually, I do not think what you say is possible Eleo.

One of the main things about how memory works is that it doesn't just record experiences like a tape-recorder, or some hard-drive. Instead, it stores the impressions that your experiences make on each of your sensory cortexes(is that the right word?). If these cortexes are not sufficiently developed, then impressions cannot be properly made, and memories cannot be recorded.

Memory, in a way, feeds back to each of these centers past experiences, and if these experiences were not processed in a manner similar enough to how the present configuration of these cortexes processes information, then recollection is just not done.

And since almost no thinks the same way they did when they were infants, their ability to recollect is hindered, almost directly proportional to how long ago they experienced it.

One way of preventing this however is to keep reprocessing old memories to keep them fresh and "up-to-date." Of course, who really wants to do that?

Me earliest memory isn't a very great one. The fact it was horrible is probably the only reason I can remember it. Because I cant remember anything else from when I was barely a year old.

I was about a year old and my sister wasn't going to be born for another few months. My family was still located in texas where I was born. A tornado warning was going off and all I remember is it being very dark and being carried into a bathroom. I can also remember bits of my mothers voice, my crying, and alot of loud noise as the tornado went by and totalled half our house. According to my father it barely missed us but destroyed a good chunk of the place.

The memory use to haunt me alot when I was younger. Lots of nightmares of that thing replaying over and over again.

EDIT: I always thought old, important memories were just tucked away in the part of the brain we are not aware of? But you can remember with certain techniques to bring them out. That is what I've heard, anyways.

When I stepped on a bee when I was about 2, 2 1/2....It was right after we moved to PA. from California. We were living in an apartment in downtown Beaver falls. I liked to squish bugs back then. So there I saw a dieing bee. I didn't think much of it but I basicly remember stepping on it then getting a sharp pain in my foot. I remember crying and my mom coming and said it was a bee I stept on and it stung my foot. Then I remember her taking out the stinger.

I very faintly remember anything before that. I had an over active imagination when I was little. So when I try to remember before that, all I remember was strange things or nothing at all (other then my second Christmas that I saw a bunch of times on an old tape, but that really doesn't count since it was on tape.). I guess the bee was the thing that snapped me back into reality.

The earliest memory I have is getting my diaper changed at about 2.

D:

Failing that, lying in my cot, drinking milk, thinking stuff and staring up at my celing until I fell asleep.



I'm pretty sure your early memories are locked up in your subconcious somewhere, blah blah dreams, etc. Especially if this lucid dreaming 1,000,000 WPM thing holds true.

We supposedly use only 10% of our brain and according to my EMT teacher our minds have every single second of every single day of our lives, but we can only recall certain memories.

In a way they are. The only technique I can think of is to attempt to think in more primitive ways and try to recall them that way. The more of your "advanced" way of thinking you can strip away, the easier it may become. The problem is that often people are trying to recall things in the context of their current way of thinking.

XSO: What's this about 1,000,000 WPM?

I was maybe 2 or 3, and I remember sitting at a small table with one of my friends who lived across the street from us. We were coloring pictures from a book, and it was a bit windy outside. My mother or some other person called us to do something, and since my friend was a year older than me, she taught me how to "mark" the page in the coloring book so I knew where to turn again when we came back. I remember seeing her fold one corner of her page down, and I did the same.

I seem to always remember that event.

I was about 4 or so years old, and I was in a travel agency before our vacation to Florida. There was a LOT of brown, fake plants, and insanely high counters :). I really don't remember much period before age 13-14, i think someone brainwashed me =/

But who's to say that they aren't developed prior to birth or soon after?

Just because they exist in an alternate form doesn't make them inaccessible. Like I said, there could be a potential to uncover these memories using some scientific method. It's possible that there could come to be some device that extracts and translates these memories into some form that could be interpreted by the brain in its current state.

My earliest memory dates back to my 3rd year of existence, before kindergarten and while we were still in our very first apartment in Canada. I went out to the balcony one day and started talking to this other kid who was as young as me in the suite adjacent to ours. we lived in the nook corner area of the apartment, so our suite was 90 degrees perpendicular to our neighbours. Somehow we our clothesline was hooked to their balcony too so he'd tug on it every once in a while and I didn't like when he did that. He went in to watch TMNT and I was impatient waiting for him to come out to the balcony again.

Because the developments are environment induced.
Without an environment in which the cortexes can adjust their discerning abilities, they remain in their relatively inert state and certainly don't function like that of a more mature individual.

Life in the womb does not seem sufficient enough of an environment for the brain to develop these skills, as the brain's interpretive abilities are dependent upon dynamic changes to function, and the womb is a relatively static environment.
Yeah, that may be so. I am not one to shoot down technological possibilities at all; however the amount of effort needed to do that seems to me to be vast. ('sup complete mapping of the brain in the past)
Ultimately, this seems highly unlikely, and very impractical.

Eleo is right. Our brains store memories as impressions, but not necessarily just sensory impressions. Our mental faculties re-assemble this information into meaningful "memories." So it isn't actually remembering, its more like reconstructing a situation based on little bit of data.

Much of this information is still stored, but lies outside of what we are able to consciously recollect. Hypnotism works to some extent to allow people to fish out these memories (although considering they are hypnotised, it doesn't do a terrible lot of good :p)

But theoretically you should be able to "remember" everything that has ever happened to you.

This is the whole reason why brainwashing will work - we don't record anything like a video camera, we store contextual clues in a manner of speaking, and if one or more of these clues are changed, our brain reconstructs the memory differently.

I don't recall what age I was when this happened, but I always have this vivid memory stored in my brain. It's not even a special memory, as I recall getting my hair cut by my mom when the doorbell rang. We ran downstairs to greet the tall man at the door, who turned out to be some family friend. He gave me and my siblings some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and sat down on our fluffy, white carpet with his large shoes still on. That's about it. :p

I still haven't figured out who this man was.

i remember when i was around 4 or so, one of my babysitters got us locked out of the house and i think we got back in somehow using a wire clothes hanger...

then another time when i was around 4 and had diarrehea and all i could eat were crackers and drinking sprite...and learning that sprite was one of the most disgusting drinks out there...i used to let the soda go flat before i drank it...

me racing my half brother down the backyard...

tearing up a phone book...

sitting by the window with my aunt, who used to live with us then, and counting to 100, waiting for my mom to get back from work...

running on our patio on a sunny day, tripping, and scraping my knee wide open ^^;;

I remember trying to move around my precious bucket of toy cars, shoving them, having a whinge, and successfully pushing them down the steps. I bet I cried. I don't remember crying, but I would have. My precious bucket of cars, how could this be? :( Must have been sometime before pre-school, as cars were out and TMNT were in. TRENDY TRENDS.

My earliest memory was before I was one year old when I went over to my fathers house to visit him. I was able to walk with the aide of someones hand, however I didn't walk on my own (according to my mother until I was 9 months old I couldn't walk unaided... I ran before I walked, go figure). He drove an orange car. I didn't see him for 12 years after that. As a small child (age 2-4) I would often ask my mom who the man with the orange car was.

I have many memories of my life when I was extremely young. I have a few strong memories from before I was one year old and a good number of them form 1 - 2 years old. I'm lucky in that I have a very good long term memory.

Just like a few other people here, my first memory is of the day my brother was born. I was playing by our fireplace (with Legos I think), with my Aunt Gail watching me. I remember her saying something about going to the hospital to see my mother and my new brother. I was around 3 at the time.

I also remember about a month later when my parents let me hold him, and I dropped him.

One of my earliest memories was when I was probably about 3 or so. Someone was trying to rob our house, and I remember standing at our doorway and yelling at him (I don't know if he was even out there at the time). Didn't take long for my mom to shut me up. xD
Another one was when I was in 1st grade. I fell off the monkey bars and probably broke my wrist. All of the other kids wanted to get the nurse, but I wouldn't let them because I was afraid she would tell me that there was nothing wrong--and I didn't want to feel dumb.

I'm not sure whether I was weird or just stupid. o__O

my oldest clear memory was when i found a black widow spider in a small flower pot when i was 4. i didn't know it was deadly so i picked up the pot and was playing around with the spider and almost touched it but decided not to.

I remember being naked in a hospital bed. I saw my mother and father waving at me through a window in the door. The old man in the bed next to me was wearing a greenish/blue sheet, tubes shoved up his nose, and wires that ran from under his sheet to a machine. The machine next to him was beeping in a rhythm. I remember a nurse walking back and forth. A large black lady, about as tall as the window in the door that my parents were looking through. I was scared and wanted to be with my parents. I cried my eyes out, but they wouldn't come. They just kept smiling and waving. The machine stopped the rhythmic beat and instead, just started screaming a flat note. The large black lady ran out of the room. The man who was laying there, then turned his head to me. His eyes partially opened. I stopped crying. Something inside me told me to just observe the old man. A team of people flew through a set of doors; some with machines in their hands. The machine didn't stop the screaming flat note. I just observed. After that, my memory cuts out.

My mother told me I was in the hospital for a hernia operation when I was about 20 months old. That was what I could remember before surgery. I could go on with after surgery, but that wouldn't be my earliest memory.

I like how I was such a nerd even when I was only two years old. My father got home in 1992 and brought the SNES with him to surprise us all. Although the SNES wasn't my first contact with videogames, playing Super Mario World with two years was just awesome. Nothing to worry about, just killing poor turtles. The next thing I can clearly remember was travelling to Sweden. My father bought me a little car on a ferry and I also remember walking through some awesome forests with fluffy moss.

My earliest memory was a tabby cat at an aunt's house, and playing toy cars with my close cousins. I asked about it to my parents once. Apparently I was 8 months old or so at the time.

Very interesting to note that I can remember that back.

My first is a really fleeting impression of being on top of some stairs. Between 1-3 is the closest I can pinpoint there. Also, my aunt was giving me a bath. The knobs for the faucet were shaped like crystals. You know, faceted.

I remember a sunny summer day, my father was on the veranda smoking a cigarette, my mother was in the kitchen, and there was some jelly-candy on the table. I have no idea why that is the first thing I remember relatively clearly, as there was nothing even remotely interesting in that scene, but there you go. I know I was at most three years old at the time, as we moved to a completely different part of the country when I was three.

Also, the "indoor smell" of hot sand always reminds me of the playground that was outside our old apartment building. But I think that might be me actually remembering a later time when we revisited the place and there was that sand smell and I remembered that that smell always used to be there. Or something.

Being in a sling on my mother's back while she was walking around a street market in Germany. Considering I was one when we left for the USA, it's probably pretty old.

My earliest memory is either when I was a little younger then 3 or about 3 and a half.

I was playing with blocks trying to construct a castle.

and then there is the time when I was able to see my sister inside of my mothers stomach.

That's when I was living in Germany. I remember so much from back then that it's hard to say how old I really was. But I know the age is close, since my sister is four years younger than I am.

My earliest memory comes from when I was three. It was sunny. Around 10am on a weekend, I think. Mum was folding some washing in the master bedroom and dad was brushing his teeth.

I was taking a shortcut across the room via my parent's bed when I slipped and fell, smashing my head on the corner of the left bedside dresser. I remember suprise followed by pain :p It's kinda comical when I look back on it though.

I was damn lucky I didn't loose an eye that day, and I still have a faint scar just below my left eyebrow as a reminder.

When i was about ~2 years old.. when i was stuck between the legs of a highchair :P

I forget how old I was, but my earliest memory was pretty grim. My mom was pushing me and my younger sister on the swing when the chain broke and sliced up her hand something awful. I remember her carrying me and my sister while running back into the house, and us getting covered in her blood.

Nice, eh?

The oldest memory that I have is actually quite blurry in my mind. I don't remember when did that actually happen, but when I confirmed it with my mom, she said it happened maybe when I was only 2 or 3 years old.

I was standing in front of a large black and white picture of a man, in a room so large that many people were there. Later when I asked my mom about it, she said it was at one of my uncle's funeral... Quite oddly, I don't even remember what my uncle looked like since he passed away when I was so little, but for some reason, I remembered the day of his funeral...

Running around taking all the toilet paper off the roll and unraveling it wildly down the hallway as a 3 year old. :)

I remember when I was three or four years old I was visiting my uncle's house. I was outside on a hot, sunny day doing something (I presume playing) barefoot when I happened to step on their sheet metal cellar door. I used to have a picture of a huge blister that developed on my foot, but when I was 6 or 7 I thought it looked gross to the point that I threw the photo out.

Earliest I can think of is about a year and a half. We were about to have a garage sale, and my mom sat me down in a pile of socks and told me to sort through them. I doubt I was doing any of it right, but it was proabably to get me out of her way.

I also remember peeling the wallpaper off the walls in that house.