Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Earliest Memories

This article is really about why most people don't remember being babies. 

It doesn't mention the fact that some people DO remember.  But the logical explanation connects to at least one reason for remembering: those of us who come into this life with some memories already in place.  Think of it as a scaffold.  If you already have some memories, then you press that template into the barely-formed brain of your new body.  This makes it easier to attach new memories immediately.  The physical plasticity means you'll probably still lose some stuff, but you are way ahead of people who have to start from scratch.
Tags: news, science
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  • 4 comments
technoshaman

technoshaman

July 14 2014, 19:26:16 UTC 6 years ago

Huh. Maybe that's why I remember this:

Being held up over someone's shoulder (I don't remember who, it was probably by Mother, because at that point I didn't like Dad to hold me), looking way back across the water at a big, big building, and a big, big rocket ship. And I knew, even at that point, what a rocket ship was, and what it did.

It's just the one frame, I don't remember anything said or done or whatever, and I only have little snippets of the rest of that trip, and nowt else until winter, and only a few more random frames until the following May... but that rocket ship made an impression on me.

It was July, 1969, and I was this many (holds up two grubby little fingers).

Oddly, I don't remember anything else about the entire Apollo program as it happened; the next thing I remember seeing *live* was Enterprise's glide test, which we got to watch in school just like our parents' generation had watched Mercury and Gemini and Apollo. Of course, I read everything I could get my hands on about space and planets and astronomy and weather, but as for actually *seeing* spacecraft, either face to face or on live TV, Apollo 11, sitting there steaming on the pad in the sweltering Florida heat two weeks before my da had to get back to his bunker and track the sucker over half a million miles There And Back Again, is the only memory I still have of the whole 400,000-person program... but *damn*...