I still remember it. The oldest yet most precious memory of mine. In fact my very first memory. I remember the first time. The first time I locked my mom out of the car, in fact the first time I remembered anything. Yet I was only three years old at the time I still can recall upon the vivid screaming of my mother, as she yelled “Mikey you better open this door!”. Somehow I had managed to lock the doors on our families old little two seater MR2. Looking back at this the story cracks me up everytime, but at the time my mother was hysterical and was nearly in tears as she was locked outside the car pumping gas. I don’t quite remember clearly how my mom got back into the car and my mom always says “pure luck”, but what I do remember is that moment of emotional distress.
That moment is about the only thing I remember from my years before the age of four. Just about everything before I was four years old is a blur. Do you ever wonder why so much of our early childhood is as if someone took our memory and just cleared it? Below is just a short snip of a study I was reading about the topic of childhood amnesia.
“At age 3, the children were all recorded speaking with a parent about recent events, like visiting an amusement park or a visit from a relative. Then as the kids got older, the researchers checked to see how much they remembered.
And they found that children as old as 7 could still recall more than 60 percent of those early events, while children who were 8 or 9 recalled less than 40 percent. “What we observed was actually the onset of childhood amnesia,” Bauer says.”
–The Forgotten Childhood: Why Early Memories Fade
As I was reading this article the words “repeated actions, make stronger connections” kept recurring in my mind. I remember my AP Bio teacher Mrs.Barro telling us this for about a solid week up until our respiration/photosynthesis “quizzam”. Now there is obviously nothing we can do about what is ancient history, but what we can do now is make sure we make strong connections in the future. It is crucial that we establish strong connections now in order to prevent unnecessary “adult amnesia”.
fishdude23 