At what age do our infant memory commence?

[coombs]

Special mention to an older pal of mine who would have been the Big Eight 0 tomorrow. He said once that his earliest memory is the winter of early 1947 but it is hazy. If born 18 Dec 1944, then it is possible that he can just about remember early 1947 as he was just over 2 years old. I think it would have been almost impossible for him to remember anything from 1945 or the first half of 1946.

[Marianthompson47]

I think that we have two types of memory - snapshot and video. 

My memory of the window in my room is definitely snapshot - I have no idea what I did before or after, but that single image alone was imprinted on my memory. 

Whereas, when I was about 6, I heard and saw an argument between our neighbours. I remember clearly, he was telling his wife that she wasn't watering the lawn properly. She countered with, he was too stingy to buy a lawn sprinkler. He maintained that sprinklers didn't do the job properly. She asked why then did all the neighbours have one, and they were the only ones not to. Were they all stupid, and he was the only smart one in the estate? Shouldn't he be going round and telling all the others how to do it properly? He was wearing shorts and sandals. He had white hair and a white hairy chest, arms and back - I thought he looked like a polar bear. She was wearing one of those multicoloured print, shapeless, housedresses. 

I was wearing green shorts with 4 pockets and a green button-up shirt in a sort of green tartan print and black leather buckled sandals.   
 A little incident of no consequence, but I have remembered it in detail this last 66 years. 

Regards 

Chas

Very interesting.

Going back to when I was five, Mum pushing a Silver Cross with my brother inside of it, I remember so well looking at the embroidered sheet on the pram and being mesmerized by the beauty of the colours and the intricate stitching and on both sides of Main street in Tamworth, feeling happy with the tall trees on either side. When we reached our destination which was my grandmother's house, climbing on her bed and being told off... Just as if it was yesterday!!
I am 77.

[Rena]

I am fifteen months older than my brother and I can recall memories of times before he was born and they were not traumatic.  On this particular day I was playing with older  local twin girls and they suggested we play "Hide and Seek". I was told to face the wall, close my eyes and count to 100.  I remember thinking that I only knew how to count to ten so I'd have to count to 10 a few times. After a while I walked around the garden looking for them, then climbed up the front door steps to the open front door where my mother  and grandma were sitting with a new baby.  "Go and play dear" said my mother - and I obeyed. We left that house on my third birthday.

  I can recall getting off a bus (can't recall the journey) and walking along the lefthand side of a road that had no pavement but a ditch where every few yards there were simple home made wooden bridges over the ditch that led to garden paths.   My mother and I crossed the bridge of the last house;  She didn't knock on the door of the house but walked along the side of the house until we came to a another but smaller wooden house.  Inside was a buxom lady wearing a blue dress and a tiny man seated in the corner.  My mother went straight over to the man and kissed him on the cheek.  My next memory is of visiting the same house but with my mother's mother.  I held her hand as we walked to the same house where the same action of kissing the little man in the corner was enacted.

My next memory is of standing in a railway station with my mother.  She bent down and instructed me not to stand over the line as it was dangerous.  I didn't walk over the line but was more interested in what was happening behind us.  A very large black horse with white feet  walked down the slope pulling a laden cart.  As an adult I have waited on the same platform which is in Manchester - I have no recollection of the journey from Hull.    My next memory is of sleeping in a strange bed next to my cousin Avrille.  I went in search of my mother and got told that she was in the bath with our new baby.   

[Erato]

Memories form very early but then they are lost or perhaps buried under the pile of newer memories.  My mother told me a little story about my childhood memory, but I don't recall any of the events myself.

When I was about 20 months old, my mother took me to England to visit my grandparents.  We travelled by ship and, to save money, my mother shared a cabin with another woman who was making a similar trip with her young daughter. This child had a set of wooden farm animals that we both played with.  Many months later, back in the United States, out of the blue, I asked my mother, "Why did the cow have a broken leg?"  She was flummoxed by the question until she realized I was referring to the wooden cow which did have one leg broken off.  So, there's a memory that was formed before the age of two and survived for at least a few months before being lost. 

[DianaCanada]

I remember standing by my crib in my sunny bedroom - no idea how young I was, but a vivid “snapshot”.
A more detailed memory is from when I was three, at my brother’s kindergarten year end party, so I know quite accurately how old I was.  I got hit in the forehead with one of those suction caps from a plastic gun some boy was brandishing. That was traumatic enough for me to remember.  Before starting school I was at some friend’s place with my brother and he and the other two were in their bathing suits. I sat down on the edge of the wading pool and went in head over heels backward, fully clothed.  I must have been pretty young as I still had braids, which were chopped off by the time I was five.  I also remember wearing navy blue pedal pushers, all the rage around 1960.  I was soaking wet, and walked home about five houses away.  Another trauma!
A happier memory was my father bringing home a mini hula hoop for me, probably the late 1950’s.  It made my older brothers envious, a bonus!

[brigidmac]

I took my foster daughter to Paris when she was 9

At one point she was turning round blinking ..I asked what she was doing and she replied I'm taking mind photos so they will always be in my mind .

It didn't work 40 yearsager she hardly remembers the trip let alone the images and we didn't take many real photos

[coombs]

In that case my aforementioned pal who would have been 80 today may just about have remembered something from the first half of 1946. His brother was born May 1946, so whether he would remember that at almost a year and a half is certainly moderately possible. He'd deffo be too young to remember Aug 1945 at 8 months old and the worldwide news about the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.