Being in my early adulthood, it is very difficult for me to recall memories from my childhood. This is referred to as childhood amnesia, where the older you get you do not have the ability to retrieve majority of memories before the ages of three or four. It is contributed to parts in your brain dealing with memories, such as the hippocampus.
You know those memories of when you’re really little? You can remember them perfectly from your viewpoint but are they really yours? We all have at least one. Mine is when I was about two years old in the winter. It had just snowed the night before so my older brother and sister got a snow day. My mother took us all out front to play in the snow. I had never seen snow before and didn’t realize the severity of the cold on my bare skin. So like a genius I remove my gloves to touch it and eat it. I’m immediately freezing with bright red hands. I turned back to my mother trying to get her to go back inside with me, my excuse being, “I’m veezin!” I couldn’t pronounce my F’s or G’s yet.
I remember this scene with such clarity it had to be from first hand experience. A few years ago, my mom broke out the home movies from my childhood. It turns out that my exact experience and memory was on one of those VHS tapes. I saw the entire scene unfold but from my mother’s perspective behind the video camera. Those were never my memories. They were adopted memories from our home movies. Because of childhood amnesia, it proves that these memories couldn’t have possibly have been mine. There is a sub-section of childhood amnesia called false memories where you subconsciously implant stories or videos from your childhood to substitute like they’re your actual memories. This is what I had done with my home movie of me in the snow when I was two years old.