First memories

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_baby_in_a_Moses_basket_(AM_75894-1).jpg

This is my first memory: 

I'm 4. My father and grandmother are at the dining table talking about names. What shall we call him? I don't remember ever seeing them talk to each other before. And they've certainly never sat at the dining table when it wasn't a mealtime before. My mother is asleep upstairs, well out of the conversation. 

I go through the door to the drawing room, a door that sticks and has a metal handle with a dent in it. I like it in there - it's usually the warmest room and it has a rich red Turkish carpet that makes it feel warm even when it isn't. I sit on my haunches in front of the fire and feel it turn my front to melting jelly and my back to frosty glass. Some time I will need to back off an inch or two but for now I watch the way the flames hover and melt above the logs. The conversation next door continues. My grandmother is old and wise and even at 4 I know she's flattering my father by telling him to call the baby William. As if, after seven generations of William first-borns in his family, it were her idea.

Over there under the windows onto the lawn there is a new piece of furniture. A pale beige kind of woven thing on legs, a bit taller than me. I put my hands up over my head and go up on tiptoes to see over the edge of it and unlike other furniture the rim of it bends with the weight of my hands and there are handles like the handles on a shopping bag. And there is the baby. It looks like a baby but all covered up except for a slice of it's face. It's eyes are shaded by the blanket. Before this I hadn't realised that babies don't come with a name, you have to give them one. Before this I hadn't realised that my father and grandmother were excluding my mother from this intense and careful conversation about what to call the baby. Before this I hadn't realised that having a boy baby was different from having a girl baby. Because a boy baby was special to Daddy in a way that girl babies weren't, being the one to take his name. As family stories later put it, now they had a boy they could stop having children.

The importance of first memories

There's a common cultural understanding in Britain that our first memories are significant ones, and that they tell us something about what the emotional environment of our childhood emphasised. So you might look at this story, as I have done at several points in my life, and say 'Yes, here we can see evidence of a patriarchal environment, the flattering of my father, the sidelining of my mother, the importance of a boy in my culture.' 

But there is an assumption in that interpretation that, now I have had experience of a large number of other peoples' opinions of their childhood and have had children of my own, I believe is worth examining. The question I want to address is: 

What it is that makes us remember our first memory? 

Because of course we have many events from before and after that one that we don't remember at all. What is it about this memory that meant I remembered it, and that I see it as significant at all?

There are seven possible causative narratives that I can think of today (in no particular order):

1. The emotional and value atmosphere of our childhood sets up tacit expectations in our world view that colours the rest of our lives. (And in many peoples' view leads unfairly or unkindly to troubles in later life). So our first memory is going to be a traumatic one or one that is symbolic of the early atmosphere that has a great influence on our lives.

2. We are born with a brain that is more sensitive to certain issues in our relationship with the world, so we are more likely to remember situations that impress this sensitive part of us. 

3. Our brains develop to a state where we are conscious of and remember our experiences at approximately 4 years old, and the intensity of emotion during an experience is a known factor in memory. So our first memory will be the first emotionally charged one that happens after our brain is mature enough to recall it in adulthood.

4. Because I have rehearsed this story multiple times through having seen it as a possible source of answers about why I am the person I am today.

5. We are a product of the overarching culture and therefore remember and rehearse stories and situations that conform with cultural norms and expectations.

6. The majority causation is not one thing but is a complex interaction of the causes above.

7. A single less obvious cause that encompasses all the above. 

Emotional Atmosphere/ Trauma

Attributing early trauma with explanatory power in later life is a familiar mechanism to anyone who has experience in psychodynamic psychotherapy. It is also a common cultural idea and is generally not overtly questioned. It is essentially blaming the family or other environmental milieu for intrapsychic conflict. This is something that for many years of my early adult life I was fully engaged with. My parents had made my life impossible to comfortably negotiate human relations and therefore needed to accept responsibility for how hard my life appeared to be. 

In later life I now see that this belief system tells you more about me than about my parents. Any parents would have fallen down in one way or another against my expectation that I should be perfectly seen at all times and that their provision of what I needed would be appropriate and timely. My insistence on blaming them was a consequence of my inability to relate to them as whole people with multiple demands and their own needs and preferences. 

This suggests that my primary motivation and attention is on myself and what I need.

Genetic

Once I had children myself I realised that every child is different, from the degree to which they move in the womb to the regularity of their diurnal patterns to their expressiveness and ability to be comforted. As they grow up they respond to the broadly similar family atmosphere and expectations in obviously different ways. As a young child my eldest was high energy, sympathetic and curious in a scattered way, while my youngest was quiet with excellent recall of the correct order of things and self-regulating, except when there was company when she became delightfully keen to be the centre of positive attention. Naturally we responded a little differently to the two of them trying to provide what they needed, but we were still who we were and lived in the universe our personalities naturally produced. But I saw the familial link between each of my children and one or more of their relatives. Not only were they physically similar but also behaviourally similar to people I knew well. How can this be, if the environment is the cause?

The way I see it now is that the eldest is prioritising new ideas, and the younger is prioritising the creation of rules and tends to tell us when we are not conforming to them. These are not things we created in them with our environment, although we may well have tried to get them to be more like us consciously or otherwise. If we did we were not at all successful!

I would argue that these priorities are in some way genetic, and that they predispose our children to respond to us and our universe in a way that is predetermined by their 'wiring'. So the eldest will be out in the world seeking new ideas and see ours as outdated, controlling, narrow-minded. And the youngest will be formulating habits taking our opinions too seriously and having some difficulty exposing herself to environments where the rules are unclear. 

Brain development

Our brains don't start developing when we are born - they are quite highly developed at birth and this continues at a declining rate throughout our childhood. Experiments show that we are able to make memories at 6 months, but that these are only accessible to us for about 24 hours. Memories made as 20 month olds last much longer - up to a year. a 

The hippocampus is part of the brain that is very important in remembering episodes of memory. During early childhood it grows new nerve cells and connections extremely rapidly and it is thought that this may disrupt the pathways for memories that have already been laid down.

In early years as our brains grow they produce way more nerve cells than we actually need as adults, and these form connections and perhaps memories, which are then pruned out to leave the most reinforced connections. This may well result in the loss of earlier memories.

Rehearsal

During adolescence we appear to rehearse and therefore reinforce the pathways to particular memories that support our self-image. This is considered the reason why adults over 30 have 20 or 30 times as many memories from adolescence than the rest of their lives. Of course the self-image we have is a function of our brain functionality and our beliefs about the experiences we have. At that time we have a limited range of experiences and will therefore not have enough perspective to put these experiences into a proper context of the range of human experiences. We are therefore thrown back on our basic assumptions and basic fears which are determined by either early life or genetics.  

Cultural influences

When I tell you that I was born in the1960s, it will be easy for you to see that my interpretation of my early memory is embedded in cultural changes of the second half of the 20th century. You can see it in trends in university studies as well - we have moved in my lifetime from Marxist analysis of everything, through Free Love, Feminism, Derrida & Postmodernism, Ecological Thinking, Me Too, Privilege, Racism, Permaculture and Gender Identity to name a few. Each generation interprets everything through a lens dictated by the cultural movement of the time Each hilariously appears to believe that these overarching and overvalent ideas are new to their generation, not realising that the new thing is that it has now become a culturally-determined movement. 

As social animals it is inevitable that we are influenced in this way whether we like it or not. (For some it is their life's work to attempt to separate their thinking from the cultural ether. From my experience it is not truly possible to do so, however much doing so would make our thinking clearer and therefore hypothetically more useful. But the truth is that those of us who have escaped our cultural programming the most are going to be the most difficult for others to hear or understand, because of the different base assumptions, and the likely blind spot when it comes to communicating our ideas.)

I would expect that people who espouse this view are people who naturally highly aware of cultural influences and wish to minimise their effects. Which would mean that they will tend to be people who prioritise logic in their thinking.

Multifactorial causation

People who favour multifactorial causation usually see either-or arguments as too black-and-white in the sense of missing some of the range of perspectives. People who can see a range of different perspectives and don't feel any need to yet come to narrow it down further. They might even be resistant to the idea of narrowing down because that narrows the opportunities and will not be able to explain every phenomenon.

A single more fundamental underlying causation

Some people prefer to look for the meta-perspective that explains everything. They look at the question asked and wonder in what way the question is coming from unexpressed and unjustified basic assumptions. This is what I, as a person with an interest in Zen, think of as a mu response - 'I question the basis of your question'. 

So if the question is 'which of the following is the cause of my having a particular first memory', then questioning the question might bring us to the idea that the cause is in fact random and the rest is interpretation of our experience based on how we already see ourselves and the world, with our conclusion and the relative balance of beliefs in different specific ideas pointing directly to the way our particular brain works.

This is an idea that has been around a very long time in various forms, and is the idea being developed by Dave and Shannon Powers as Objective Personality System. That our brain is continually deceiving us into believing certain things about the world and about ourselves and ignoring others so much that we don't even realise they are there.b c That far from being individuals with a whole view of reality, we are in fact only in possession of a section of it, and are erroneously basing our understanding of ourselves and the world on that as if it were everything.

Remind me what that has to do with first memories?

Our first memory was always the one we could retrieve from our brains at a particular time - perhaps the first time we were asked what our first memory was. It is obvious that what made it come to mind was largely what our own mind thought was important, rather than being actually the first time we laid down a memory that we could still access. We know that emotional charge increases the tenacity of a memory. But what increases the emotional charge is the meaning that we give to the event, which comes from our brains. So rather than being a true indication of the factually earliest event after my brain was able to hold onto memories, it is a relatively pure reflection of what is important to my mind. 

We could say similar things about Rorsach ink blot tests or, dare I say it, dreams. It is not, by the way, that these are the only events that we project our inner preferences onto, because that is actually any and all events, but that these are some of the most obvious. 

In my case that means that while the remembered event was the arrival of a new sibling, the way my mind interpreted it through the concept of feminism, suggests that external concepts are probably excessively important to me, as is my tendency to react to environmental events in a way that rejects the cultural norm. Which tells you a lot more about the kind of person I am than about the actual facts of my childhood. 

So what if this were true?  

Remind me what that has to do with retirement?

The reason I'm writing about this here is because many of us have had terrible things happen to us in life, and it's natural to think that one or more of these have ruined our lives. 

So to take the trivial example of my first memory, I could have gone through my whole life believing that my upbringing as a second-class citizen in my own family damned me to being one in the rest of my life. When the truth is that it really isn't as simple as that. Even in the most extreme cases of traumatic experience there are people who carry the weight of it with them for the rest of their lives and other people who leave it behind. 

I have a choice about what perspective I take on my personal history - whether I continue to believe my initial interpretation of it, and whether I allow a single event or a single relationship to continue to define me half a century later.

Tell me what you think

If you have got this far into this rather theory-heavy post, thank you.

I would love to hear what your experience is. Have you changed your mind about events in your past? What made you change your mind? Is there anything that you think would have made it easier for you to do that? Please tell me in the comments.

a. Queensland Brain Institute

b. Objective Personality System

c.OPS Youtube channel