Memories of childhood

Post Reply New Topic

How much do people here remember of their childhood? Of course that depends on how long ago one's childhood was. I remember some things about my childhood, although not in great detail, but not when I first started walking or talking or reading.

A study Mechanisms underlying deficits in autobiographical memory retrieval in Autism Spectrum Disorders, by L. Goddard et al. in which 35 autistic children between the ages of 8 and 16 were matched by 35 typically developing children matched for age, sex and IQ, found that the autistic children were impaired in their ability to retrieve remote memories, but very recent memories were intact. They also showed deficits in remembering specific events.

I mainly remember the horrible stuff in my childhood.

Don't know why.

I remember fragments of my childhood. It wasn't that long ago really, but ages 8-13 are really blurry for me except for a few specific events and even then my memory is pretty fuzzy about details. I think the most likely cause of my lack of memory for those years is because that was when no one had any clue what was going on with me and I'd have "meltdowns" pretty much daily, and a lot of adreniline was flowing then. I'd linked the adreniline rushes/medication to my memory loss.

I've pretty much had to be told what happened during that time period because I generally don't remember anything about it. Which really sucks because I'm really tired of the "do you remember when we went and did x" conversations.

the ages between 8 and 13 were particularly akward and blurry, and it was a time when either my negative social skills caught up with me and seemed more apparent...or I experienced a sorta regression in social/personal skills......though I remember things getting akward before that age....like when I was singled out in pre-school and mentally tortured in first gradeand while I have episodal memories of the ages between...around 7 and 12-13....everything is a blur....I don't remember any details of day to day life....... Everything seemd to go particularly downhill when I entered elementary school...and then it was like a dark messy tunnel that gradually got clearer once I hit puberty..and by then i had alot of catching up to do...and the catching up in and of itself was akward....but I was no longer stumbling through so much of the dark tunnel of the previous years...

I do have issues with PTSD...and that is kinda what I attributed my sorta-breakdown to in the past....though I had issues prior to the things that caused the PTSD...

It is complicated and confusing...and I am sometimes glad that I have turned out as well as I have concidering the circumstances....

am remember childhood in great detail-supposedly anything after five/six years old,seizures had caused a few memory problems before five.
am can see everything visually,in perfect colour and moving/not still.
but have a impairment in working/short term memory,can be walking through the door way back into a building,and instantly forget thats what had been doing and leave the door wide open.
am hate it when people say do not have a memory problem because have a [long term] memory better than anyone they know,
if only all of it could be like long term memory.

I remember everything about my childhood. Then again, I'm only nineteen. Heck, sometimes I'm still basically living it! I have no doubt I'll still remember everything in a few years though. My first memory is of me sitting in a high chair. Then another early memory is of me at one and a half with the fire ants. I hate fire ants...

I don't really have any memories before the age of 6. After then I remember specific events that were good/bad. Since 13 or so (young adulthood), I remember far more than before such an age.

not much of a problem as I am only 17

I don't have any memories before 7-8. but it is more like anetrograde amnesia for me rather then your retrograde amnesia or do you have the continual process thing going on? You also have clinical ED too?

My understanding is this is extremely unusual. Many people with ASD can remember what it was like to be a baby.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 03 Jun 2008, 7:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

My childhood memories are actually very detailed and vivid, and they start really early actually. I remember the old olive green Pinto my dad used to tinker with in the backyard of the house that we moved out of when I was 20 months old. I remember the dark hardwood floors, the yellow walls of my room, the fireplace. I remember the dakr brown carpet and mirrored closet doors in the apartment we rented when my mom was pregnant with my sister (I was two). I remember in detail the dream I had the night my sister was born when I was staying at my grandmother's apartment (I was 2 years, 5 months). I remember that day in K-Mart when I let a little girl my age hold my teddy bear and she walked away with it and never came back. I remember my favorite outfit in size 2T and I would refuse to wear anything else, and I was very upset when I grew out of it. I rememember the big red doors of the first preschool I attended. I remember the taste of the paste (it smelled minty but tasted sour).

I have very accurate long-term memory. I could verify all my memories about where I lived from before I was 2 years old sometime in my teenage years.

However: My memory function only sequential and linear. My memory doesn't grasp the idea of time.

I need to start from point A to get to... F for example. Or I need to have another important event in mind from which I go through time lineary, each event after the other. I cannot spontaneously pick out details about what happened during a certain period of time (say, year 1995 or March 2008 or what happened during going out ion the evening yesterday).

By this I also find it hard to remember what I did last week or so. Or 5 minutes ago. Gosh, I have a devastating short-term memory. If you can have none - then I have none!

I don't know the year of my earliest memory for two reasons. one, I can't recall memories very well at will, I need something to remind me of the event first. and two, my memories are mostly visual and so the only way I can tell 'when' they are from is by guessing based on the situation. You know, like if I remember being in a certain classroom and I know that I was only taught there during the ages 7 to 8 then that would tell me how old I was at the time. Sometimes this can be difficult because my memory is usually very 'blurry'. It's like looking at a picture, but you can't quite make out the details because you're standing too far away. You go in for a closer look, but the closer you get the blurrier the picture gets.

Also, photographs of my childhood sometimes enter my mind when I try to call up old memories, sometimes I can't distinguish between a direct memory of my childhood and a more recent viewing of a photo from that time.

I'm really terrible at remembering feelings with any kind of precision. I have almost no memory for emotion. I also have little sense of time, when I look back on the past 20 years, it doesn't feel like anything has happened. There is little sense of progress and change.

0_equals_true,

I only have a handful of memories before 6, most around the age 4 and 5; all related to upsetting events, or its opposite (the most vivid was Christmas at the age of four when I got my toy truck, I liked that truck). I can't even remember the years worth of speech therapy I had at the age of four, except that the [nice] lady had a huge and hairy mole on her arm that I continually stared at (it was interesting).

I chalk this lack of development of working memory due to my cognitive delay; I was quite "backwards" for the first five or so years of my life, and as is typical with "Autism", I made bounds and leaps in the acquisition of cognitive ability in weeks and months, rather than a normal and prolonged development that is typical.

I do have ED, well, that's what the lady at Attwood's said; she also said I had "Autism" when little, and I improved to Asperger's.

I have a good memory now, especially in relation to interests (stereotypically...).

I wonder if the researchers had this thought - was it that autistic children "couldn't" remember, or weren't interested enough to remember the event the researchers thought was important? From what I understand of memory, we only get fragmented images anyway - I know I remember choking on an ice cube at the age of 3 and managing to dislodge it before anyone noticed. I can describe the room I was in. I also remember the evil apricot coloured poodle who bit me for no reason. I remember when I learned to read - dad refused to read the comics to me any more unless I learned to read, so I learned to read. I remember the teacher whining at me that I had to "slow down" while reading aloud to let the other children keep up. However, these are things that stuck in my mind for some reason. Other things, things that didn't have a connection to me personally, have been lost.

I also wonder if the researchers took into account *cough* the whole socialization thing? Having a social group to be around to *remind* you of certain stories is of a big help in retaining those memories later on, I would wager.

Just some thoughts

There ain't much in my life I'd have any reason to want to remember. Anything good turned out bad.

I avoid thinking about the past as much as I can. I try to get by.

My childhood was a long time ago. I tend to remember the best and worst. I don't remember much about day to day living but I believe this is typical.