What age is your earliest memory from? (parent, father, adult)

[ReeceJackox]

There are people who can remember things that happened when they were a few months old others can only remember things from when they were 7 or 8

My first memory that I can remember is when I was about 7 scoring a penalty in a football match

[tidaldream]

age 2, in the crib

[David A Stone]

5 years old and my mother scared me by knocking on the window Halloween night.


We lived in a remote area and never had trick or treaters show up.

[NYC refugee]

Three. However, when my youngest sister was born and my mother gave her liquid vitamins, I remembered the smell. I don't remember taking the vitamins, but the smell was instantly familiar.

[Lovehound]

About 7. I remember lying on my back watching airplanes flying over my family's house.

About 15-17 years later I found myself circling the landing pattern at my local airport, flying my first solo ride in a Cessna 150.

Let me tell you it is sure a head rush to be busy in takeoff and take the turns to downwind, and realize at tower abeam that you are the only person in the aircraft and if you fail to land it safely you die!

Less than a year later I was practicing spins solo, watching the ground rush up at me through the windshield knowing that again I die if I fail to pull my plane out of the spin. Biggest adrenaline rush I ever had, unless it was skiing off a 20 foot cornice dropping to a 45 degree slope several years later.

Yeah I've had some good adrenaline rushes in my life. I also learned to sail a sloop but the only rush there is docking your boat. Coming about can be fun with dummy passengers aboard. "Duck your damned heads you fools or I'll end up tossing you a life preserver while I debate coming back and picking you up." If they get knocked unconscious by the boom... oops... never mind!

When you come about the boom swings over quickly (in 1-2 seconds) from hard one side to hard the other side while the pilot executes about 45 degree turn to tack upwind and maintain the course. That's the problem with sail boats. Easy to travel downwind, harder to travel upwind. You tack (zig zag) to travel upwind. The zigs and zags are "coming about." (I can imagine other meanings.)

I've had some pretty good times now that I think about it. It all started when I was 7, in my parents' back yard on my back watching the airplanes fly over.

If this topic continues I'll cite a good anime movie by Hayao Miyazaki (writer/director). I can't remember the title offhand. Miyazaki's movies were the best anime ever: Studio Ghibli.

Not that anime was around when I became fascinated enough by aircraft to get my pilot certificate.

[TabulaRasa]

Good article on early childhood and episodic and semantic memory, neurogenesis, why we "lose" early childhood memories/infantile amnesia, how what we sometimes think are true memories are actually suggested and altered by things like photos we've seen, stories we've been told, etc.:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...mensia/508886/

[Mightyqueen801]

^That was interesting. I do have a few very early true memories, not things someone told me about, but that I see in my memory from my perspective. They probably don't add up to a minute.

In one, I am holding a stick and waving it at a dog, who is barking at me and lunging, but he is on a leash or a rope. Someone lifts me up and away from the dog. From family info, that has to be the dog who died when my mother was pregnant for my sister, who is 2 years 5 months younger than I am.

I also remember being with my grandmother waiting for my mother at the hospital. My father and mother appear and my mother is in a wheelchair holding what looks like a doll. It has a green hat and sweater on. It moves and cries and scares me and I cry and the grownups laugh. That was my younger sister.

In another memory my mother seats me in my chair but there is something cold and hard instead of the seat. I am crying because I don't like it but my mother, oldest sister, and grandmother are there and they are laughing. I pee and it makes a sound in the pot and that surprises me.

[ClaraC]

I was 10 months old, about the same time two of my adult children also have clear memories of their childhoods. Maybe very early memory capacity is genetic. I was in a crib, nursery, and the female caretaker looked like "Captain Kangaroo", a television character at the time. When I was about 12, we were talking in my family about our earliest memories and I told this one and my parents confirmed it, although they had never discussed it with me or even really fully recognized the nursery caretaker looked like Captain Kangaroo. In retrospect, she was a good likeness of Captain Kangaroo. My sons have had similar experiences of recalling extremely early memories.

[FloretMediaPvt]

At the age of 14 i started learning to art and painting, that time journey of writing arts began.

[kapikap]

my earliest memory was at about 4 years old, visiting the hospital. my childs earliest memory is about the same age. I don't think the brain holds information younger than 3 years old, as the brain is still in development .