A friend who knows how interested I am in memories and how we store and access them, sent me a Washington Post article... Washington Post journalist, Janice D'Arcy, comments that she has retained few memories of Christmas as a young child — the Holly Hobby doll “Santa” gave her at age four or maybe five; the soothing sound of Nat King Cole’s voice; the aroma of pancake batter on the hob. But she is not sure if these recollections are from a single day, a composite, or some combination of real and imagined life. As she rightly observes, "memory, especially childhood memory, is tricky that way."
This idea of memory as a medley, reflects researchers' conclusions – that children’s earliest memories shift and change continually and that most adults cannot recall anything from when they were two or three years old.
A recent report in the journal Child Development found that young children remember events from years earlier, but noted that as they age, those memories vanish. It is not until about age ten that “first memories” are solidified and by then, most recollection of the early experiences are forgotten.
This research also concurs with Professor David Rubin's research around what he calls the 'reminiscence bump' which is the period between about ten and thirty years which for most of us, hold our 'brightest' memories and which stay with us all through our lives.
Ms D'Arcy asks, "what does this mean for parents with young children, who devote much time and expense to creating a Christmas holiday season for their kids to remember? Given that they probably won’t remember much, if any, of it, should we have tried so hard?"
She reports that about a year ago, she came across an answer to the question — or at least one that made sense to her — in an essay that had nothing to do with parenting. Instead, it was about reading and tucked in the back of the New York Times Book Review about how we may forget the details of every book read, and in which the question, “Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?”was posed.
There is a difference between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but there is a 'wraith' of memory. The information we glean from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more than we realise, which is working on us even though we aren’t thinking about it – and we are the sum of it all.
Article, 22 December, Washington Post, by Janice D'Arcy
A friend who knows how interested I am in memories and how we store and access them, sent me a Washington Post article... Washington Post journalist, Janice D'Arcy, comments that she has retained few memories of Christmas as a young child — the Holly Hobby doll “Santa” gave her at age four or maybe five; the soothing sound of Nat King Cole’s voice; the aroma of pancake batter on the hob. But she is not sure if these recollections are from a single day, a composite, or some combination of real and imagined life. As she rightly observes, "memory, especially childhood memory, is tricky that way."
This idea of memory as a medley, reflects researchers' conclusions – that children’s earliest memories shift and change continually and that most adults cannot recall anything from when they were two or three years old.
A recent report in the journal Child Development found that young children remember events from years earlier, but noted that as they age, those memories vanish. It is not until about age ten that “first memories” are solidified and by then, most recollection of the early experiences are forgotten.
This research also concurs with Professor David Rubin's research around what he calls the 'reminiscence bump' which is the period between about ten and thirty years which for most of us, hold our 'brightest' memories and which stay with us all through our lives.
Ms D'Arcy asks, "what does this mean for parents with young children, who devote much time and expense to creating a Christmas holiday season for their kids to remember? Given that they probably won’t remember much, if any, of it, should we have tried so hard?"
She reports that about a year ago, she came across an answer to the question — or at least one that made sense to her — in an essay that had nothing to do with parenting. Instead, it was about reading and tucked in the back of the New York Times Book Review about how we may forget the details of every book read, and in which the question, “Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?”was posed.
There is a difference between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but there is a 'wraith' of memory. The information we glean from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more than we realise, which is working on us even though we aren’t thinking about it – and we are the sum of it all.
Article, 22 December, Washington Post, by Janice D'Arcy