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.