EARLIEST MEMORIES

Do you have a "good memory"? What is the earliest thing you can remember? I have often thought of myself as having a good memory. From a young age I understood my father to have a "photographic memory", and I never quite understood what that meant, but I took it to mean that he had an abnormally good memory, and remembered images, faces etc., quite easily. I also figured this was yet another trait I had inherited from him, though I'm not very well versed in the neurological and genetic literature.

If you ask a few of your friends if they have good memories, you're likely to get a variety of answers. I have observed the same person that may boast about being bad with maths may just as soon boast their poor memory and just how poorly it served them in primary school. Nevertheless, the is an interesting issue with memories. A memory is only as helpful in as much as you understand it. To say that, if there is an image or impression in your brain stored as memory, if you do not understand it as memory or as meaningful, you may not even "remember" it. Take for instance, the hair color of the student that sat next to you in primary school. Their hair color is something that often was impressed upon you. It is a stimulus that has been etched onto your neurons, but it has been moved into a secondary memory storage that isn't very relevant for your everyday life at the moment -- but perhaps you were able to bring that fact to mind since this I prompted you. A memory, first dormant, brought to life by the stimulus of my question. Personally, I remeber the hair of the student who sat in front of me in my fifth grade class. We were sitting on the left side of the classroom, in the last row, in the first two seats. I was in the second, and she was of course in front of me, but she also could have been behind me. That specific is perhaps not important for the current topic. I do know, she had long very sun-bleached blonde hair, and a straight line along her bangs that sat just above her eyebrows. She was probably the first person with such hair I had ever seen, but I also have plenty of memories with her laughing about various things -- she did an impression of "The Lovely Bones" trailer that we both thought was hilarious. Nevertheless, this idea is quite rudimentary, perhaps even the definition of memory. Something is out of the field of observation, but is brought into the field of observation solely by the mind. I can also recall the spikey brown hair and freckled cheeks of another classmate of mine, and could probably keep going if I continued for a while. But it is important to note, at the time, I understood the one classmates hair to be blonde and straight, and the others to be brown and spiky, as I do now, and it is those same concepts that allows me to remember them.

My earliest memory, that I suspect, is from when I was about one-and-a-half. I was in the pool with my sister who is 10 years my senior. She was singing some nursery rhyme. There was the heat of an Arizona summer, and the smell of Chlorine. She dipped me underwater, I saw a bunch of little bubbles, and my vision went black. I then woke up somewhere outside of the pool to the site of my sister walking from inside the house to the backyard. I had had a febrile seizure. Thankfully, my sister was holding me and the ambulance was able to come, and I lived to tell the tale, but I'm sure it must have spooked her. I remember all of that quite well. All except the fact that I was about one-and-a-half years old, I didn't know how old I was until my older sister provided that context, since she was about 11 at the time. But I still remember it all quite well. The feeling of her hands under my shoulders supporting me. A sensation that I really can't feel now seeing that I'm 6'3" and 170 pounds heavier. The interesting thing to me in that story, was the memory of my sister walking outside after waking up. I had always figured that she ran in and got help. It wasn't until years later that my sister told me her friend was there as well. This memory I had wasn't of my sister walking outside, but of my sister's friend coming outside. Of course my sister stayed with me since I wasn't very mobile at the time. But my child brain, understood it as my sister coming out. Which I think is quite excusable seeing that I was under a bit of stress, and they did look alike. But here we see an example of a the dichotomy that arise between what one remembers and what one understands about the memory. Then the question arose, what if I had an earlier memory, but didn't understand it as an earlier memory. If I had a clear image in my head of the ceiling fan above my crib from when I was 8 months old, how would I be able to distinguish it from the thousands of other mundane memories I have of ceiling fans above my bed? Perhaps I couldn't.

Now this is quite a messy explanation for the concept, but it becomes very important for precognitive observation. If I have a memory from a precognitive dream, it is not likely that I would understand it as precognitive, unless of course I am trying to observe such a phenomenon. If I dream that I am in the line at the grocery store waiting to checkout after a long stressful day at work. I may wake up and entirely ignore the precognitive aspect of such an image or impression in the brain, and dismiss it as some unpleasant memory worth ignoring due to its banality. So the question still remains for me at how to best identify a "precogitive memory", or any memory at all, as opposed to some imagined thought.