Yesterday Nurse Wretched asked a very good question: what is your earliest childhood memory, and how old were you?
Her question was prompted by having read this article by Bill Briggs.
The earliest memory that stuck with you likely came when you were “…3 1/2 years old, according to numerous past studies. At that age, the hippocampus, a portion of the brain used to store memories, has adequately matured to handle that task, experts say.”A friend remembers being upset one September when she was four. Her older siblings were now all going to school and she, being the youngest, wasn’t allowed to go yet.
Mr. S., an engineer to his bones, says he remembers asking an aunt what subtraction was. No surprise there, really.
It took me a while to assemble my earliest memory. For a long time I remembered a brightly-coloured playground with a playhouse and slides, but it seemed to be indoors, which didn’t make sense. Eventually I worked out that it had been aboard the ship on which my family emigrated from England, when I was two and a half.
I also remember a fire from when I must have been three. We lived near a farm, and I remember my mother, older sister and I being clustered in an upstairs window watching one of the outbuildings burn down. There’s no trauma associated with it; the memory is more about the cluster than the fire. Go figure.
So what about you, Crassers? What’s the earliest memory you have? What do you think it means? If you have young children, do you have any insight into what their own earliest recollection might be?
photos: Wiki Commons
