As a military wife in my twenties, I spent nearly four years living in Germany. I arrived in Germany with a baby who was not quite nine months old and I had another child while I lived there.
When it was time to go back to the US, the movers arrived to pack us up and I decided to take my two small kids to the arcade to get them out of the way. This turned out to be a huge mistake.
My youngest was a few weeks short of his second birthday. He didn't have the life experience to understand what was happening nor the verbal capacity for me to effectively explain.
From his point of view, we left our nice, safe home in the morning and returned to an empty home in the afternoon. He felt like someone must has stolen everything and he was very, very upset.
It took some weeks before we would see our stuff again. On our way from Germany to Kansas, we visited multiple relatives up and down the East Coast that we hadn't seen in nearly four years.
After we finally got to Kansas, as we unpacked my youngest was all excited and relieved. He loudly announced "I found my toys!"
To his mind, they had been "lost" this whole time and now they were found again.
His four-and-a-half year old brother was unperturbed by the whole thing. He did not get similarly upset about the packers taking everything nor similarly excited to learn it was not actually gone forever.
Roughly ten years later, I was talking to my oldest about this incident and he casually replied that he wasn't upset because he knew he would get his toys back because he had "the last time."
He meant when we moved to Germany from Texas. But he was less than a year old when that happened, so this casual remark was a very remarkable statement.
It took a few seconds for that to sink in for me and then I did a doubletake and went "What do you mean? You were a baby in the previous move."
He ended up describing to me his memory of that first move in terms that fit with a baby's perception: That we first lived in a hot place (Texas), then we went to a bunch of places (visiting relatives on our way to Germany) and then we lived in a cold place (Germany) where he got his stuff back.
This was how I accidentally tripped across the fact that he remembers everything from birth. His earliest memories are actually in utero.
Like Temple Grandin, he thinks in pictures, not words. He spent the next few months translating some of his earliest memories into words for the first time in conversations with me, usually at some ungodly hour after everyone else was asleep so we could talk uninterrupted.
Starting when my oldest was sixteen, I ran a discussion list for a time called Wired for Science. We would post articles about neurological research and discuss it in terms of how it impacts your life and identity when you have various neurological issues.
The list was designed around my oldest son's interests and he was the life of the party. When he lost interest, I could not breathe life back into it and I killed the project.
These are some things I know about memory and memory access. I don't intend to back it up with citations. This is being written from memory.
A lot of people think you don't have memories from early childhood. You do or you wouldn't have learned to walk and talk and retained those abilities, but many people are unable to actively and intentionally peruse those files, so to speak.
What happens is that we gain ability to encode our memories in a more accessible file format once we learn to speak. So for most people, "earliest memories" tend to roughly correspond to the age at which they developed competent speech.
You see some quirks happen in this area for gifted kids and especially for Twice Exceptional kids. Their brains are a bit quirky and this often involves odd speech development patterns. For example, some of them just start suddenly talking in full, articulate paragraphs at a relatively late age. This is called Einstein Syndrome.
Like Temple Grandin, my oldest son thinks in pictures and this impacted his speech development. It also impacted the way he related to early memories.
His memories were all in there and intact. He just didn't always know how to express them in English because they were in the form of visual imagery and experiential impressions. They were not attached to spoken language -- at least not until we spent those months with me patiently listening to him describe them for the first time.
Emotion can be a form of memory.
People with strong affect can make snap judgements because their feelings summarize a lifetime of experience with X thing.
People with low affect can't make snap judgements. They have to go through the information and make a reasoned judgement. They can't "go with their gut." They don't have that single line file saying "I feel good/bad strongly about this!"
This is one reason impaired people are often very difficult to deal with: Other people are often ugly to them, thinking they won't remember so it doesn't matter. They do remember, but only in the form of "I hate you" and not in the form of "Because of this long list of mean things you did to me that I can describe like a witness in a court case."
If you are dealing with impaired people, you need to be nice about it if at all possible. It will pay dividends when the chips are down and you need them to trust you on something.
Habit (or muscle memory) can be another form of memory. Habit is a form of memory that older people who are beginning to lose their faculties often rely upon as a crutch to help them get through the day.
The familiarity me and my sons had with various types of memory and neurological issues came in handy when I was getting divorced and moved in with my parents. My father had Alzheimer's and this was a hardship on the family.
One of the issues they had was fighting over trying to keep him adequately fed. If you offered him food, he got defensive. It had been a battle for a long time and he was struggling to retain some control over his life and body at a time when everyone was trying to take away his control on top of his mind beginning to fail him.
My sons and I resolved this issue by leaving good quality food at dad's "place" at the table. I think my oldest son is actually the person that started this. He was very talented at understanding his impaired grandfather, having dealt with a lot of similar impairments himself in his short life.
Dad had become a creature of habit, wandering the house and sitting down at his place at the table periodically. My parents still had the same dining table I grew up with and dad still sat at the same place at the head of the table and no one else ever sat there.
So if he wandered in and there was a plate of food there, he automatically "knew" it was his without anyone telling him. This allowed him to decide for himself if he wished to eat it or not without having people bugging him or fighting with him.
It returned decision-making control to him concerning what to eat, when and how much while letting other people make decisions about what was appropriate for him to eat, given his many dietary restrictions. It allowed all this to happen without anyone having to explain anything to dad or fight with him about anything.
After a few weeks of this, he quit pulling tubs of ice cream out of the freezer and eating directly out of the ice cream tub with a spoon. Dad was a big guy and he had been slowly starving in spite of my mother's dedicated efforts to keep him fed under difficult circumstances.
Once others in the family saw how well it worked to just leave a plate at dad's place at the table instead of trying to talk with him about food, the fighting stopped. Dad was better fed and had less emotional baggage (because the fighting had mostly stopped).
Thereafter, he was generally easier to deal with.
When it was time to go back to the US, the movers arrived to pack us up and I decided to take my two small kids to the arcade to get them out of the way. This turned out to be a huge mistake.
My youngest was a few weeks short of his second birthday. He didn't have the life experience to understand what was happening nor the verbal capacity for me to effectively explain.
From his point of view, we left our nice, safe home in the morning and returned to an empty home in the afternoon. He felt like someone must has stolen everything and he was very, very upset.
It took some weeks before we would see our stuff again. On our way from Germany to Kansas, we visited multiple relatives up and down the East Coast that we hadn't seen in nearly four years.
After we finally got to Kansas, as we unpacked my youngest was all excited and relieved. He loudly announced "I found my toys!"
To his mind, they had been "lost" this whole time and now they were found again.
His four-and-a-half year old brother was unperturbed by the whole thing. He did not get similarly upset about the packers taking everything nor similarly excited to learn it was not actually gone forever.
Roughly ten years later, I was talking to my oldest about this incident and he casually replied that he wasn't upset because he knew he would get his toys back because he had "the last time."
He meant when we moved to Germany from Texas. But he was less than a year old when that happened, so this casual remark was a very remarkable statement.
It took a few seconds for that to sink in for me and then I did a doubletake and went "What do you mean? You were a baby in the previous move."
He ended up describing to me his memory of that first move in terms that fit with a baby's perception: That we first lived in a hot place (Texas), then we went to a bunch of places (visiting relatives on our way to Germany) and then we lived in a cold place (Germany) where he got his stuff back.
This was how I accidentally tripped across the fact that he remembers everything from birth. His earliest memories are actually in utero.
Like Temple Grandin, he thinks in pictures, not words. He spent the next few months translating some of his earliest memories into words for the first time in conversations with me, usually at some ungodly hour after everyone else was asleep so we could talk uninterrupted.
Starting when my oldest was sixteen, I ran a discussion list for a time called Wired for Science. We would post articles about neurological research and discuss it in terms of how it impacts your life and identity when you have various neurological issues.
The list was designed around my oldest son's interests and he was the life of the party. When he lost interest, I could not breathe life back into it and I killed the project.
These are some things I know about memory and memory access. I don't intend to back it up with citations. This is being written from memory.
A lot of people think you don't have memories from early childhood. You do or you wouldn't have learned to walk and talk and retained those abilities, but many people are unable to actively and intentionally peruse those files, so to speak.
What happens is that we gain ability to encode our memories in a more accessible file format once we learn to speak. So for most people, "earliest memories" tend to roughly correspond to the age at which they developed competent speech.
You see some quirks happen in this area for gifted kids and especially for Twice Exceptional kids. Their brains are a bit quirky and this often involves odd speech development patterns. For example, some of them just start suddenly talking in full, articulate paragraphs at a relatively late age. This is called Einstein Syndrome.
Like Temple Grandin, my oldest son thinks in pictures and this impacted his speech development. It also impacted the way he related to early memories.
His memories were all in there and intact. He just didn't always know how to express them in English because they were in the form of visual imagery and experiential impressions. They were not attached to spoken language -- at least not until we spent those months with me patiently listening to him describe them for the first time.
Emotion can be a form of memory.
People with strong affect can make snap judgements because their feelings summarize a lifetime of experience with X thing.
People with low affect can't make snap judgements. They have to go through the information and make a reasoned judgement. They can't "go with their gut." They don't have that single line file saying "I feel good/bad strongly about this!"
This is one reason impaired people are often very difficult to deal with: Other people are often ugly to them, thinking they won't remember so it doesn't matter. They do remember, but only in the form of "I hate you" and not in the form of "Because of this long list of mean things you did to me that I can describe like a witness in a court case."
If you are dealing with impaired people, you need to be nice about it if at all possible. It will pay dividends when the chips are down and you need them to trust you on something.
Habit (or muscle memory) can be another form of memory. Habit is a form of memory that older people who are beginning to lose their faculties often rely upon as a crutch to help them get through the day.
The familiarity me and my sons had with various types of memory and neurological issues came in handy when I was getting divorced and moved in with my parents. My father had Alzheimer's and this was a hardship on the family.
One of the issues they had was fighting over trying to keep him adequately fed. If you offered him food, he got defensive. It had been a battle for a long time and he was struggling to retain some control over his life and body at a time when everyone was trying to take away his control on top of his mind beginning to fail him.
My sons and I resolved this issue by leaving good quality food at dad's "place" at the table. I think my oldest son is actually the person that started this. He was very talented at understanding his impaired grandfather, having dealt with a lot of similar impairments himself in his short life.
Dad had become a creature of habit, wandering the house and sitting down at his place at the table periodically. My parents still had the same dining table I grew up with and dad still sat at the same place at the head of the table and no one else ever sat there.
So if he wandered in and there was a plate of food there, he automatically "knew" it was his without anyone telling him. This allowed him to decide for himself if he wished to eat it or not without having people bugging him or fighting with him.
It returned decision-making control to him concerning what to eat, when and how much while letting other people make decisions about what was appropriate for him to eat, given his many dietary restrictions. It allowed all this to happen without anyone having to explain anything to dad or fight with him about anything.
After a few weeks of this, he quit pulling tubs of ice cream out of the freezer and eating directly out of the ice cream tub with a spoon. Dad was a big guy and he had been slowly starving in spite of my mother's dedicated efforts to keep him fed under difficult circumstances.
Once others in the family saw how well it worked to just leave a plate at dad's place at the table instead of trying to talk with him about food, the fighting stopped. Dad was better fed and had less emotional baggage (because the fighting had mostly stopped).
Thereafter, he was generally easier to deal with.