Childhood Amnesia? What’s My Earliest Memory? — 30 Days Writing Challenge

“Do you remember when you were 2 years old, we went to Taman Safari and you wanted to bring an orangutan home because you thought it was a doll?”

“You didn’t used to sleep without your favorite minnie mouse doll until you turned 5. Don’t you remember?”

“You were a very grumpy kid back then. When you saw a guest in front of the terrace you used to yell at them like ‘jangan masuk rumah aku!!’. Remember that?”

Have you ever receive similar questions from your relatives about your childhood? Don’t you realize that most of the time we could only respond with chuckles and nod slowly while trying to reminisce but we can’t remember anything; it’s blank. Do you know why?

Well, this is actually interesting, I’ve done some research and found out about a thing called “Infantile Amnesia” or Childhood Amnesia in common term. It represents an inability of both children and adults to recall episodic memories. It’s unclear whether childhood amnesia occurs due to the failure of memory retrieval or failure of their storage. But some researchers believe that childhood amnesia is due to the underdevelopment of the infant brain, which would preclude memory consolidation, or to deficits in memory retrieval.

Basically, this theory states that the earliest memory adults could remember starts at age of 3.5 in average. So, yeah. It makes sense if most of us have earliest memory around kindergarten time. For me, I start having a full-time memories recollection around early elementary time (5–6 years old).

If someone asked “Do you remember blablabla when you were 5?” Mostly, the answer will be yes. Even until now, in my conscious state, I can remember the details about some particular events around my early elementary time plus the reasoning why I did that. Just like I remember what I did last week, or last year. So what’s my own earliest memory? my answer is the first time I ate Indomie Ayam Bawang with three green chilies after school at Grandma’s House. I could even remember how it tasted hahaha. That was the first time I ate spicy food and maybe the answer why I really like spicy foods. Me + spicy foods is a thing LOL.

Anyway it doesn’t mean I can’t remember any events prior to age 5. I do remember the fragments of some memories, but I can’t rebuild it to form one complete memories sequence.

I remember the first time I ate my lunchbox at kindergarten.

I remember swimming with a duck tires.

I remember that I wanted to be a princess because I watched Princess & Pauper for almost every day.

Those memories were from around 3–4 years old, before that age, I remember nothing. So what about your childhood memories then?

-d-