Memories
Think back to your earliest memory that you are able to remember. Not something that you were told by someone, (i.e. "you were very talkative at 2 years old" or "you used to run around naked as a young child, it was the funniest thing ever") Think back and think hard to the earliest one you are able to remember.
The theory according to my professor (which she has done no research on it whatsoever) is that the earliest memory you can recall is the moment you started to understand language and hence you are able to form memories. This seems like it is true, and at first when I heard her say it, I was thinking to myself, "yeah, right!"
And then I started to think about it more and more. The earliest memory I can remember is when I was young child. Nothing before that. Nothing of my first 3-4 years in Texas. The earliest I can come up with is probably my time in Pomona when my dad owned a motel and events of my childhood thereafter. However, I was not a slow child, I "understood" language before that. A classmate of mine was wondering the same thing because he couldn't remember anything past being a little child. The professor asked a few people to share their memories and there were a few classmates who can remember when they were babies...waiting in a crib, or pooping their pants (though maybe they don't remember that far back as much as they wanted to get a laugh...cuz I am also taking a memory class and we tend to form our own memories on our own perspective, that's why eyewitness accounts are kind of shady because we alter situations in our memory to fit...that's a whole different topic).
Anyways as it turns out, my classmate and I figured that when we were younger, we spoke a different language. He spoke Spanish and I spoke Chinese (Mandarin) as children. I spoke nothing but mandarin and he spoke nothing but spanish. Now we are grown up and in college and we mainly speak English and have forgotten most of our primary language...so based on the theory, we can only remember as far back as we could when we understood English, and since we forgot our primary language that we spoke when we were younger, that's why we are unable to remember anything younger. It is a very interesting theory, and maybe something I might look into and reseraching or writing a dissertation on...haha...
Think back to your earliest memory that you are able to remember. Not something that you were told by someone, (i.e. "you were very talkative at 2 years old" or "you used to run around naked as a young child, it was the funniest thing ever") Think back and think hard to the earliest one you are able to remember.
The theory according to my professor (which she has done no research on it whatsoever) is that the earliest memory you can recall is the moment you started to understand language and hence you are able to form memories. This seems like it is true, and at first when I heard her say it, I was thinking to myself, "yeah, right!"
And then I started to think about it more and more. The earliest memory I can remember is when I was young child. Nothing before that. Nothing of my first 3-4 years in Texas. The earliest I can come up with is probably my time in Pomona when my dad owned a motel and events of my childhood thereafter. However, I was not a slow child, I "understood" language before that. A classmate of mine was wondering the same thing because he couldn't remember anything past being a little child. The professor asked a few people to share their memories and there were a few classmates who can remember when they were babies...waiting in a crib, or pooping their pants (though maybe they don't remember that far back as much as they wanted to get a laugh...cuz I am also taking a memory class and we tend to form our own memories on our own perspective, that's why eyewitness accounts are kind of shady because we alter situations in our memory to fit...that's a whole different topic).
Anyways as it turns out, my classmate and I figured that when we were younger, we spoke a different language. He spoke Spanish and I spoke Chinese (Mandarin) as children. I spoke nothing but mandarin and he spoke nothing but spanish. Now we are grown up and in college and we mainly speak English and have forgotten most of our primary language...so based on the theory, we can only remember as far back as we could when we understood English, and since we forgot our primary language that we spoke when we were younger, that's why we are unable to remember anything younger. It is a very interesting theory, and maybe something I might look into and reseraching or writing a dissertation on...haha...
