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At what age do you think children start to remember things?

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There are many studies that show that children,

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when they are approximately between four onwards,

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they start having memories.

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So they start being able to remember things that happened to them.

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The studies are studies that, for example,

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in which children are presented objects

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objects, and then the objects are hidden behind a curtain. And when the curtain is lifted, then

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they are surprised or not surprised. And the fact that they are not surprised is that they remember

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that actually the object was there. So they have formed a memory for the object. But if you test

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these children after, I don't know, three days, they no longer remember. If you test them after

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three months, they no longer remember that specific event. And so I think that our memories

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of that age are memories that are built differently than from just the first direct experience.

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So is it true that many early memories may not be reliable?

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Well, it depends on what you mean by reliable. A memory could correspond to the experience, to the event that happened, but might not be a true memory in the sense that it is the memory for the narrative that the family provides afterwards.

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It is the memory of the narrative that the family or friends or, you know, siblings, et cetera, provide when you see the pictures, the photos of that period.

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And so there is a correspondence between your memory and what happened.

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But then the memory is not your genuine memory.

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It's the memory of what people have told you afterwards that happened.

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So I think that in many, many instances, our early memories are memories of what people tell us happened to us in life.

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Are there any famous cases of childhood memories that turned out not to be true?

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Yeah, Jean-Pierre Gé, a very famous Swiss psychologist, child psychologist.

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and he remembered for his entire life

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actually a very strong and strange episode

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of being abducted as a child in a park

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while he was with his nanny.

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And it was only when he was in his mid-40s, more or less,

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that the nanny, at the time much older,

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decided to reveal that actually this was

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just a fabricated experience so that she made up the memory she made up the event and the striking

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thing is that he still had this very vivid memory of even seeing the scratches on the nanny's face

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made by the abductors and so you know he needed to give up the belief that the memory was referring

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to a true experience but the memory was still there is it possible that we sometimes think we

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remember things happening in our childhood, but in fact they happened to someone else.

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I used to give a lot of talks around the world, and people were coming to me saying,

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Professor Mazzoni, really, you know what happened to me that I had this very vivid memory of falling

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off a tree? And then I talked about this with my mother, and my mother told me that it was not me,

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it was my sister, or it was my brother, it was my cousin. Or somebody else was telling me,

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You know, I remember going to the hospital and getting my arm in a cast, and instead I discovered that it did not happen to me, it happened to my cousin.

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So many, many experiences like that.

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And if you test people, and we did that, we tested a large number of people, we found that approximately 25% of the people have at least one memory of this type.

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So a memory of an event they no longer believe happened to them.

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But the memory remains and remains beautiful as if it was a true memory.

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Could you tell me what your own earliest memory is?

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Well, actually, my earliest memory is a memory which I think is not a memory.

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I was more or less eight months old, seven, eight months old.

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and I was in the countryside at my grandmother's house

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and I was on the top floor

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and I can see in my memory myself falling down the stairs

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in a terrible situation.

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And the reason why I don't think it is a memory

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is because I can see myself falling down the stairs.

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I don't feel the falling.

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And so I think that it is not a memory.

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I think that my earliest true memory is the memory of my sister, me and my sister playing and my sister stealing sugar and then putting the sugar in a teacup and then not to be caught, she threw the teacup off the window.

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I think that this is my first true memory.