What are your most vivid childhood memories? It can be assumed that the events that are engraved in our memory did take place. The truth is that almost all of our childhood memories have nothing to do with reality.
When a father tells how his son, at the age of three, grabbed the key and inserted it into the socket, this event is postponed in the memory of his child. Every time distant relatives come to visit the family, the mother retells the story of the boy's shocking acquaintance with electricity over and over again. Well known is the story of how little George Washington confessed to his strict father that he cut down a cherry tree. The future president was not afraid of harsh punishment and preferred to confess what he had done. This story teaches children that a lie is worse than the truth, although in itself it is fiction.
At what age can memories be considered reliable?
In a recently published study on autobiographical memory, psychologists Jonathan Koppel and David Rubin argue that people experience their earliest reliable memories at the age of eight. Children remember the events that happened yesterday or a week ago, but what happened to them in the senior group of the kindergarten they "remember" only from the accounts of adult eyewitnesses. According to the researchers, all of your childhood memories may be stories that have formed in your head thanks to conversations with your parents, and not a true memory of the event. Childhood is a fun time with many funny experiences, and the more often your relatives share their stories with you from the past, the more vivid your "memories" become.
Promotional video:
What's the secret to childhood amnesia?
Psychologists have been studying the phenomenon of childhood amnesia since the days of Freud. One of the most likely reasons is the development of speech functions. Autobiographical memory is a storytelling from life, but for this a person needs to have complete command of the language. This is why children remember themselves from about the age of three, when they begin to masterfully construct sentences.
Lack of memories does not mean that babies are unable to form memories on their own. So, babies already know how to recognize the faces of the mother and other family members. It is known that personality traits of a child are formed in early childhood, which can subsequently affect the rest of life. For example, a person who was told by his parents about a scary story with keys and an outlet will be afraid of electricity in adulthood. Let us examine what purpose the memories from the past serve, taking into account the fact that you can no longer change the sequence of these events.
Memory functions
By and large, we need memory to accumulate information from the past that can be used in the future (personal experience). As we move through life, on an unconscious level, we track the consequences of our actions. When we encounter similar experiences later, memories of past events are triggered instinctively. Someone correctly disposes of the accumulated baggage of knowledge and moves forward, while someone shows stupidity or stubbornness and again makes the same mistakes.
In fact, autobiographical memory is clearly focused on the past, not the future. But if these memories are not useful for our survival (for example, in predicting the outcome of events), why do we store them in the first place? The hypothesis put forward by the psychologists Koppel and Rubin shocked the scientific community. Experts say that people do not store autobiographical memories in their memory, and all these pictures that spontaneously appear in your head are possible thanks to personal stories.
What is Reminiscence?
When elderly people are asked to remember the most striking events in their lives, they are guided by the memories of their youth, at the time when they were 20-30 years old. Distant or vague memories formed under the influence of significant events are called reminiscences. Older people look back at the heyday of their youth, when they experienced the most important milestones in their lives: first love, graduation from school, study at a university, the beginning of an independent life, the formation of a family and the birth of children. All of these stages, one way or another, are familiar to most of us. Given this stable life pattern, which is typical for the bulk of people, all the bits of personal information add up to a big puzzle. You fill in the missing pieces with intelligent inferences or by creating believable stories about life during that period.
Life stories
We all love to tell stories from our lives. Sharing personal information is the bulk of the conversation between friends who have not seen each other for a while. We talk a lot about ourselves when we meet other people. You can retell the same story dozens of times, but with each new interpretation it will acquire some new details. Sharing experiences and personal experiences is the glue that holds social relationships firmly in place. Autobiographical memory is not what matters, but it is what drives interpersonal relationships forward. It turns every walk through the lanes of consciousness into a fantastic journey.
Inga Kaisina