Your First Memory Is a Lie The Shocking Truth About How Identity Forms
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Your First Memory Is a Lie The Shocking Truth About How Identity Forms
Close your eyes for a moment. Can you recall your very first memory? Perhaps it’s a vivid scene from your childhood home, a specific toy, or a moment with a parent. You feel it, don't you? That certainty, that absolute conviction that this was the beginning of your conscious story. What if I told you that memory is almost certainly a lie? Not a malicious lie, of course. But a fascinating, deeply human construction. Because the shocking truth is, most of us don't remember anything before the age of three or four. And what we think we remember from that time is often a carefully curated, largely fictional narrative. The Great Forgetting: What is Infantile Amnesia? Psychologists call it infantile amnesia . It's the puzzling inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories (specific events) from early childhood. Think about it: you can probably remember what you had for breakfast last Tuesday, but not what you did on your second birthday. Why? For decades, scientists have grappled …