When I was young, very young I have a specific memory of going shopping with my great grandmother. We were looking for a Hardy Boys book for my brother for Christmas. We went to the mall and the book was sitting there in the bookstore window.
I often attribute this to my first memory, but the thing is I don’t know if this memory is real. As far as I know there was nothing significant about this event. I have no other recollection of my great grandmother, and for all I know this may have been a vivid dream I had when I was younger. I do; however, have the book. I don’t think I will ever know if this memory is real and until I took this class I thought this was unusual. But, I was surprised to learn that our brain often makes up false memories.
When new memories are made its called construction and when memories are recalled its called reconstruction. Our brains; however, do not always reconstruct memories correctly. We have a tendency to fill in the gaps and details that didn’t actually exist. In class when we did the exercise with the different words on the board “chair” was never posted, but because words similar to “chair” were in our brains we thought we remembered it.
Our memory is not always reliable but the reason it is not reliable can work towards our advantage too. The fact that our brain fills in the gaps and picks up on pattern recognition very well. However, this can result in something called suggestibility where we remember things that did not actually happen. For example, if someone witnesses a dog running by they may say it has brown fur and floppy ears because that’s there view of what dogs look like. In reality though the dog may have been a different color but because we aren’t good at remember details we fill in the gaps. This is important to remember when listening to eyewitness accounts. They are not always reliable and cannot counted on. In conconcussion, our memory is pretty good but its not perfect so we need to be aware when reconstructing previous memories.
I have always been curious about the idea of our “first memory” too! I personally have no idea what to attribute my first memory to because I can’t tell if a given event is something I truly remember living through or if it is something my family has told me about. It’s so interesting to think about the source of our memories because they are so intriguingly ambiguous. In your anecdote about your great grandmother, I was struck by your comment that your memory may have just been from a vivid dream. That idea is something I’ve never thought of or considered before, but now it seems so plausible that the source of some of our “memories” may actually be from our imagination. It reminds me of the idea of deja vu, but in a slightly different way, where our dreams feel so real that it’s like we actually experienced it in real life. Overall, I really enjoyed reading your blog post!
I found your blog post very interesting and it even had me considering my first memory. In specific, the detail of your first memory with your great grandmother was very vivid, much more so than mine. My first memory that I can recall is a blurry scene of me bawling in a white room with the lights shining in my eyes. While I’m not sure at what age I conceived this memory, I always attribute it to being my “first memory” when I think back. When you say that the “first memory” could perhaps be a vivid dream, it makes me think that this scene wasn’t an actual experience but instead just a short glimpse of an intense dream. This is something I hadn’t considered before but it makes a fair amount of sense. However, it’s also puzzling that if it was indeed as dream, why would my brain remember this specific dream? I’ve always believed that I remember this event because it seems like a traumatic event early on in my life. In reality, I will probably never find out if this memory is actually my “first memory” or just a vivid dream. Your blog post has helped me understand my “first memory” and how the brain retrieves memories.