How we forget to remember
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On the hunt for a personal jazz hero.
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Cover:
Haight Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco. 123RF
Photo:
My earliest memory: I’ve wandered off into a field of Scotch thistles behind our Waikato farmhouse. I’m holding a red plastic frisbee. I’m afraid. I’m 2 years old. Or am I?
Memory is an unreliable witness. As vivid as this vignette is, I could have made the whole thing up. It could be a collage of unrelated recollections, an example of what psychologists call ‘‘imagination inflation’’, or nothing more than a misremembered dream.
At least part of my memory serves me correct; Dad confirms that this particular paddock was indeed once home to a noxious thicket of Cirsium vulgare, fed by our septic tank’s soakage trenches. And it’s conceivable that I did once own a red frisbee, and loitered off with it because, let’s face it, 1970s parents displayed a rather lax approach to proper supervision.
What’s your earliest autobiographical memory – and how old were you? I polled my Facebook friends. Of the 100 who could definitively declare an age, it was a dead heat between ages 2 and 3, with 37 per cent each. (‘‘I remember my dad storming out, my mum lying on the couch crying. I was 3 when they divorced,’’ said Jackie.) Two friends could recall an event before they were 2, 20 per cent were aged 4 and the rest were over 5.
Earliest memories fit roughly into five categories: family moments (such as the arrival of a younger sibling, ‘‘remembered for the highly unusual act of my father cooking dinner because Mum was in hospital’’); sensory experiences (watching fireworks, a warm bath, the smell of peat smoke); a newsworthy event (the Erebus disaster, the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch); childhood antics (that time you stuck your kid brother’s hand in the toaster because you were out of bread); and trouble or trauma (a nose bloodied in a car accident, a finger clamped by a live toheroa, your first encounter with an electric fence).
‘‘I was 3, all dressed for church,’’ recalls my high school classmate Denise, ‘‘when the dirty old rooster pecked my legs. Next day, Dad had it strung up from a tree.’’
Excitement, discovery, grief. All make for memories that stick. ‘‘We went to visit my mum in the mental hospital. She looked at me and said, ‘Who’s that little girl?’ I’ve never forgotten. I was 3,’’ wrote Debby. Or my cousin Rob, attending his sister Mary’s funeral. ‘‘She went to heaven in a white Holden Kingswood station wagon. I was 4.’’
As we get older, we fear dementia, yet for as long as we’ve been remembering, we’ve also been forgetting. A study by Newfoundland University psychologists prompted children aged 4-7 to share their earliest memories. Two years later, the same kids were asked the same question, yet few if any told the same story. Not only that, many denied all knowledge. ‘‘Didn’t happen,’’ they said, despite parental confirmation that it did. This continual overwriting of early memories continues until about the age of 10, by which time we’ve already forgotten two-thirds of what we could remember at the age of 3.
Psychologists call this childhood or infantile amnesia. Some believe it’s an issue not of availability, but accessibility (we haven’t forgotten, we’ve just forgotten where we put those memories), suggesting that parental prompting can offset it.
‘‘Childhood memories are sometimes reconstructed from later family discussions,’’ says my erudite colleague, Phil Gifford. ‘‘So, I believe the memory I have of my older brother threatening to throw me off a bridge when I was 3 or 4 (and apparently a s*** of a kid) could be false, but I’m sure the memory of cuddling up to my grandmother, who died before I was 5, on the veranda of her Motumaoho farmhouse while summer rain fell on the tin roof is true. To this day there is no more pleasant sound to me than rain on a roof.’’
In memory, as in life, there are milestones. This week, my eldest son Lucas, my kind, inquisitive, Minecraft-obsessed, loquacious little lad, chalks up a biggie. He turns 5.
What will his earliest memory be? The birth of his baby brother? Snow falling at his feet? How he cried on his first day at kindergarten? His first hospital stay (bouncy slide, broken arm)? His unrequited love for our crabby tabby, forever to be known as Ouchy Cat? His first day at school this week?
I can share all the stories of his action-packed preschool years. I can show him the photos, the newspaper clippings. But how weird it feels to know that, five years from now, chances are he won’t truly remember any of it.