Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be talking about that hole in your memory before the earliest one you can produce, also known as infantile amnesia. And hey, listeners, you were promised you would be getting some baby looked at Me topics this year. My wife and I had a baby this past October, and I think many of you have been practically daring me to embark on indulgent dad topics. But here we've arrived at one because so I think the way I got here was recently we have started spending a lot of time trying to make a five month old baby laugh. Rob, I don't know how much experience you have with this, like the parent comedian routine. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of hours clocked on that particular stand up gig. Well, sometime recently Rachel figured out what our baby's favorite genre of comedy was, at least for that day, and it was a textile gravity comedy. It was the act was you hold a cloth up in the air and then you drop the cloth on the baby, and when the cloth falls down and hits the baby, this is hilarious. It was creating these storms of laughter from another dimension, truly riveting experience, at least for us. But I started to wonder, like, why is this funny? And of course I wanted to ask her, but she's a five month old baby, not talking yet. She can't explain why it's funny. And you know, I was thinking, one day, will I be able to ask her, you remember when we were dropping the cloth on you and you thought this was so funny? Why was it funny? What was going through your mind? But I just know that's probably never a conversation that's going to go anywhere, because is she really going to even remember this by the time she can talk about it? Because I certainly don't have any memories that I can bring up now from being five months old, or even from being one year old, or even from being two years old. I'm not sure, honestly what my earliest memory is. But I know I don't have any memories I feel confident about from the first several years of my life. And it turns out this is not unique to me. This is pretty common most people feel this way, that they don't have any really solid memories from the first several years of their lives, and so I just got really interested in the question of why that is. Yeah, I mean, unless you are biological mother partook of the waters of life, she was pregnant, you're probably not preborn like that. You're you're not gonna You're not gonna remember these things. And we'll get into some There is a certain amount of subjectiveness to all of this, and we'll get into some of that, And certainly we'd love to hear from any listeners out there who are firm on this or feel firm on this and are like, yes, I do remember being under the age of two, that sort of thing. But most of the research seems to point in a different direction that most It seems like most of what we remember is after a certain point in our development, and that certainly your daughter has not quite reached that point. Which is not to say that she is not capable of memory, because I mean several things I can notice. She recognizes faces, and she is forming associations and routines. There's learning going on at this point in a baby's development, and learning is to some extent based on memory. So it's not that the brain is not capable of any type of memory at this point, but it seems that most people's brains at this point are not producing episodic or autobiographical memories. Episodic memories meaning memories of specific events or experiences, not producing sort of narrative memories of that type that can be retrieved later in life. I guess it's a question whether memories of that type are formed at all. And so I don't have any memories like that from infancy. Most people report the same, and I cannot, honestly, from my memory, tell you a story about anything that happened before I was probably like four or five or so. You do bring up the idea that there are a small number of people who claim they can remember like being born or being a baby. But even in those cases, while you can't, you say, well, you're just wrong, you don't remember that. I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about whether those are real memories or just later confabulations. Yeah. Yeah, And I on this note, I think it's important to remind listeners that fabricated memories are by no means necessarily intentional. They're numerous ways that we've discussed in the show before, numerous ways that false memories may be encoded. There are plenty of examples of cases where attested early childhood memories can ultimately be attributed to stories one is told about one's younger years and or something formed out of say longing or desire for a certain framework. A lot of stuff like that out there. And again we've touched on many times before, like we alter memories every time we draw them out, every time we get them out of the storage, we get our fingerprints all over them, and we change them. And then ultimately, the memories that are most dear to us, the ones that we pull out the most are the ones that are potentially the most altered, right because the form in which they are stored in memory is ultimately the form in which you rehearse them. You know, it's not a videotape. It is a it's a constant sort of like rewriting over the same document. Yeah. Yeah, And to your point, though, it is kind of ironic that when you have a young child in the house like this, for for parents, this is or even you know, other people in that uh, that infant's life, these are some of the dearest moments. You know, you're experiencing these moments and you're like, this, this is you can feel it embedding, you can you know this is something you're never going to forget. And then on the other hand, you have at least a very strong suspicion that the child is not going to remember it the way that you remember it. Uh and uh, and it's a it's so it's something that I know that we my wife and I talked a lot about with our son when he when he was much younger. And sometimes my son will comment on this because when your child gets over, you're always like, well do you remember this? Do you remember that? Or I remember when this happened, but I know you don't remember it. And so there are a lot of conversations like that. And then sometimes we'll be on a trip and our son, at this point, who's almost eleven, he'll comment like, oh, well, that baby's not even going to remember that vacation. Uh, seeing like a you know, another couple with an infant on a trip, but it might as well not even take it. Yeah, well, you know that's that's kind of the joke, right, like just go ahead and put your baby in a closet for a few years because they're not going to remember these expensive trips. But of course you can't do that. That's not how it works. You have to have these moments in these trips. And and just because the baby's not recalling it the way an adult recalls something later doesn't mean that it's not quote unquote remembered. Right, those I mean those instead of say having autobiographical memories that can later be retrieved in narrative form. Instead, the effect of those experiences might be, say, structural impacts on the development of the brain. Right. There's a great quote that came up in a paper I'm going to source here in a bet where they said something that you know is quite simple. But I think is important to keep in mind in this context and in memory context in general. The brain remembers what it needs to remember, you know, and and the memory demands on say a five month old baby or a one year old child one and a half year child are different. And therefore again it's not there's nothing bad about not having not being able to recall when you are two or three, or four or five. It's just it's just what your brain needed to do. And as we'll get into there are different reasons for this. Yeah, so that's what we're going to be exploring in this series. Questions like why don't most people have specific autobiographical memories of being a baby? Do we have episodic memories of infancy which get like erased from the brain for some reason, or do we never form episodic memories of baby life in the first place. Obviously there's some kind of memory going on in very young childhood and infancy, but maybe it just like it doesn't have an episodic memory component. Maybe it can remember associations and images, but maybe not like sequences of events. Or maybe is there some weird third option, like we do form memories and they're not exactly erased later, but they're sort of fun or hard to retrieve for some reason. That that's what got me really interested in this exploration today. But of course I also got very interested in the question of before people could do experiments on this, they must have observed childhood development firsthand and had all kinds of questions of this sort and probably come up with answers whether or not those answers were accurate. Yeah, so yeah, let's get in a little bit into just sort of some of the history of this, some of some sort of pre modern infant opinions, and also a little bit of cultural variation. I think one of the things to keep in mind about pre modern and pre scientific beliefs about infant memory is that a lot of it is going to come down to older beliefs about what human infants are and what they are not, And so this is all a mixture of things based on cultural tradition, but also based on observation. I think it goes without saying that that no matter what may have been ultimately recorded in literature ancient people, you know, they would have applied different insights and different ideas to the experience of babies, but some things were obviously going to be the same. Babies evoke strong emotions in us. That's just part of the way we're hardwired. Babies require a great deal of care. Babies cry baby is inherently can't communicate precisely. And also human memories of early childhood or the lack thereof, would have been identical more or less to what we have now, or at least any differences are not going to be based merely on say the the timeline, and we'll get into some of that in a bit. Right. For example, I would really not say that the current characteristics of infantile amnesia or memory formation and very young children are say, a result of the Internet or some other kind of like technological context, especially because we know people have been in the more modern era doing research on this going back more than a hundred years, so before a lot of the the sort of like communications and technology context we live in today, people were asking hey, when are people's first memories and what do they remember about childhood? And the answers were largely the same as what we get when we asked that today. Yeah. Yeah, So it doesn't seem like there's any expectation that there's been significant variation in this, aside from variation that occurs for cultural reasons and so forth. But again, a lot of this is going to come down to how we think about babies, and again it's it's it's interesting because on one hand, yes, we have this inherent draw towards our own young and to the young of our community, but at the same time, you know, you often hear people talk about older kids, and you'll hear them say, well, you remember what it was like when you were that age. You know, there's a certain relatability in that. But generally they're not saying this about infants or very young toddlers because by and large we don't remember what it was it was like to be that age. We only remember the stories of what we were like at that age and so forth. Now, examining how people in ancient times, for example, thought about babies, thinking about pre modern and prescientific thinking into all of this, you also have to take into account infant mortality rates, which were often high in ancient times. And I realized that infant mortality is not exactly a fun topic. But some of the attitudes of the ancient world surrounding the nature of infants is more sharply expressed over the subject, or so it seems. So we are going to touch on it a little bit, at least in passing. Yeah, it's sort of unavoidable for most of human history, for most people, just a major fact of life. Yeah, So I looked at a few different sources about the understanding of infants in ancient Greek and ancient Rome. In Childbirth and infancy in Greek and Roman antiquity from twenty eleven author Varneck Dason points out a number of interesting things about how these ancient people seem to seem to have considered young children based on the evidence we have to go on today, and so I want to outline some interesting points that they bring up. First of all, most of what we know relates to elite children rather than the lives of those born into lower classes or two enslaved people. Also, we have to think about the terminology here. This is fascinating, so you know, basically the infant toddler dynamic and duality. It's it's interesting and potentially telling in that changes in terminology may indicate changes in cultural understanding of young children. So you know, certainly there's a difference between an infant and a toddler, and we tend to sort of we tend to mark that transition point. But to what extent is that transition point born out in a people's language, and at what point does the language potentially shift, etc. Basically just sort of a larger background topic to keep in mind. But the big point here is that it's most helpful to think of childhood as a journey, one that hits different milestones, goes through different stages, and that and this in turn alters the way that adults view the child and the degree to which they can be integrated into society. Also, Dawson points out to quote, in times of high infant mortality, these stages represented steps for hope of survival and increasing parental bonding. We'll come back to exactly what is meant by that, but basically it comes down to, like, how does a culture deal with the fact that there is a high infant mortality rate. Is there more of a sort of pushing away of kind of like a ultimately a stoic reaction, sort of distancing of the infant from the society who are making kind of a marginal state, or is there indeed still a lot of bonding going on and so forth. Now, with the Greek and Roman viewpoints, specifically, what we think of as infancy would have probably ended at age two or three, with you full weaning, increased ability to speak, and at age three integration into practiced religion at least at some degree. Now, medically speaking, it was previously supposed that there was next to nothing in the literature of ancient Greek ancient Rome to suggest that physicians were concerned with babies, except in exceptional circumstances, it was thought that babies in general were left to the midwives and the mothers. However, Dawson stresses that this is no longer really a correct viewpoint, based on numerous examples of writings that have come up about say, essential diet and hygiene for babies. So I think that's interesting representing there like a shift in our modern understanding about ancient views on infants that they were actually sometimes a more relevant object of what was considered medicine. Yeah, there's sort of this, and we'll get into it more than just a second here, But there was this understanding of the ancient world based on somethingificant evidence that basically the ruling male elite we're saying, like babies that not even worth your time, not worth my time anyway, call me when it is old enough for me to care about it, or if there's if it's exploding, then yes, a physician may come and check out the child. That sort of thing, because without a doubt, there seemed to have been far less of a view of baby superiority in ancient Greek and ancient Rome. Dawson writes the following this is great quote from Hippocrates to late antiquity, babies and toddlers are defined as a category of beings with a special morphology and physiology. These characteristics are on the whole negative. Newborn babies are generally described as imperfect, weak, and ugly. Wow perfect yes, Oh no, this reminds me of the story you've shared many times of your son calling the cat a stupid baby or just a baby maybe when it was just baby like baby is an adjective, bemoji and just a solid burn. As a toddler, it's like peak insult, imperfect, weak, and ugly. Yeah. Yeah, they toddlers get it, and so did the grown learned men of ancient Greece. So Dawson points a few specific authors to underline these views. So m. Aristotle wrote that babies quote are born in a more imperfect condition than any other perfected animal, and also that they have poor eyesight. Oh well, it depends on what Aristotle means by that. I'm not sure the full context, But if he's making a distinction between human beings and other animals, I think that's a fair observation that human babies are more helpless than the newborns of most other animal species. Yeah, absolutely, I think I think that's what he's going for here. There is there's another work on colors that is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, and in this it's pointed out that babies are ugly because or well it's much it's as ugly, but it points out that there's essentially they're ugly because they have red faces and little hair. Do you ever get the feeling that like Aristotle might have been writing about human babies the same way he was writing about like sting rays. It's just like this is something he's observed a couple of times and made a few notes about. Yeah, I mean I've seen some pretty hairy little babies before, so I mean they think it varies, yeah, but yes, on the whole, they tend not die us half of like a full head of hair or certainly a proper beard. Now. Galen was one of numerous physicians to comment on the seeming wax like malleability and weakness of the baby. Weakness of the baby. Babies are so weak. They're they're weak, and they're they're basically made out of wax. Like if you don't handle them too much or you will change their form completely. They do tend to be Doughey, yeah, that's true. But also Galen, I can just tell this guy did not spend much time holding a baby because, like especially Galen probably had a beard. I've a beard. When you feel the baby grabbed the beard and just not leg this is the handle for the adult, and it will pull until it has a fistful of beard hair. You do not walk away with the impression of how weak babies are. Aristotle also recorded that many babies die within the first week and are therefore not named before this period passes. And this is a kind of approach to the first week or so of a child's life that you see reflected in various cultures in various times. Meanwhile, Plutarch just wonders if babies are in fact animals, because they're more like vegetables. They're more like a plant. I mean, yeah, plants cry at midnight, plants poop where they want to. That's exactly what a plant is. Dason adds this line here quote a mineral metaphor substitutes for the vegetable one. And Chronosis myth who ate his children as soon as they were born and thought a stone to be a swaddled nursling. So you know, is it a baby? Is it a stone? Like anyone can tell the difference, I guess. Yeah. Is that supposed to be a comment on how like how featureless and uninteresting babies are? Or is that myth's supposed to be a like a joke about Chronos being stupid? Um? I always I mean, granted I was as a modern English speaking human. I'm not the the intended audience, I guess for the myth, But I always interpreted it as being like, he's just so consumed with this this need to destroy his young. You know that he's just like just gobbles him up without really tasting them, you know. Yeah, it's more like down he's more machine now than man, almost like a he's a baby eating machine. He barely notices or or or has cognizance of what's going in his mouth. Yeah. So, after expressing some of these again aristocratic male opinions on babies recorded in the literature, I think it's a good time to distress something that another author drives home as well. And this is from the work of Marine Carrol in Infant Death and Burial in Roman Italy from twenty fifteen. She points out that we base a lot of our understanding of this topic on the writings of Stoic male aristocratic literary elite, and also the arguments that the remains in Roman cemeteries seem to bear this out. The I think quote unquote invisibility of the young child in Roman cemeteries. Yeah, and unfortunately this is true about a lot of things in the ancient world. When you have to consult literary texts to get a flavor of ancient life, that's necessarily going to be leaving a lot of stuff out because of the sexism of like who could receive literary education and who was writing texts and stuff at the time. You're you're going to get a lot of aristocratic male perspective. Yeah, and and certainly manufactory in Stoicism. And then also the fact that maybe some of them did not know how much hair baby had on average. You know, it's a it's it's it's well worth taking into account. But on the other hand, you do have this this argument that lines up with things with the writings of say Plutarch, who said that infants quote have no part in earth or earthly things, and therefore they don't require any of the rights normally performed for the dead, So you know, there's just kind of this um push and pull over, like what is the status of the of the infant? And we can understand like this like stoic approach that's like, look, there's a chance that things aren't going to go well, and then therefore one should be prepared for that by not fully integrating them into into life essentially. But Carroll points out that these views do not necessarily represent those of of course other classes or certainly mothers during the time period. So the seeming invisibility of young children in Italian cemeteries of the time period is something that requires like further examination and perhaps a little more understanding, as opposed to just like well, they weren't considered real things. Also of note, I was looking at a paper from twenty twelve child Exposure in the Roman Empire by W. V. Harris, published in the Journal of Roman Studies, pointing out that child exposure like the leaving of a child, you know, in the wild or out in the open, away from from humans, that this was widely practiced in the Roman Empire, often when quote physical viability and legitimacy were in doubt, but that not everyone agreed with the practice Stoics in particular tended to believe that infants should live at the very least if they're healthy and legitimate. And certainly there's plenty of room for hypocrisy and something like that. But I also wondered to what extent it backs up or counters the idea that babies in general were considered only halfway real. Here's another great chunk going back from from Dawson, going back to her paper. Quote for Aristotle, infants were defined as a lower category of beings physically weak, mentally and morally inept, with unco controlled appetites. Physical disproportions associate them with animals. A heavy upper part explains why children move like quadrupeds, says Aristotle. Quote. That is why infants cannot walk but crawl about, and at the very beginning cannot even crawl, but remain where they are, but remain where they are. This paper from Dustin doesn't really get into memory all that much. A lot of it's again we're dealing more sort of the overarching views of young children and infants. But Dustin does such a memory as well. In this part. Quote disproportions also explain mental incapacities. The heaviness of a large head impairs the impulses of thoughts, and the infant's memory is bad. Children are further associated with inferior categories of human beings, such as old people physically weaker, with a poorer memory and less hair, with the insane and the drunk with a similar e fable temperament and a disorderly behavior, with women irrational, changeable and weak, and even with dwarfs. So you ask, what did ancient Greek philosophers think about babies? And it's the answer is just a conglomeration of offensive opinions. Well, a lot of that is what seems to remain in the literature. But Deson also stresses that while a lot of this may just sound like, you know, babies are gross and the worst, there's also plenty of evidence that the seeming deficiencies of babies were also very much enjoyed. That it wasn't just like, oh, man, this baby's like an old man. It's more like, oh, this baby's like an old man, and the bonding still occurred even in times of high mortality. Their smiles and their skin were written about as being irresistible. And also, I thought this was Nate quote, myths of baby heroes transcend children's deaths, and this is something perhaps worth thinking about. I don't know, we might get into this in the second episode. We might come back at a later time. But you do have a lot of baby heroes and child gods and godlings and various myth and folklore traditions from the likes of baby Krishna to the Christ Child. But anyways, sticking on the topic of memories of a lack thereof and small children infants, it would seem that you know, of course, the lack of memories from one's own infancy was very much a known factor, and that it would make sense within a viewpoint that babies are unfinished and imperfect. They have yet to cross through all the stages of becoming truly human, becoming you know, truly a part of family unit, truly a part of society, even if they still amuse us and we still have a lot of emotions about them. Now, we mentioned earlier cultural differences that could impact just how early one remembers one's lie what are what one's earliest memories happen to be? And I was looking at an article titled the culture of Memory by Leo Winnerman published by the American Psychological Society back in two thousand and five. The author here points to research that shows that quote, the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures, and it seems to come down to the weight and importance of memory within a specific cultural system. According to Michelle Leichmann, PhD, cited in the article quote, people who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history like the Maori will have different and often earlier childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy. So a key nineteen ninety four study from psychologist Mary Mullen, published in the journal Cognition as more than seven hundred Caucasian and Asian or Asian American undergrads to describe their earliest memory on average Asian and Asian American student memories happened six months later a subsequent study, and we should know there were many subsequent studies that examined different slices of all this from In this case from Mullen, though, found a sixteen month gap between Caucasian Americans and Native Koreans. These studies led to a host of others, and it seems to follow the basic social interaction model. Quote. According to this model, our autobiographical memories don't develop in a vacuum. Instead, as children, we encode our memories of events as we talk over those events with the adults in our life. The more those adults encourage us to spin an elaborate narrative tale, the more likely we are to remember details about the event later. This absolutely dovetails with much of what I've been reading that like sort of an interactive rehearsal of memories helps make those memories stronger, but sort of the paradox of memory. And this is true not just of childhood. I think this is true of adult memory as well. Is that while that produces a stronger memory consolidation and you you are better able to retrieve that memory later, it also makes the memory more subject to contamination by whatever input you're getting from the person you're rehearsing it with, or even from outside sources such as advertising. UM. I don't know if this is still the case, but many years ago I went to the Coca Cola Museum here in Atlanta with my mother, and there was some bit of advertising. I'm not sure if it was current advertising or past advertising, but the gist of it was Coca Cola. We've always been there, like we were a part of your essentially saying we were a part of all those memories that you hold dear and and I often think think of that when I'm encounter branding from this company, because I'm because it's good, it's really infectious. Yeah, it does a great job. It is kind of like trying to worm its way in there, like do you remember that that great memory from your childhood? I bet there was a Coca Cola on the table. And even if there wasn't, Bam, there is now. Well you could say it's genius, maybe even insidious, the way that they insinuate their branding into inherently nostalgic imagery. So like the Santa clause with the Coca Cola, Yeah, I think that's not an accident. That's like to try to integrate the brand with your earliest and best feelings from childhood. Oh boy, Christmas is coming, here's Santa. And what Santa got in his hand a coke? Of course, that's just part of the Santa lore. Yeah, yeah, so so yeah, there's a you could really get into advertising and so forth and all of this as well. But but yeah, so even within a given culture, and they're going to have this sort of different cultural leanings based on what sort of emphasis you place on an individual experience. But also there's gonna be there're gonna be differences even within a culture based on high elaborative and low elaborative mothers. And I take this to mean you could basically mean any person in an individual's life, but they're using mothers the main example. So basically, the question is is a child routinely ask for detailed stories about their daily life or they ask mostly closed questions. And this is interesting to think about, like, yeah, is the is the child asked to it like fully explain their day or is it just like did you eat lunch today? Yes? Did you eat your snack? Yes? That sort of thing. And not to say either approach is better than the other. Life is busy and sometimes you just got to make sure that your child ate a snack and you don't need the full story, but it is interesting to think about, like perhaps the necessity for that balance, you know, to get a full account of what the day was like as opposed to just like did you do the things that were acquired? Well, this also connects to some things I was reading about how very young children can in fact answer questions about things that happen to them recently, or at least they typically can. The has been studied, But one thing I was reading was that how well, say, I don't know, you know, a two and a half year old can describe a memory of a recent event depends very much on how you elicit the memory from them. And you might have seen parents doing this. I'm you know, I'm not at that stage yet in parenting, but I've seen other parents doing this kind of thing. It's like what did we do on your birthday? You know, did we go somewhere? Where did we go? And so you can kind of like talk the child through the memory in a way that it seems like the child may not be able to produce the details and connect them spontaneously. Did that make sense? It was that yeah, yeah, no, no. It makes me think of other memory exercises where like if one is having like the tip of the tongue scenario, where if someone is having if you're having difficulty remembering a particular name or whatever, like it's better for your memory for you to keep trying to guess, or for the other person on the other end of the conversation to encourage you to guess and not to just give it to you. That sort of thing, like like making the brain work for those details. That's true. That was a finding at that episode we did, wasn't it that, Like, you're more likely to remember the detail you're searching for next time if somebody like gives you a hint and you make the connection yourself versus if you just look up the answer. Yeah. Absolutely. Anyway, in all this, I think it is important to mention something that Michelle Likeman points out here, and that is again that there's not a wrong direction in any of this. The brain remembers what we what it needs to remember. We remember what we need to remember. Social pressure contributes to this, but it is what it is now. One question I thought we should look at before we wrap things up today is like, Okay, we keep talking in you know, more general terms about like, well, there's an earlier period where most people can't really produce any memories from that period of their lives, and then a later period where they can, But what are the actual numbers, like when does that kick in? This is something that has been studied extensively. There are certainly different methods, and I think we might be able to add some nuance to this answer later on, But it seems to me like the sort of magic age is like three to four years or about three and a half years, is what most studies have converged on. And to be clear, also, when we talk about childhood amnesia in the scientific literature, it seems often to refer to two different things that are related. One is the loss of all memories as far as we can tell, from before the earliest memory we can produce. And then the second thing is the relative scarcity of memories from the early years of childhood compared to equivalent spans of time from later in life. So, for example, even though you have some autobiographical memories from ages six to seve even if you are like most people, you will have a fewer number of spontaneous memories that you can recall from that period than from say sixteen to seventeen. And I thought it was also interesting to just look at the different experimental methods for trying to find out what people's earliest memories are. There are a number of ways to approach this. Sometimes it's done by, say, just asking people to describe their earliest memory and estimate at what age it took place. That is, of course a perfectly good place to start, but putting aside for a moment the question of like the accuracy of these memories, you could imagine reasons why just asking somebody what is your earliest memory might not actually produce their earliest memory. For one thing, most people don't keep their memories indexed in a sortable form. You know, it's not an Excel sheet that has a sort by column for date. And so you may have a memory that occurs to you in one moment as the earliest you can remember, But how do you know in another circumstance you wouldn't think of an earlier one that just didn't occur to you at that time. Yeah. Plus, I guess it's worth considering that in many, but certainly not all cases, you have you have sort of a stability to early childhood. Certainly that is desired that that there there would be sort of a sameness to a lot of the early memories. You know, it's like, uh, you know one or both parents are there. Um, perhaps the immediate physical surroundings are the same. Uh So, like what is going to be president in a memory? To distinguish it and set it apart in the timeline again unless you go back later and then you you have encoded it and then you identify it, maybe falsely, and say, oh, well, this is a memory of say when we lived at this house or when we lived in this town. Yeah, And that raises important questions about like the characteristics of what counts as a memory, Like I wonder if there's a sort of boundary being established by the terms of the demand for reak call. For example, an autobiographical memory needs to be something you can put into words and explain to somebody else. But do you ever get that feeling that you're experiencing nostalgia But it's not for a thing in the outside world, Maybe not for an image or an event, but something that isn't really something you can put into words. It's like nostalgia for an internal state or a feeling, this kind of strange thing. I sometimes have that sensation. Of course, when I have that feeling, it's totally possible the memory component of the sensation of nostalgia could be illusory, but sometimes I wonder if maybe feelings like that could be based in really old memories that can't be put into words or something. Yeah, I'm having trouble remembering a specific example of this, but I think some of my early memories definitely have this component to them. Even if I do remember like a basic setting or event around them, there is like a there's there is at least as strong the feeling of what it meant like. There's one particular early memory I have of like running around in circles in a living room, around like a dinner, like a dining room table in a living room, or a dining room that just seemed enormous, you know, like a cathedral. And so part of it is like these vague memories of what this space looked like, but it's also equally met by the exhilaration that is remembered of just kind of like this, you know, this running around And it is hard to really explain, like give what that means, because if I were to run around in circles right now, it would certainly not be the same feeling. You know, it doesn't relate to other memories of physical exertion from other points in my life. Oh but then to come back to other methods to study early memories. Another one that seems to be used fairly often is the word que test. So this one's pretty interesting. I say a word to you, and then I ask you to tell me a memory associated with this word, just anyway memory. We could try it right now, rob do you want to do it, chair, let's do it. Okay, tell me a memory associated with the word jar. Oh, well, that's easy. I have an early memory of trying to get a jar of Marischino cherries out of the refrigerator by myself, and I dropped it and broke it or spilled it. I'm not sure if I broke it or spelled it, but that is a strong early memory of mine, Okay. And then from here in the experiment, I might ask you for some subsequent details, like you know, who was there, did anybody else witness this memory? Etcetera, etcetera. And then I would also ask you estimate what age you were when this memory happened. But what age do you think it was? Who? I would say maybe maybe three, But that's just a real that's a huge guess, and I think I've actually asked my mother about this memory before. And you know, this is the kind of thing where like kids have things like this happened all the time, they don't necessarily. If not necessarily, something apparent is going to specifically remember. It makes more of an impact on the child and the parent. So I have no idea exactly when this occurred. Okay, but this is a good answer. Jar of cherries on the floor, maybe spilled, maybe broken. You think you were around three, So I keep doing this. I do this for a big list of words, maybe with a big sample of people, and then you can sort of cross reference all of the answers. You get to look at what ages the memories tend to come from. And you could see by this method that of just making up random numbers here, but say by randomly associating memories with words, we end up with people telling us about twenty percent more memories from ages sixteen to twenty than from ages six to ten or something. So I think that's a pretty clever method. But anyway, what this research tends to converge on is that a really important time is roughly the age three to four, or like three and a half. Generally, the earliest memories that adults can produce are around the ages of three to four, and there is not much or nothing from before that. And then after that there is a gradual increase in the quantity of autobiographical memories from each year of age up until maybe like seven or eight, when the autobiographical memory store starts to look more like that of the rest of adulthood. So for most people looking backwards, memories tend to start around three or four, and then you get more of them at five, more of them at six, more of them at seven, more of them at eight, and then you start to reach a more kind of complete adult memory set. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that children before the age of three or four produce no autobiographical memories. Instead, it seems like there may be a sort of period of forgetting. And I thought this was very interesting. Just one study I wanted to mention quickly that gets at this. It was published in the journal Memory in two thousand and five by Dana Van Abama and Patricia Hour and it's called Autobiographical Memory in Middle Childhood Recollections of the Recent and Distant Past. Now I was looking for the full text of the study, and I couldn't find it before we recorded today, but I did find a summary of the findings in a Psychology Today article by an author named Vitelli, And basically what happened in the study is that children were interviewed about autobiographical events along with their mothers at the age of three, and they produced details about those events. Is something they did, a trip out to do something, and they could recall things about their own past, so they had some form of episodic memory. They could be prompted to retrieve details about these episodic memories. But those same children were brought back years later at ages seven, eight, and nine, exactly the range at which there seems to be a profound forgetting of early childhood memories. So from vitelli summary here, the seven year olds could recall sixty percent of the same autobiographical events they recalled at three, but the eight and nine year olds could only recall thirty six and thirty eight percent of events. So there seems to be a major drop off of memories from this earliest period around the ages of seven, eight and nine. Yeah, I think this kind of matches up with some stuff I've observed with my own son, mostly when in talking about things that we watched together when he was in like one age group versus another. So, and it varies, I think from picture to picture, Like there's some movies that maybe we've we've talked about more we've that have become more like a sort of a regular part of one's life. And then there are other movies where you like watch it, forget it, and then maybe truly forget it and then come back and experience it again. Now, why patterns like this emerge is something I think we'll have to get into more when we come back in subsequent parts of the series. I'm not sure how many we're going to go to. We'll have at least one more part, maybe maybe a couple more. Yeah, there's certainly going to be a plenty to get into for a part two, possibly a part three. But as we often have pointed out, we're we're hesitant to say this will definitely go to a certain number of episodes because we're often just a little unsure where we're going to cut it off. Well, how about you, Joe's we close out this episode, what's what comes to mind is your earliest Jar related memory? Jars only please, and if it, even if it's from the last five years, that's cool too well to bore you with dreadful cliche. I think catching fireflies in a jar, that that is very early. We did that a lot when I was a kid in our front yard. We had lots of them. I think I also have very early memories of pickle jars, because I recall from early childhood being really into pickles pickled cucumbers, like a like a Classon's pickle jar. Oh oh, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, clearly I had more of I guess the sweet tooth as a child, But my son has always been super into pickles of all different varieties, from the little cornishans to the big dill pickles, to the big bread and butter pickles, to the slices, all of it. Though with both of those, I guess those are just sort of like ambiguous, continuous states of childhood. Catching fireflies in jars, it's just something that happened often. I don't remember a particular instance of it, saying with admiring the pickle jar and wanting its contents if I had to produce it more. I don't know a direct autobiographical, specific memory you'd probably be a more recent one. I don't remember if I think you asked me for my earliest but if I were just doing the word que test, i'd probably say, oh, from when I was thirty five and I made and I made kimchi in a large jar on my table, and I remember how it smelled and all that. Oh nice. Well, you know, I think it's it's worth telling everyone, like, go out now and create some positive jar based memories with your children, even if they're grown now. It's never too late to create a jar based memory. All right. Well, on that note, we're going to go and close up this episode, but we'll be back with more on this topic, and in the meantime, certainly write in with your thoughts on all of this, and yeah, if you want to share some of your earliest memories with us and sort of attempt to define when these memories occurred, and if you have any, if you've been able to dig around and to ask other people to sort of prove them out to see if they are in fact largely authentic or if they've been augmented in any way. Yeah, we'd love to hear from everyone throughout these episodes. But this is going to produce a skewed sample because we're gonna hear from everybody who's like, I can remember being one, But people aren't going to write in to tell us I don't remember being one. No, right, you can write in with that if you're like, my earliest memory is being you know, five or older, whatever, right in. Like we said, there is no wrong answer here. The people who claim to member being born, it doesn't mean their brain is better, their memory is better than another individual. Again, where you're going to continue to discuss this as as we explore this topic. No wrong answers. All right, Yeah, so we close it out. We'll just remind you that core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed on Mondays, we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film. And this week, I think it's going to be a pretty fun one that will tie in with early childhood memories for many people, because I think we do form a lot of early childhood memories based on movies we're exposed to, so perhaps we'll get into bat a little bit. As we discussed this week's title, Huge thanks to our audio producer J. J. Pasway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. 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