First Memories: the Locked Years and the Ones Who Claim the Key

Run the experiment on yourself: what is your very first memory, and how old were you? For most people the earliest reliable fragment dates to age three or four — and everything before it is sealed. Childhood amnesia is universal and well mapped: the infant brain records (babies demonstrably learn and retain), but the machinery of DURABLE autobiographical memory — a maturing hippocampus, language to encode with, a self-concept to file under — comes online later, and early traces are overwritten or rendered unreadable. Neurogenesis itself may erase: new neurons flooding the young hippocampus plausibly bulldoze old indexes.

The claimants

Against the wall of the locked years stand three kinds of claimant. The honest majority with a "memory" of infancy that is actually a RECONSTRUCTION — built from photos and family retellings; researchers can implant convincing childhood memories with little effort, and your vivid crib scene shot from ACROSS THE ROOM (note the camera angle) is usually the family album speaking. The verified handful: studies find a small number of people whose earliest genuine memories date remarkably early — under age two — usually single emotional flashes, checkable against records. And the impossible claimants our files collect: adults and, more unsettlingly, small children describing BIRTH, the womb, or the time before — the toddler who described the delivery-room emergency nobody had mentioned; the child who answered "where were you before you were with us?" with logistics (a favorite of the reincarnation-research literature, which built its method on exactly such statements, verbatim and dated).

The sober floor: memory before language is not narratable, so narrated memories of it are reconstructions by definition — says the textbook. The file drawer replies with the details that checked out. Ask your smallest relatives the question above, write the answer verbatim — and if it arrives with facts nobody supplied, the jury is seated.