During a shrooms trip one sapphire blue sky day in Fall at university, I lost all access to my language faculty. It felt like an invisible hand was erasing my entire lexicon in huge swaths at a time until there were no more words left in my head. One moment I had thoughts. The next moment, after the last word blinked out of existence, I had only feelings.
The clouds covered the sun, and a gust of wind passed over me, and I was cold, and I could only experience the sensation of discomfort. Then the sun emerged, and I was basked with warmth, and I experienced happiness that brought a smile to my face and a feeling of safety.
For about two hours I existed in this language-less state. Without words I wasn't able to think. There was no internal dialogue. I couldn't reason about things, or think about the past or future. There were no words there to attach to the objects around me let alone abstract concepts. Then, as quickly as my language had been erased, it returned again in patches. Once it was all back I was able to reflect on this experience using my words. I have always wondered if this is what it is like to be a baby.
This is very interesting for me because I have almost the inverse experience of this. When I was a child I was diagnosed with migraine induced absent seizures. I think it was mostly a "we don't really know what this is, but here's a diagnosis so you can stop bothering us". I mostly grew out of it, but a few times per year I'll have an episode.
What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.
This sounds similar to depersonalization episodes [0]. I used to have regular episodes myself, and they scared the hell out of me. It didn't help they lasted 10 days, but strangely enough never more and never less. The experience is indeed hard to describe, but the video game analogy clicks with me. I usually describe it as experiencing life in third person.
Depersonalization is really bizarre and unsettling. During the pandemic while working from home (and shortly after our first child was born), I started to get these periods of time where life didn’t “feel real”. A room in my apartment wasn’t a room; it was just an arbitrary box that my body was inside of. Things that had substance or meaning started seeming sort of “hollow”, and I felt like I was watching a movie about myself rather than experiencing it. I started Googling and depersonalization / derealization showed up in the results.
I’d like to say it’s gone away since it first appeared two years ago, but it hasn’t entirely. The “not real” sensation seems to linger in the background of my life permanently now. I notice it’s worse if I’m stressed, haven’t had sleep, or haven’t hung out with any friends in person in a while. I also wonder if working remotely via Zoom meetings all the time contributes to the problem; it would be interesting to know if diagnoses of depersonalization spiked during the pandemic.
Frightening. The longest I had one was about a day. Most come and go very quickly now since I've learned to manage them. I feel like the longer I panic and think about the longer they last.
I've had a similar experience, but only once, and only induced as an accidental side effect by months of mental and physical preparation. About ten years ago, I spent three months where I almost singularly (outside of my software job) thought about and prepared for a powerlifting competition (amateur, not crazy strong). This would be my second competition (and at the same location), and every night before falling asleep, I would visualize the entire day, from waking up, to driving to the location, weighing in, sitting in the stands, walking up to the platform, and completing the lifts. What I would be wearing, what I would eat, what books I would bring. What lifts I would attempt, and how I would warm up.
During the competition, while I was on the platform, I felt like my consciousness was ten feet above my head, and all my actions happened autonomously, without any conscious direction. I can hear, on the video someone recorded, my father yelling my name from the stands, but in the moment I had no conception of that. I bumped into the spotter while resetting my stance on one of the squats, and didn't even really register or respond to his presence.
It felt incredibly powerful, but that's probably because of all the purposeful preparation that led up to it. I can't imagine how terrifying that would be to have happen at random without any warning.
Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?
Somewhat unrelatedly, I've recently been toying with a philosophical idea: what is the inverse of solipsism? Solipsism is the belief that the Self is the only real thing, since it's the only thing that can think. Everything else, and everyone else, may all be false perceptions. So I am real, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. The inverse of that would be that everyone else is real, and I their collective mass hallucination. Who am I to say that I exist? The best way to exist is to not believe in one's existence. I wouldn't say I exactly subscribe to it, but I do enjoy thinking about it.
> Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?
No I maintain full muscle control, physical feeling, etc. It's much harder to explain because of this. It's more or less sudden onset ego death, which is why it's so frightening when it happens. You can only get so used to it, and even now as an adult my heart still races although I don't panic.
One physical way to think about it is that my movements feel like they precede my thoughts about that movement, but I'm still thinking and bringing those movements into existence. Time gets jumbled during these episodes much like what happens the moment before you're knocked unconscious, but the unconscious part never comes.
The only time I've been able to replicate even a small part of these episodes was when I was very very high. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time and I hadn't had an episode in a long while. I smoked a ton of weed with one of my friends and parts of that high felt like these episodes, though much more subtle. So I would say if you've ever been so high that you have a hard time keeping track of time, and you often get stuck in these mini loops of saying or doing the same thing, it's kinda sorta like that, but not really.
may be you need to look at what buddhists are saying about no-self and hindus are saying about brahman and compare and contrast your experience with these texts. What you are describing looks completely normal (except for migraine) and is in fact expected as per these texts.
Can I quote this story in an anecdotal context in a book I’m writing about Why We Play?
Sorry for such a short, bizarre reply. Your comment and GP are fantastic accounts, and I genuinely appreciate you both for sharing these experiences. Let me know if you have questions, but certainly no need to reply otherwise. Cheers :)
Yeah I can still drive. In fact, I’ve had episodes while driving.
It’s not dangerous. I still know where I am, how to drive, and what’s going on. It just doesn’t feel like I’m doing it. So if I think “I need to pull over” and then I pull over, it’s as if I’ve observed myself doing that in some sort of higher abstracted state. I’ve thought the action into reality, but I had no connection to my body doing the action.
The hard part to explain is that I can still “feel” my body during these episodes. But it just feels like data being processed by my brain. I have no sense that the things I’m feeling are me, or a part of me. This is why the video game analogy sometimes works.
If you’re playing a game you’re making decisions, you’re physically controlling the actions (through a keyboard or controller). You might even have some haptic feedback that you can feel. But you have no sense of that character being you. You have no ego connection to that character, at least not in any meaningful way.
That’s what these episodes feel like. It’s like experiencing an ego death, just very quickly and without any lead up or warning.
Why does it seem that way to you? They specifically detailed they can still act in the expected way, just with dissociation. Nothing inherently dangerous about that. To get a driver's license, I don't think a sense of self is required at all. Just the knowledge of the script.
Huh, most of my thinking isn’t language, and that which is is mostly something of a bad habit, like a voiceover narrator trying to recreate thoughts that already happened (And is quite hard to pull attention away from)
This occasionally leads to communication difficulties in translation into language.
During total ego death (from quite a significant amount of shrooms) where I have totally forgotten who I am, where I physically was, that I am human, or where I came from, I thought to myself “do I exist?” shortly followed by “wow! I still have language! I must exist!”
I had an interestingly similar experience. As the shrooms were starting to hit, I recall my internal monologue was racing with thoughts, as if that part of my mind was desperately struggling to hold on to the reins of consciousness. Then suddenly... silence. My thoughts were completely stilled as my mind entered into a wordless state, and the sounds of the world around me became incredibly overwhelming. I didn't last long (I can't give an exact time frame, but it certainly was not anywhere close to two hours), but during that time, I developed a strong sense of empathy of what it must be like to be an intelligent yet wordless animal like a dog or a cat. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.
500 micrograms LSD. Experienced "personality regression." I lost my ability to process and generate language. I had only emotional responses to noises that I heard. Some of those noises were human voices, but they sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: just a wah-wah-wah-wah trumpet-like sound that was more a placeholder for the speech than anything like real speech. The emotions that the sounds caused were basic and strong: a longing to be closer to a voice whose timbre I recognized, pure joy at hearing the rhythm of a song that I knew.
Once my language facilities came back, I could remember only the "shape" of the experience, but none of its contents. I remember feeling the emotions, but I don't have the usual internal voice that narrates them. I knew there were sounds, but I can't describe them well, except in terms of my emotional response to them.
At this point, because of a long history of meditation and other factors you'd recognize, I'm absolutely certain that there is nothing to our consciousness other than a narrative machine that creates who we are using words. This is why I believe were so close to AGI, just looking in the 'wrong' direction. We think AGI should have more than just a self-centered narrative, because we think we do.
> a narrative machine that creates who we are using words.
That's a really interesting thought that I'll have to spend some more time with. It makes me think of an experiment I heard about[0] with people who had lobotomies. The split brain leads to one side having verbal facilities, and each side having one eyeball sensory perception. They showed the non-verbal eyeball a sign that said something like "stand up", and most patients did. When then asked why they stood up, they had unrelated answers, like "my legs were stiff". So the idea that we just create narratives as post-hoc explanations of our actions is pretty compelling.
[0] I really wish I could find the reference to the experiment, but my google-fu is failing me and I don't recall where I read about it.
As the person said, they still had qualia while without the ability to form a narrative, and another person has said it was hard to remember, because narratives act as a mnemonic. Having experienced ego-death myself, I can confirm that I still have a memory of the experience, but that it is more of disjointed impressions (hard to maintain memory of the chronology, which a narrative might be able to cement). But I was still conscious and experiencing things; that is precisely the weird part.
You may have a point in some way (not specifically narrative alone, though): It is true that certain anesthetics don't even render us unconscious, but just make us forget what we were perceiving while having our CNS motor functions paralyzed... and maybe deep sleep is similar--while paralyzed maybe we forget our senses moment by moment. But ego death from psychedelics is not the same thing: it doesn't completely erase your ability to recall impressions and images.
Either way none of this explains how qualia can arise other than it helps to remember things for us to have a sense of chronology/persistence of experience, and so I doubt a machine that can come up with a narrative of what it is sensing would magically have qualia (we would have no way of knowing, even if it claimed it did--all we could know is that WE are consciously observing an apparently conscious thing).
I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. Like "the prestige" the man drowns each night and experiences death, but the clone has the illusion that it has been alive up until the point it was created. In this case I see consciousness and qualia as a temporary instance/shape of neurons activating in unison that is suddenly conscious, but can lose residency, and when it re-forms has the illusion "it" is the same thing and maintains an identity.
Considering it takes many depths of artificial neurons to simulate a single human neuron, and the speed at which learning can regress is so slow now, I think we are a very very long way from having such an instance of consciousness appear in an active neural network. Such a network would need to be so analog that it would be effectively the same thing as actual grey matter, and you may as well just have a baby. At least with a baby you would have a true sense of the responsibility you have in creating such an instance (or persistent series of instances that creates an identity).
> I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body.
That makes me think about a saying I've heard about how memory isn't read-only, it's always read-write, and you write back the modified version of what you read. We're constantly changing our past to be more more like what wished it was, and you can see an example of that process in another of my replies in this thread.
> I lost all access to my language faculty...One moment I had thoughts. The next moment, after the last word blinked out of existence, I had only feelings.
It's a common belief, but a myth, that you need language to think. You can tell you don't, like when you can't remember a word but you know what you are trying to say, or when can't remember someone's name but you remember everything about them. Deaf children (certainly before modern times), they know how to think no problem, but they don't have language.
What's odd and sorta frightening is that some people lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. They apparently think in symbols and visual elements.
You think that's odd and frightening? I find it a lot more odd and frightening that y'all constantly hear voices in your heads and think that's normal.
Jokes aside, yeah, I have no internal dialogue, I at best have an internal monologue if I'm specifically trying to express something in language (e.g. to write it down like now).
I wouldn't say I think in "symbols and visual elements" as I also have aphantasia, which means y'all literally seeing pictures (or even being able to place imagined objects in your perception of the physical space around you) in your head feels equally weird to me as the voices.
I find it hard to imagine my future selves ("Where do you see yourself ten years from now?" is hard to answer for me because I literally can't) and feel detached from my past selves (memories are somewhat abstract because of my aphantasia), but I've read that this may be related to my autism. I can anticipate changes/events but it's more like seeing a cartoon sketch than directly interpolating the present and the predicted outcome.
My thinking is definitely spatial though. If I work on anything that requires focus, I sense concepts I work on persisting outside my "peripheral vision" much like you'd perceive a faint directional noise.
I also have terrible memory when it comes to names and dates or mathematical formulas (or chemicals for that matter). I find it easier to memorize processes (if they have a logical flow), which is probably how I ended up in programming.
Oh, and I am terrible at perceiving things like hunger or needing to pee until it's urgent, but that again seems to be an autism (or ADHD) thing.
I don't have an internal dialogue. I think in symbols and visual elements. Sometimes a realization hits but it's never in the form of words or a sentence, but rather like entering a new state of consciousness.
Language is more like a tool than an innate part of me.
It's not that I'm incapable of having internal dialogue, it's just that it is putting in words others could understand a thought, or series of thoughts that happened in fraction of a time it takes to form a single sentence. The result of the thought process isn't something expressed in words, it's internalized knowledge, conclusion or decision
I don't feel singled out, I feel inclined to think that most people do have internal dialogue, but for some it's after the fact, it's not part of the thought process
For someone who's experienced loss of language, I have to say that your writing style is very vivid and poetic. I could only wish to have even half your diction
I think in order to recall something, you need to have some internalized understanding of it. In those very early formative years, you're still trying to understand 3D vision, and haven't yet learned to apply the shapes and colours you see to the crayons your using to scribble on the wall.
In the same way that if you fail a high school math test based on material you covered in class already, it is because you were unable to recall the bits you don't yet understand. You've seen it before the test, but since you didn't understand it, you can't recall and apply it.
I have only two clear memories from when I was around 2.5 years old. I think they stuck because of an unusual connection. There was a guy who used to come to our door and sell eggs, in huge 24-egg cartons (I didn't count them, I just remember the big square size). And then one day we took a long drive in my father's old car, along wet dirt roads, and ended up at a country house where my mother bought a sewing machine. And it was the same guy selling that one. So he was clearly some kind of peddler of various diverse items (and his farm house explained where he got the eggs from, but that's my much later reasoning).
(the sewing machine is still around, btw, a lifetime later).
For other memories I don't have any clear ones until I'm a bit more than three years old. But I have lots of them.
Edit: Oh, and of course the memory from when I was exactly three.. I fell on my head from quite high, landed on ice.. I probably fainted, but I remember a guy came and carried me home. I got a concussion from that.
I understood "infant amnesia" but wondered how far back my kids could remember when they were little. As soon as they could start to communicate with words (around 12 months?) I asked both kids about being born, and being in mommy's belly. They both gave descriptions I'd call accurate! "Wimming" my son said, meaning swimming inside of mommy's belly. And my daughter said "coooold!" when I ask if she remembered coming out of mommy's belly.
I remember thinking "Holy shit, they remember it all."
Kids from age 1-4 also have an incredibly vivid imagination for fantasy, and can't tell apart the difference between reality and imagined scenarios sometimes.
The prototypical scenario in which this is relevant is the whole "there is a monster in my closet". Sure, they just imagined it. But the visual feels just as real as if they had actually seen it.
It's easy to dismiss this as an adult, but modern parental advice is to treat these flights of fancy very earnestly, and engage it on it's own rules ("I went inside the closet and I chased the monster away" is a much better strategy than "There's no monster in your closet") [this isn't advice for you, I'm sure you don't need it, but any non-parent reading that may find it interesting]
My 2 year olds frequently tells me and my wife stories that we know are factually inaccurate. (Like something that happened on a walk with one of us so we know for sure it didn't happen)
The best leading theories about infant amnesia is that language IS what causes it. Memories are indexed by different keys until language is developed. Once language comes in, it becomes the only key function for accessing memories, and the ones mapped before language just become unsearchable.
I hope I'm wrong. It would be super cool if your kids actually remembered these things for real. But I doubt it.
> The best leading theories about infant amnesia is that language IS what causes it. Memories are indexed by different keys until language is developed. Once language comes in, it becomes the only key function for accessing memories, and the ones mapped before language just become unsearchable.
That actually makes a ton of sense. Also a bit eerie to think that my brain holds information that I just can't search for. I wonder if certain triggers could cause that information to surface, since even though our memories are searched through language, maybe there are other 'pathways' that can reach those spots. Kinda like memory that's not mapped in any pages, it's physically there but you can't normally address it.
Think about all the time you couldn't remember an actor's name, or some detail about a party. But then as soon as someone tells you, or starts telling a story from the party, it all comes flooding back.
That's a good point. I wonder what kind of triggers could bring those really old memories back, as simple things like seeing objects/faces from back then don't work.
I learned how to walk when I was around 10-11 months old. I still remember showing it to visiting relatives, and is my first memory that I can date.
I can date other memories relatively accurately because they are from an apartment where I only lived until I was 2 years old. They probably don't go as far much farther back than my first memory. I remember playing with a car, looking out the window, meeting my neighbour who I never saw again after we moved etc.
Some may call them false memories, but I don't see any reason why we should not be able to keep memories alive if we think about them from time to time? It's not like there's a big "reset" on your birthday that deletes all information from your brain. I have always reflected on the past from an early age, and I think the memories were kept alive by this and moved into the more mature part of the brain as time went on. At least that is my theory.
Maybe most people don't remember their first years because they don't reflect on them from an early age, and the memories are destroyed as the brain changes and evolves? Like a LRU cache :-)
I don't know about that far back, but when my older daughter was about 18 months old, she had autobiographic memories going back to maybe 9-12month of age.
When she was 3 years old, she still remembered them. Forget everything about them at age 7.
I've lost the visual memories, but I remember having memories from an early time, short glimpses. Things like trying to repeat words and the grownups not being patient enough and moving onto the next word before I could attempt to speak. Faint memories of my first steps, walking from my father to my mother, being proud, stuff like that. I remember a particular new year's eve, the grownups were dancing and I was in a crib alone, feeling left out. I remember not liking to wake up in the dark, being scared and crying for mom to get in, or the sensation of having a soiled diaper. People don't believe that I remember. My brother is the same, we still hold onto some distinct memories from really early on, although the specifics are getting muddled and eroded.
During a psychedelic trip, I had similar memories of how difficult speaking was in early childhood. It made me quite proud afterwards that I had finally managed to master speaking.
During the same trip, I also heard my mother as if my mental dictionary of sounds was made of her voice.
I remember being carried around, having diapers changed on some table in a bathroom. "Oh back here again", I started to think. I am not kidding, of course I did not think that in words, but just the familiarity of it happening over and over. I believe those are true memories.
Wow, I always thought I had abnormally early memories, but nothing like this. Do you have these memories only from being very young? Or are the glimpses there from infant up to now?
Unfortunately, I'd forgotten a lot from my school years. There are of course moments, some more vivid than others, but I can't really remember my classmates, teachers, school activities and such anymore. I don't really reminisce a lot, maybe I could dig up the memories if I had someone else from that period to talk to.
I remember visiting my moms house in my 20s and seeing an old dresser I had as a baby. I immediately had a flash of the feeling of chewing on the drawer handle. My theory is that the memories are there but they just don’t make a lot of sense to us once we start to use language for storage and recall.
I recall reading about a paper where they ran a test on kids just as they had started to learn language, and again a year later after they had learned a lot more.
They did a vocabulary test and played a game. A year later they did another vocabulary test and memory recall challenge. They found that for the kids that remembered the game they played, if they didn't know the word for something at that point, they wouldn't use that word when recalling, even if they had subsequently learned that word in the meantime between tests.
Their conclusion was that memories were closely linked to the vocabulary the kids knew at the time the memory formed.
I have this vivid memory of listening to a conversation between my parents, and they said something (I don't remember what) was going to happen on "Saturday". I did not know what "Saturday" means, so I tried to ask them about it. They could not understand my question though. I sometimes wonder about this memory, if perhaps I was at an age where I could understand some, but not speak. Pretty weird.
I have a memory of falling off a dock when I was 3 while fishing.
I think half the memory might be imagined, which is while I was underwater. I remember it being green and seeing fish nearby, which seems a little unlikely to adult me (I would scare the fish away presumably).
The rest of my memory is being rescued. I'm relatively certain it's a real memory, because I can describe to you what it feels like to have your entire body weight pulling against your scalp, as my dad lifted me out by a handful of hair onto the dock.
It was not painful, as you might imagine. It was rather nice.
I also wonder how much of what we remember is false memories. For example, I vividly remember my first steps when I was around 1 year old. But the details don't match what actually happened. It happened in a different house, for example. I think what actually happened is that my parents loved to tell this story every birthday of mine, I imagined how it might look like, and my brain formed a false memory. I read somewhere that a lot of what we remember is false memory (made up or distorted) and we are completely unaware of it.
When I was little, my older brothers repeatedly told me that I'd pushed over a motorbike one day. I eventually believed them and formed a vivid memory of the incident, and it wasn't til my 21st birthday that my brothers came clean.
15 years later, I still have some recollection of pushing the motorbike over, but I think it's more like a memory of a memory now, since I know it didn't really happen.
I don't think I'm particularly prone to suggestion (although I was young at the time). I feel like if it can happen to me, it must happen to other people also, and I too wonder how much of what we remember is false memories.
Yes. Children can be (unintentional) little shits. I could go on for hours about all the shit me and my brothers did to each other much worse than just gaslighting.
When I was in kindergarten, I can't know how old I was, I clearly remember going to the window in our apartment and seeing my grandmother looking up at me, so I jumped and she caught me.
Obviously not a true memory. I remember remembering it, and that feels weird, because I don't actually remember it happening anymore (saying that makes me realize that the false memory is either me remembering that, or me remembering remembering that). I think it came from a weird dream.
It may have something to do with my mother telling me not to go near the window because I could fall. My grandmother used to visit us there a lot too, and I liked that. The brain is super weird.
There's very little in a baby's head to hang those memories on. Not only can we not remember birth, but I'd bet that the baby doesn't remember it after five minutes or so (after the fear that it might happen again dies down.)
The only reason I can recall anything is because the words that I use to try to recall it ("what did I do yesterday morning?") take me down a chain of associations that hopefully will spit me out yesterday morning sometime, and that thing I remembered (maybe that I dropped one of my shoes when I was putting them on, or that one of my teeth hurt when I brushed it) can be a conduit to remember the rest of my morning.
The memory experiment just seems like spaced repetition to me [edit:which you can use to teach a cockroach, or a worm.] They show a baby a unique object with a particular use. The next time they show the baby that unique object, they either recall the particular use, or the experimenter demonstrates it again. As these periods grow longer and longer, the memories grow longer. The intuitive reason it would be less effective earlier in life than later is because babies can't see properly, or understand the positions of things in space, so they don't care when a mobile or a train moves; they don't recognize it as interesting.
Note: I can never remember what I did yesterday morning, because with the way I process the world, there's usually nothing in the sentence "What did you do yesterday morning?" that would associate with a particular day; every morning is yesterday morning. If I'm celebrating having done something significant "yesterday," however, I can start with that thing and work backwards to how I prepared for that thing. Some people are journalers/diarists, or heavily scheduled, and knowing what they have to do today, or maybe the last thing they wrote in their journal, would bring up almost immediately the memories that I have a huge difficulty recalling.
My memories are not connected to the calendar. Things I remember are free floating in time, except if they are in a particular place I remember when I was in that place, but that isn't part of my memory of the place.
I've lived in the same house for 20 years now, and don't have anchors to connect memories to dates because of that. I have memories that could be 5 years old or 15, I couldn't say.
I also do this thing, where when I read about something that was some time ago with a specific year, I try to see it in the context of what I was doing back then, and what situation I was in. For example "ah, this was my last year of university, so I was living in that apartment, meeting so and so...".
Again all those things are "free floating" with no feeling of calendar in my mind, but factually knowing what I was doing during some time frame and using other specific "anchor dates" of important events in my life and the world, it's fun to read about something old and reconstructing it in the context of my life back then.
It does not work very well the other way around. There are a lot of memories similar to: "Oh, I remember that party... wonder when that was. I definitely was in university then, but that's not narrowing it down." (Especially because "pre-PhD" university studying lasted much longer in Germany back then than it is nowadays.) If I really wanted to know the exact year, it would be detective work.
I've kept all my emails going back over 20 years now, that helps a lot. I've also been experimenting with keeping a journal, I'm curious how that will work for my future self.
My dad kept a journal of his WW2 experience. He told me some years ago that he read it, and was shocked that it didn't jibe with his recollections.
Sometimes I wonder how people who write autobiographies can possibly remember things in such detail.
We have done some interesting studies on infant memories. At first, you are correct that they basically can't remember anything.
Even then, though. At a very early age, they will recognize their mother. This comes well before "object permanence," which happens at about 8 months.
(Object Permanence is the ability to remember a thing even after you can't see it anymore, and to recognize it as the same, rather than a new one, when it returns. It is the ability to mentally follow an object when it "goes away" and to understand that it still exists)
> At a very early age, they will recognize their mother.
If there's any stimulus that gets worked over and over, it's your mother's face. Surely in a traditional mother-child relationship you use your mother's face to learn how faces work, probably even your own face.
I'm not sure what you're trying to explain to me. I'm aware of object permanence.
I remember reading a book by Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria about a man with 100% memory. Afair, he was able to recall the events right from his birth when he was still in a a crib.
Lot of interesting comments here. It is odd that we Cartesians consider "memory" to be a kind of passive process, like geologic sedimentation, RAM, or something like a material impression. Memory is interactive. It's a skill, like walking. I've taught kids the art. It takes work and very specific techniques. I'd point anyone interested in the topic to folks like Henri Bergson, or Frances Yates's "Art of Memory".
I've a terrible memory (actually I think its more accurate to say recall, the memories are in there, it's just hard to access at times). However my earliest memory is of seeing an orange glow as I was falling asleep in bed. I found out many years later, well in my 20s, that I used to sleep in a cot in my parents room that had an electric bar heater on the wall. We moved from that house before I was 1. Crazy.
I find the distinction between “semantic memories” (of facts), “procedural memories” (how to do something) and “autobiographical memories” (stories from the past) very helpful when thinking about memories.
"semantic memories" (of facts in objective reality), "procedural memories" (how to do something) and "autobiographical memories" (of subjective experience).
Weirdly enough, I have a distinct memory when I was "young". Young was in my case, 1.5 years old.
I met my great grandmother, whom was nearing her death. She knew that we were making one last visit and that I was coming. I remember meeting her, being in the old 80's hospital room with the upper white and lower green tiles. I remember how frail her hands were, like delicate paper. I remember getting out of my stroller and laying my head on her hand, carefully.
I could feel this was my last and only moment with her, and that somehow a continuation or some completion was right then and there.
I have other memories that become more 'solid' later. My memories really start around when I was 3 onwards, along when I was able to read. I never was taught... I just knew how to. My mom even still has my first alphabet I wrote down when I was 2.5y old.
Direction was important to me somehow. I can remember the orientation of every house we've lived in. And it's coarse, like north, west, etc...
The very earliest one is of being in my crib, bouncing the little spring that is wound around one of the shafts that hold the crib together. I would lay there and lift it up, and it would bounce. Boing, boing, boing... Lift higher, more bounces. Slamming it down worked too. A related one, a bit later was flicking the little springy door stop and realizing they were the same kind of thing! And that realization is probably why I remember.
I can remember my crib, parts of the house, and the porch with little walk leading to the fence and the little gate that could open to the sidewalk, out of our yard, into the world.
One day, my parents set me down, opened that gate and walked next door, across the street! And there was this other little kid. A little older than me, his name was "cash" and I had associated "cash" with money, and why would someone name a person like money? I thought about that a lot while we met, and I have a set of photos from that day in my head. The walkway, being set down to walk. The gate opening, or open. Walking up to Cash, my parents on my left, us talking while they talked, and then the best:
Cash said, "you want to play downstairs?" I said, "yeah" because I had been downstairs in our house a time or two and people had all manner of interesting stuff in the downstairs! Parts, equipment, things, and all sorts of smells, and the walls are usually not finished, can see stuff we don't always see.
We walked in the door, Cash opened the door leading downstairs and flicked a light switch, and the light came on. He said, "Two way switch" and that it just worked when you needed it to. I remember being super impressed! Like that was some high tech our house did not have. Their house was much bigger than ours...
I need to cut this short. Bottom line is those people were thieves. They had way more stuff downstairs than I had seen and it solidified in my mind. Tires, radios, stuff..
Years later, age 17'ish, I mentioned all this to my mother, who said they moved after finding out!
The people in this discussion saying that memory is about connections are on the right path. The earliest ones I have also have a basis, a connection of sort, a place to be.
I remember several times putting my eldest son to bed when he was a few months old and having this intrusive thought that maybe the reason why he was yelling was because he knew he wouldn’t remember today when he woke up the next day and that every day was like being reborn! Darker than a Black Mirror episode for sure! It only went away when he started developing more of his own personality
(This stuff + sleep deprivation is a heady cocktail!)
Better yet: do not feel as bad because kids won't remember. If you are sleep-training them and they cry for hours, they won't remember the next day anyway.
Edit: this is what a pediatrician said to help console a parent who was hesitant to try sleep training
This is some approximation of what half the globe already believes to occur with reincarnation, but it is not felt exclusively as a dark terror. More like the setting and rising of the sun. The nights are dark and full of terror, but it is cast away with the coming rays.
Interestingly language shapes memory. There was a study I read years ago (digging up that citation would be next to impossible) that revolved around psychologists asking adults to recall memories from their childhood. And what was curious about the study is that all of the participants reverted to using simpler, more child like vocabulary to describe the memories, because the memories formed at the time were formed along with the level of language they had.
I have observed this in myself when discussing certain computing concepts, talking about projects I undertook 20 and 30+ years ago, and describing in language those concepts that today we would simply say "oh, that's this data structure" or a particular technique or algorithm or concept.
You observe the same thing in certain cultures that do not have the words to describe certain concepts, e.g. complex familial relationships in English. And you observe certain things in gendered and non-gendered Romance languages.
I grew up before there were camcorders and video recording in every phone or even instamatic polaroid cameras in every hand at every point in life, and I have "core memories", very distinct events in my life, where I describe them as "riding a bicycle" moment. One day you cannot ride a bicycle, and then something clicks inside you, and then you can. Learning to swim, learning to read, learning to ride a bicycle, learning to wire up a circuit, learning to stand up in my crib, learning to take my first steps, learning to get out of the pushchair. I have a recurring nightmare, that has lessened over the years, as I've gotten older, but still holds the same terror, that forms part of my earliest memories, I would say I have had that nightmare before I could even speak coherently. It's like a movie that plays in my head, the exact same way, the exact same sounds, the exact same feelings of dread.
I also log a lot of my life, so I don't recall "yesterday" but I can tell you a lot of what was going on in my life on any particular day, from deaths of pets and family members, to changes to my workshop, to code I wrote, to algorithms I was pondering, to new stuff I learnt.
I'm surprised my brain remembers a lot of weird dreams I had along the years. Most often completely imaginary, psychedelic ones with no relation with reality.
I also have a lot of dreams which I remember time to time and it makes me feel confused because why my brain thinks about things which is not even real.
Also, sometimes when I wake up I need a little bit of time to understand if it was real life or just a dream
> And what was curious about the study is that all of the participants reverted to using simpler, more child like vocabulary to describe the memories
This correlates well with the study on toddlers I described here[1]. I guess it's not terribly surprising that words are being used to encode events, they're pretty darn good at compressing details.
Most strong memories are either linked to a strong emotional event or can be linked to a lot of other memories/ideas.
If I get a new piece of information, I'm much more likely to remember it if I can relate it to things I already know. The things that don't relate to anything else are difficult to remember, or at least difficult to recall.
My theory is that when you're first born you have no basis to relate anything to. Eventually you experience enough things that your brain starts making connections to make it easier to start remembering things. Those early memories, if they exist, are orphaned and lost to time without a clear path to recall them.
Except when you're born you've been around for a few months already, likely felt one thing or another shared with your mother.
You're right in another way, though: when you are born your body is still not physically wired up completely yet, a process which starts in the womb but we're not in there long enough to allow it to complete.
This is part of the reasons newborns flail around so much -- they're learning what's connected to what, and that takes lots of repetition.
I would be surprised if this didn't affect the physical wiring of the brain, too.
Also keep in mind that in the body, connectedness is not a binary idea. It's really the strength of connections in relation to each other that make up how we respond to things.
> Except when you're born you've been around for a few months already
With the same level of stimulation that you get from a sensory deprivation tank (by design.) Without memories and associations to get lost in, lying in a sensory deprivation tank would probably be a completely timeless thing, no different than being dead. There's very little you're going to learn in the womb that will help you to interpret what's happening outside, other than you may get some experience with the sounds of your mother's language. [edit: Feelings of acceleration? A sense of one's own mass?]
I had a friend whose sister was mentally ill. When she wasn't on medication, she did not behave in a normal fashion. But then she took medication, and she was entirely normal. Thing is - her memories seemed to be locked to her frame of mind, so she could only remember what she did off medication -- when she was off medication.
Some antipsychotics work by essentially blocking the activation of most neurotransmitter receptors, preventing neural circuits from firing. Newer ones also activate one or two specific receptors. It seems plausible that these two ”frames of mind” are two completely separate neuronal networks, and because one of them is entirely blocked while on medication, it tends to overfire when off medication.
We moved when my baby was one year old. Both our old and new houses had stairs he would scoot down backwards on his belly. Once right after we moved he would reach the bottom and keep scooting backwards on the floor. He pretty clearly was thrown off by the fewer steps in the new house.
Compared to many other species except marsupials, human babies aren't close to fully developed. It has to do with evolutionarily with infant brain size and the size of a woman's pelvis. Few other animals have such as a high mortality rate. Sheep, which are domesticated animals, are close in infant mortality rate to humans.
Among the different takes on consciousness one goes that we become conscious when our minds begin to model humans close to us. As you model others in your mind continuously over time, you end up modeling their minds, which leads to creating a model of yourself embedded in them; consciousness as a sort of feedback loop.
Yes, it implies that we are essentially conscious through others and no man is truly an island.
As the article mentions, it might explain the lack of autobiographical memories in early years.
It also explains how treating a person as if they were X results in them eventually behaving as if they are X, especially if you are of consequence to them (a parent, a teacher) or if this treatment is persistent in their life. Since their model of themselves is partly your model of them, it adjusts correspondingly to whatever label they are assigned.
My earliest memories are from age 2 years, 8 months. They involve a cross-country bus trip and remembering a few things like my pillow on the bus, a kind of cereal I got to eat, and a carpet. I never brought them up with my parents (my mom took me on this trip) until 20-25 years later, at which point they didn’t remember these details. I’m able to date the trip, however, and thus my age.
I have a number of other memories from the ~3 year age range, including my brother being brought home, and they are still pretty vivid, though of course I have played them back in my head many times.
I remember waking up and walking around the house until I ran into one of my parents. My father was complaining about something that apparantly I had done, he wanted me to say a phrase that obviously pointed to me and I remember thinking that it was dumb since that was the same as a confession.
Notheless I repeated it to him since more than anything it seemed he just wanted me to say it for his own amusement. Shortly after while I was under this fog of confussion I was given photographs of me with some cousins at some nearby park, the event had happened a week earlier and I was very intrigued by these photos and spent a long time looking at them trying to recall the event in some way
but no matter how much I tried I never did, to me it was the same as looking at a stranger's photos.
That's my first memory, since then its been an uninterrupted stream. By my calculations I must have been older than 3 and younger than 5 since I remember when my sister was born who is the youngest but not my younger brothers. If someone ever mentions a past event all I ever need is a few pieces and then I will eventually recall without problems and with many more details than they themselves remember, same thing with any photograph that includes others. I've never experience anything similar to that initial event.
Why would you want to remember something as close to a near-death experience as you can get? You're comfortable, then all the sudden, compressed through way too small an opening into a cold, loud, bright world, and find yourself suddenly forced to breath for the first time.
If you could remember that, you'd have PTSD for life. It's too much like waterboarding.
I remember a lot after about 6 months which is when I started running around. I remember my first word - "hot" after I burned myself on an iron at about a year old. but I used to remember everything, now a lot of it is gone.
I see it as follows: Infants have little concepts/constructs that can serve as foundation for thoughts.
Being able to 'ground' thoughts in constructs that are understood helps with recalling the thoughts.
At some point, the more basic constructs (the ones you created as an infant) are not as useful anymore, as your thoughts are now grounded in the more advanced constructs.
This causes you to forget about the more basic constructs, as they are not used anymore; the basic constructs have served their purpose and you moved on to the more advanced ones.
More like being conceived is, but at the moment we likely weren't conscious. From then on it is a long and slow process of becoming aware. Birth is only one of many steps on the way, it's more special for the mother and others than the person itself.
Another thing is how can we date when a memory is?
I have a collection of memories from when I was 22 months old, but I can date those in retrospect. I also have various memories of being fairly young, but have no idea if they were before or after 22 months as there is nothing to date them by. It's not that different than more modern memories - I can remember something happened about a decade back, but often have no idea if it happened eight years ago or twelve years ago, unless I can date and contextualize it by some means.
I see a lot of claims like this. I believe you believe it's true. The scientific evidence is to the contrary however.
Memory at this age is extremely malleable. And I mean "malleable" even years later. I mean "malleable" as in you can create false memories. Consider this experiment [1]. Participants were told about meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney. A significant number of participants then added their own stories of the same thing happening. Bugs Bunny isn't at Disney. He's a Warner Brothers character.
What I suspect happens is that you're told about these events at various points, enough that you start to fill in the details.
Dating memories from childhood is even more difficult. It's easy to be years off the mark. Often it's only successfully dated by corroborating details eg you remember a dog that died when you were 4 or you remember your room in a house that you moved out of.
It's anecdotal, but I have memories from when I was an infant. The only reason I know is because my parents relocated a lot when I was young. I have spacial recall of the layout of their apartments. I have specific vivid memories in a kitchen playing with a train. I can describe the layout of my parents apartments and the furniture they had. There are few pictures from that time period, and none showing the layout. A few years ago, I asked my mom about the layout of two of the apartments and described in very good detail the layout and furniture. She said I was correct. We moved out of those apartments by the time I was 2 years old. These are all mundane memories, a clock radio playing "Eye of the Tiger" across from my crib. Playing in a kitchen and dining area. The layout of my bedroom including the fact that there was a brick wall in the room. No pictures of this room and yet my parents remember these details as well. These are mundane spacial details.
There is further a memory I have of being outside of an apartment being carried inside the apartment and to the left of the entry way was a mirrored wall with an orange couch in front of it. My parents have no pictures from this time period, and we moved out of that apartment when I was a little over a month old, because it was, according to my mother, a childless apartment complex, so they had to leave.
I have a lot of memories that pre-date me being 4 which many people I know have no or only one or two memories from their lives that young.
I just find it hard to believe that I manufactured all these memories.
I don't believe that everyone has Infantile Amnesia. Maybe many do, but not everyone.
I can confirm this happens to me. Several occasions I have a “memory” of something. A house we lived in, a late relative, etc. Things that have an oral history since before most my normal memory begins. I have an image in my head of what that memory was to me. (My normal memory is rather image recall based, even for facts I remember/see the books/movie/website where I saw it as a reference for the memory.) Except on a handful of these early memories, I’ve later, sometimes much later, found an old photo in one of the family albums that IS my memory. Leaves me somewhat in a minor existential crisis each time I realize my memory is a sham.
> The scientific evidence is to the contrary however
The scientific evidence? Scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons moves to the left or the right, how can a scientist determine that I don't remember what I remember?
Given the date of the study, I think there’s something they didn’t consider. Bugs Bunny may not have been there, but Roger Rabbit was! For the bulk of the 90s a child could have met a character that was essentially a Bugs Bunny parody/homage without the appropriate context.
Am I the only one who remembers the "black void"? Before my first visual memory I was feeling something and nothing at the same time, it was like a black void that lasted a moment.
My ex-girlfriend told a similar story. Her mum had chosen a "natural" home birth without anaesthetic.
Years later, soon after learning to speak, the baby girl (my ex) kept talking about going back into the warm, dark, safe room.
By the time she and I were in a relationship, it was unclear whether it was her own memory, or just what her mother had repeated back to her over the years. But the story has stuck, and it does make me think deeply about life.
I don't know what you refer to. But I have some kind of memory that I think may be from the womb. It is very hard to put into words, but something similar to waking up from sleep. Just a memory of consciousness.
Even if this memory may not be real, just "remembering" it makes me dizzy, because it feels like it is a memory from when the light was turned on inside me, so to say. A very strange feeling.
As Steven Wright says, "I kept a diary when I was born. It said, "Day 1 - Still recovering from the move. Day 2 - Everyone talks to me like I'm an idiot."
I remember being in the womb. I remember being born. And I remember many infant events. I don’t think it’s as black and white as the article makes out.
I have a clear memory of my first word "tractor" that I uttered upon having a green toy tractor, but although the toy and the word are correct per my parents' memory the word I spoke was more like "Tatogli".
The clouds covered the sun, and a gust of wind passed over me, and I was cold, and I could only experience the sensation of discomfort. Then the sun emerged, and I was basked with warmth, and I experienced happiness that brought a smile to my face and a feeling of safety.
For about two hours I existed in this language-less state. Without words I wasn't able to think. There was no internal dialogue. I couldn't reason about things, or think about the past or future. There were no words there to attach to the objects around me let alone abstract concepts. Then, as quickly as my language had been erased, it returned again in patches. Once it was all back I was able to reflect on this experience using my words. I have always wondered if this is what it is like to be a baby.