My earliest memory goes back to when I was three years old and my parents brought my little sister home from the hospital (at least that’s the earliest one I can reliably pin a date on). But if I’d grown up in a different kind of culture, my first memory might well fall earlier or later in my life. This article from the American Psychological Association says that the average age for the earliest memory a person has depends on the value placed on individual experience and memory in that person’s culture. The more a culture values the past (individual or joint) and the sharing of personal memories, the farther back in childhood a person is likely to remember. In America, we value our unique personal histories, and we typically remember back to when we were around 3 1/2 years old. In Maori New Zealand culture, which emphasizes a shared past to a greater degree, people remember back to earlier ages than we do, on average. By contrast, in Asian cultures people tend to have a later first memory. It’s not a function of how good a memory you have; it’s got to do with how much you hear others talking about events and their memories of them, and how people speak of their memories (cultures differ in how much detail is generally given when people are telling their personal stories or discussing events). If you live in a society where people share their personal narratives in greater detail, you need to have your own memories to bring to interactions with others. I’m intrigued by this glimpse into the way the inner world works differently in other cultures.
Earliest memories
