Is extremely early memory associated with Autism?

Post Reply New Topic

Me too!


Huh. I have never had any problems differentiating between them. There are many things I can't remember but have been told and know have happened, and there are things I have seen in photos that I know have been part of my life, but that I can't remember (including a child's bucket with a nice pattern that I liked looking at the photo of, but have never remembered beyond the photo), while my memories are so different from that; so vivid and clear. Very unlike things I have been told about and remember in words only.

C'mon guys, share more memories

I remember the doctor my mother took me to when I was little. She was a dark.haired woman behind a (to me) huge brown desk. She seemed very strict, I can't remember her ever smiling. I found her somewhat intimidating. I even remember her last name, but I won't say it on here.

I also remember being sick once when I was little. I was in bed, and had my green two meter long toy snake next to me. A doctor came home to us. He looked a little like a man who had a children's show on TV. I didn't wanna talk to him. He smiled and asked if I had a worm in my bed. I had to tell him indignantly that it was a snake.

Let's see....

I remember breast feeding.

I remember my crib.

I remember diaper changes.

Lots of the memories are fragmented, so I can't really say which is my "first" memory as I can't really arrange them chronologically.

Circumstances made it easier for me to establish that my early memories were real.

My parents abandoned me to state care when I was about 8 months old. I was sent to foster homes and an orphanage and then taken by adopters when I was one. They pretended that I had been born to them, and never spoke of my true history. I had nothing in common with these people - they were another wrong planet for me, and always knew that I did not belong in their house or lives. I would ask them about my past, because I had memories, and they would just make up more lies. But I was determined to grow up and establish where my memories came from. When they realised this they tried to stop my search by telling me that my family were dead, yet another lie. I finally found my "dead" mother when I was 34.

I told her that all through my childhood, I had had flashbacks of seeing broken glass and blood on a carpeted floor, that somehow I was looking down at this glass.

She exclaimed: but you were only six months old, sitting up in your cot. How could you remember that?
She had taken a swipe at my father with a golf club, in the living room, missed, but broke a lot of ornaments that had been on the mantlepiece, and some of the flying glass cut him. She said I was sitting in my cot, watching and screaming. Apparently an uncle heard me screaming and came in and took me away. (I found this uncle, he verified the incident).

Another memory I always had was of a very large, dark oval table with a lot of children sitting around it, and me watching them from a small table on my own, in the same room. Eventually I found the orphanage I had been in at age one, which did indeed have that table. I remember spilling peas on the floor there and being viciously yanked by my arms from the little chair by a woman, Although all the records had been destroyed, I knew it was the same room and table. I also remembered the landscape outside, tall trees around a paddock.

I am thoroughly tired of this myth of how we can't remember - these were powerfully visual memories, deeply imprinted and scary. We have sight from birth, and hearing and a brain. Though I must say that sometimes I wish I did not have this acute ability to remember things, because the memories are painful and make me sad, even now, 65 years later. My memory is too acute, even now.

Until this thread it had never occurred to me that this might be an autistic thing. I know that the current theories of memory regard it as functioning holographically, not just stored in one part of the brain. How this all ties in with autism is something I am very curious about.

My memories aren't usually vivid, it's mostly just facts, things I know happened. I can't properly picture it, of relive it. It's really distant. Without a trigger (a smell, a song, a place...) I can't get a sense of how I felt.

I didn't know we were supposed to post memories. I have a memory from when I was four years old. I was on vacation in Gran Canaria, I think, or one of these island connected to Spain. During the day I was at a kindergarten sort if thing, and one day while me and someone else was on a seesaw, everyone else, including the one that was on the seesaw with me, was suddenly gone (I can't understand that I didn't notice that person was gone, because the seesaw doesn't work without two people) and I went to check the door to the club house, but it was locked. The others had left me there alone, so I wandered back to the hotel, across a road, just four years old, and it was just a coincidence that there was anybody back at the hotel (well there's always someone at a hotel, but from my family), because my father was there because he was sick. I don't remember all of this, but I have a vague memory of being in the playground and then suddenly being alone. My dad was furious, understandably, that they had managed to leave a four year old alone. It wasn't like they were just around the corner; they had left the place.

I have clear memories from age 3 and on.

I'm glad I found this thread, I've often been told that having such early memories is unusual.
While I might struggle to remember what happened last week, I have some very clear memories of being no older than six months old. Mind you, people are often surprised to learn that I was capable of having a conversation - sentences and stuff (I must have lost it somewhere, ha!) at the age of 1.

This might be a strange question, but is it possible to somehow have memories from before or during birth? This sounds impossible to me, but I've been having a very strange recurring dream my entire life that only makes sense from a sensory perspective if those memories formed before I opened my eyes for the first time. This assumes that my recurring dream is rooted in memory, somewhere.

It was a friend that suggested that the dream was based on memory. His (unqualified) theory was that ASD folks' brains are or can be activated (for want of a better word) unusually early, and they start trying to make sense of their environment when they should be more concerned with more pressing matters - being born, feeding, and sh*****g themselves. Stuff like that.

As for the dream, should I even begin to try an describe it? I'm a very 'visual' thinker and I honestly struggled to describe it in visual terms to the aforementioned friend when it came up in conversation - perhaps his crazy theory is more of a reflection on my inability to describe it.


Hmmmmm.

*strokes chin*

It only go back to about five years old for me. I guess I don't have that good a memory for a aspie.

I remember the feeling of walking on grass for the first time - inner city boy, we didn't have a garden - and the wonder of a huge park with trees and plants. I thought it was heaven and must have been somewhere between 12 and 15 months old.

I have great memories of my maternal Grandmother who died when I was 18 months old. I vividly recall thinking it was hilarious that she slept in a bed in the living room! It was years later before I realised that this was due to her being in the advanced stages of the illness that killed her. I do remember sitting on the bed and watching childrens TV on the BBC with her - only one channel at that time! I was fascinated by her knitting and loved the 'clickety clack' noise and watching the garment grow; I thought it was magic. She taught me to read and write and instilled in me the passion for the written word which I still have to this day. She left a pittance as an inheritance, nobody had any money in those days, and my father did the one single thing I am grateful to him for and bought a full set of children's encyclopedias. It was a little while before I could read them, but by three I could understand most of it and funnily enough I can still quote verbatim some passages from those glorious books.

I remember being bitten by my Paternal Grandmothers' poodle and having to have stitches, I was about 20 months old I believe. That said, I can also remember mundane things - I too remember having a bath in the kitchen sink at around two years.

I never thought anything of it until I had a conversation about earliest memories with a group of ex-workmates. None of them believed I could remember so far back, which gave them another reason to dislike me! Some people can be so creative about their excuses for bullying!

In my mom's photo album, there's a picture of me in my pediatrician's waiting room, playing with Christmas ornaments on a tree. The date in the bottom corner says it was taken when I was a year old, yet I swear I remember playing with the same tree. I certainly don't remember for how long I went to that pediatrician; maybe she put up that tree and ornaments every year and I played with it again at an older age. It's definitely one of my earliest memories.

My earliest verifiable memory was visiting a brand new department store. I checked the internet and discovered it opened in 1985 when I just turned 3. I have memories from before that but cannot verify them with objective proof. I did have a recurring dream of being sat up in a playground near my home (that we moved out of before I had my first birthday). It was a beautiful summer day and was the most peaceful, happy feeling I have ever experienced. It seemed like my senses were heightened and the flowers and grass smelled incredible. I recently went back to that first home and yes, the playground was still there and to my shock, it was exactly like I saw it in the dream. In the dream I couldn't walk so this would be consistent with be being 6-9 months old.

I also had recurring memories in my childhood of living on a farm somewhere (as an adult female) even though I've lived my whole life in the city. This is long before I was allowed to watch TV other than cartoons and while I obviously cannot verify it, everything in the 'memory' matches up with what happened at that time (60s-70s), like having a sun room and ugly brown wallpaper.

This article suggests that a difference in the way early memories are stored and a lack of adequate synapse pruning may enable autistic people to retain extremely early childhood memories.

“Although the metabolic efficiency is improved, this comes at a price, as discovered by the authors in simulating pruning in the midst of learning (just as actually occurs in childhood). Adult networks that undergo synaptic pruning actually lose the ability to retrieve the earliest memories. In humans, this phenomenon is known as ‘childhood amnesia,’ in which memories before the age of 5 are hazy, and those before 3 are almost completely inaccessible. This amnesia emerges from the networks because the earliest memories are stored in a highly distributed fashion, relying on many different neurons, while later memories are stored in a more sparse format. Therefore, early memories are more degraded by the pruning strategy because of sheer probability: more neurons participate in their representation, so they are more easily affected by changes to the network.“
Link>overgrowth, pruning, and infantile amnesia

I don't have any real early memories. I have a hard time remembering things from young ages that NTs can.

I had very bad asthma when I was a child so it's no surprise that my very first memory in life was of being in a hospital. I was in a crib, I remember that I was standing up and crying while holding onto the bars of the crib so I couldn't have been very old.

I can't remember much from [real] little Dill.

I too can remember things clearly from way back, potty training, teething, endless crying, illness, being left alone, sitting in my high chair. Some of this fairly convincingly verified by parents. I certainly have many aspie traits, and my memories start from about 2.

Very good and clear memories from childhood, age 1-2 and up. Normal people i have talked to ask me how i can remember things like that since many people dont.