Sunflowers and Santa Claus: Guardian writers and readers on how their first memory changed them

Our earliest memory can shape our lives, but new research suggests that many are false. Here, writers and readers reflect on their earliest recollectionsIt starts as a dreamy state of dizzying vertigo, and then I rattle, headfirst, down the wooden stairs. Falling down the white-painted (I think), definitely uncarpeted stairs of our first house is my first memory, and I must have been around two. But is it real? A new study suggests not, and if you can remember lying in your pram/taking your first steps/having your nappy changed, then you are almost certainly wrong, too.In a survey of more than 6,600 people, published in Psychological Science, researchers found that 40% of people believe they have a first memory from when they were two or even younger, even though evidence suggests it is not possible for memories from this age to be retained. Around three to three-and-a-half seems to be the agreed age of a first memory, although Martin Conway, the study ’s co-author and director of the Centre for Memory and Law at City, University of London, has said it’s “not until we’re five or six that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world”.Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - July 19, 2018 Category: Science Authors: Emine Saner, Polly Toynbee, Remona Aly, Stephen Moss, Jess Cartner-Morley, Hadley Freeman, Hannah Jane Parkinson, John Crace, Hugh Muir, Sarah Phillips, Anne Perkins and Poppy Noor Simon Hattenstone Tags: Memory Science Source Type: news