Comments on: The First Forgetting

By: Meera

Meera — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:55:55 +0000

Here’s an interesting, if slightly grotesque, study of what hearing might be like for an unborn fetus: researchers implanted electrodes into the inner ear of a sheep fetus, returned it to the womb, and made recordings of human speech using that setup. They concluded that unborn human babies can probably hear lower frequencies better than higher ones, and therefore that vowels come across more clearly than consonants. Hm.

http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0402/14.htm

By: Charles Gulotta

Charles Gulotta — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 01:03:48 +0000

I’ve always found it interesting to consider the seemingly random nature of early memories. I remember incidents I would now describe as unrelated and insignificant. But obviously they were significant enough for me to recall, even now. It’s also intriguing how some of these memories bubble up on their own, only to disappear again, like some repeating dream. I remember my mother coming home from the hospital with my brother when I was 28 months old — but I have no memory of her leaving to go to the hospital, even though it would have been just a few days earlier. That would be an easy one for psychologists, I suppose.

I do wonder what speech could possibly sound like to a baby in the womb. I remember asking the same question when the idea of playing classical music during pregnancy first appeared. Would it not all be garbled, if heard at all?

This is a fascinating topic, and you write about it with clarity and insight. Thanks!

By: Meera

Meera — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 01:55:08 +0000

Thanks again for reading, Adrian. I appreciate your candid criticism a great deal. (I’m working on a new piece right now that I hope will be ready tomorrow—come back soon.)

As to your speculation, it’s an interesting point. It’s as if at some point in early childhood we build a (not very good) time-machine, and can never go back to any period from before the time we built it.

By: Adrian Morgan

Adrian Morgan — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 01:15:11 +0000

So I’ve been reading your essays in chronological order, and this one makes me think.

I felt the conclusion was a bit weak, but I’d give you full marks for the introduction and body.

My earliest memories tend to be verbal: they are about conversations. Other people’s earliest memories are may be more visual. I sometimes wonder if there’s anything to be learned from the fact that different people remember different types of experiences through different sensory filters.

On the question of childhood amnesia, I also wonder at what age a child becomes capable of remembering experiences without need of a sensory trigger, of contemplating memory in its own right, or of comprehending the question: “What is my earliest memory?”. It would make sense for our earliest memories to come from around the time we developed these faculties, because most of the time that I think about my earliest memories, I am in fact remembering what I thought about the last time I thought about my earliest memories.

By: carolyn

carolyn — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:43:30 +0000

weirdly enough I read a LOT about this phenomenon in advanced educational psychology last semester and I could write you an essay on the conclusions they served up which boiled down to the difference between verbatim memory (which is what we have early on, where our brains tried to store each and every moment b/c that’s all they knew how to do, but there’s only so much space for those kinds of memories) and “fuzzy gist” memory (which we develop later, where we recall more of what happened in an event b/c our brains store a bit less of the actuality of it / a “gist” of what happened rather than a “script”)… (and once we develop gist memory, we let go of some of the verbatims, and the early stuff drifts away…)

interesting stuff. i love how you’ve reformed it into something I actually care to read about again after suffering through page upon page of stultifyingly boring academic text. ;)

By: Meera

Meera — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:22:51 +0000

Samantha, thank you! And a belated mazal tov on your new beautiful baby boy. Maybe you should start writing things down from these early days so he’ll have them later…

By: Samantha Zirkin

Samantha Zirkin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:52:16 +0000

Beautifully realized piece. Thank you!

By: Meera

Meera — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:58:24 +0000

That’s amazing, Steve. I’m pretty sure I have nothing from before I could walk, so playpen, crib, and cot memories fascinate me. To hear about them first-hand is like hearing from someone who visited another planet.

By: Steve B

Steve B — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:46:13 +0000

I can remember the feeling of chewing on the vinyl edge of my playpen. I remember that my gums hurt and that the chewing motion made it feel better. I can remember the feel of the mesh sides against my face as I looked out at my mom in the kitchen, and the way the sun felt when she pushed the playpen into the sun for my nap.

http://twitter.com/140Fiction