In past lives I was a tribal king over the people who built Stone Hinge. Before that I was an Advisor to an Egyptian Pharaoh.
(Funny how people who remember past lives were always someone important... never a peasant who lived in a mud hut.)
How Far Back Does Your Memory Go?
by snowbird 89 Replies latest jw experiences
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snowbird
FF, that is some powerful stuff. I believe most people don't believe babies are aware of their surroundings. That's why I don't like seeing people drink, curse, and smoke around babies.
Dig, my last child is unusually intelligent. At around 8-9 months, she used to crawl (crawl!) to the bookcase to get her favorite book for me to read to her. I moved it from its place once, and she kept looking through the other books until she found it! The triumphant look on her face was priceless.
Tee hee hee.
Sylvia
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StAnn
The week of my second birthday, my parents put me in the bathtub to get me ready for the meeting. Mom was giving me a bath when Dad called her away "just for a second." During that "second," I got out of the tub and ran away. I walked down the sidewalk in our Cincinnati neighborhood, buck naked, and ended up several blocks from home. I remember a very nice woman picked me up, wrapped me in a towel, and sat me down at her kitchen table. She fed me chocolate cake. Then I remember a nice policeman coming in with my dad in tow to retrieve me.
My mother is a terrible driver. It took her 20+ tries to finally get her driver's license. Around the time I was two years old, I remember sitting in the living room floor when Mom and Dad came through the front door. Mom had failed her driving test again. Mom was walking up the staircase, crying, and Dad was standing at the bottom of the staircase yelling at her. (I was nine years old before she finally got her license.)
Also, my grandfather lived with us. He died a month before I turned three. He had hardening of the arteries of the brain and couldn't walk without assistance. He would lie on the couch a lot. Whenever I walked by the couch, he would reach out and pat me on the head. I remember walking by the couch when he was asleep and I took his hand and patted myself on the head with it.
I remember my grandpa taking me to the corner store, Boatwright's, in Pleasant Ridge (a Cincy neighborhood). He would let me pick my own candy. I always picked a box of Boston Baked Beans. Once he bought me a balsa wood airplane, the kind that is two pieces you stick together and it breaks the first time it lands. But it was sweet. Funny thing was that he would leave me at the store with the shopowner, a friend of his, for about five minutes, and then go next door and buy a bottle of beer. He'd always come out of the store with a bottle of beer in a brown paper sack, look both ways on the sidewalk before stepping fully out, then run back into Boatwright's and get me. This seemed strange to me. Years later, my dad told me that my grandpa was from a dry county in KY and was checking to make sure that nobody he knew saw him buying beer!
I also remember my grandfather's funeral. It was held in a church so my mother, good JW that she was, stayed in the car. I remember my dad being a pallbearer and crying as he shouldered the casket. That was the first time I'd ever seen my father cry.
StAnn
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snowbird
That is so true, Else.
Sylvia
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snowbird
Oh, St Ann, now you've got me
Sylvia
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ninja
I vividly remember being a glint in my old mans eye
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snowbird
Ninja, you are incorrigible!
Thanks for the pm, by the way.
Sylvia
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jamiebowers
18 months old April 1966 when my brother was born. I thought my mom brought him home for me.
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caliber
Infantile, or childhood amnesia is characterized by the relative absence of memory before 3 or 4 years of age. It is important to note that the term does not refer to complete absence of memories, but the relative scarcity of memories during infancy — a scarcity that cannot be accounted for by a forgetting curve. [citation needed] Additionally, the boundary is malleable and can be influenced by both individual experiences (Usher & Neisser, 1993) and cultural factors (Wang, 2001).
Research has demonstrated that children are adept learners and are quick to acquire and retain information. Children do remember events; however, these memories accessible as children are lost to infantile amnesia in adulthood (Bauer, 2004; Fivush, et al., 1987).
Language explanation
The incomplete development of language in young children may be a cause of childhood amnesia in that infants do not have the language capacity to encode autobiographical memories in a manner that their language-based adult selves can interpret correctly. Indeed, the typical schedule of language development seems to support this theory. Babies of one year old tend to be limited to one word utterances, and childhood amnesia predicts that adults have very few, if any, memories of this time. By the age of three, however, children are capable of two or three word phrases, and by age five their speech already resembles adult speech. This language development seems to very much correspond to childhood amnesia because it is around the age of three to four that is the time of most adults’ earliest recallable memory (Gleitman, et al., 2004).
Emotion explanation
One explanation notes the connections between the emotion or amygdala-governed memory pathway and the autobiographical or hippocampus-governed pathway. While these two memory systems do have much independence, it is also known that emotions and the amygdala play a role in the encoding of memories typically associated with the hippocampus (Phelps, 2004). Knowing this, it has been suggested that the differences between the emotions experienced by infants and adults may be a cause of childhood amnesia (West, et
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snowbird
Thanks for that, Caliber.
Most of my memories have strong emotional overtones.
As an example, around the age of 2, I distinctly remember my brothers coercing me to steal food from a neighbor's table.
I recall NOT wanting to do it, but hunger and my brother's threats won.
Sylvia