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At what age do you think children start to remember things? 00:00:05

There are many studies that show that children, 00:00:09

when they are approximately between four onwards, 00:00:14

they start having memories. 00:00:18

So they start being able to remember things that happened to them. 00:00:21

The studies are studies that, for example, 00:00:25

in which children are presented objects 00:00:29

objects, and then the objects are hidden behind a curtain. And when the curtain is lifted, then 00:00:31

they are surprised or not surprised. And the fact that they are not surprised is that they remember 00:00:40

that actually the object was there. So they have formed a memory for the object. But if you test 00:00:50

these children after, I don't know, three days, they no longer remember. If you test them after 00:00:57

three months, they no longer remember that specific event. And so I think that our memories 00:01:02

of that age are memories that are built differently than from just the first direct experience. 00:01:10

So is it true that many early memories may not be reliable? 00:01:18

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. 00:01:23

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. 00:01:46

And so there is a correspondence between your memory and what happened. 00:01:59

But then the memory is not your genuine memory. 00:02:04

It's the memory of what people have told you afterwards that happened. 00:02:07

So I think that in many, many instances, our early memories are memories of what people tell us happened to us in life. 00:02:12

Are there any famous cases of childhood memories that turned out not to be true? 00:02:25

Yeah, Jean-Pierre Gé, a very famous Swiss psychologist, child psychologist. 00:02:31

and he remembered for his entire life 00:02:38

actually a very strong and strange episode 00:02:45

of being abducted as a child in a park 00:02:49

while he was with his nanny. 00:02:54

And it was only when he was in his mid-40s, more or less, 00:02:55

that the nanny, at the time much older, 00:02:59

decided to reveal that actually this was 00:03:03

just a fabricated experience so that she made up the memory she made up the event and the striking 00:03:05

thing is that he still had this very vivid memory of even seeing the scratches on the nanny's face 00:03:13

made by the abductors and so you know he needed to give up the belief that the memory was referring 00:03:20

to a true experience but the memory was still there is it possible that we sometimes think we 00:03:29

remember things happening in our childhood, but in fact they happened to someone else. 00:03:35

I used to give a lot of talks around the world, and people were coming to me saying, 00:03:40

Professor Mazzoni, really, you know what happened to me that I had this very vivid memory of falling 00:03:46

off a tree? And then I talked about this with my mother, and my mother told me that it was not me, 00:03:53

it was my sister, or it was my brother, it was my cousin. Or somebody else was telling me, 00:03:59

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. 00:04:04

So many, many experiences like that. 00:04:14

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. 00:04:18

So a memory of an event they no longer believe happened to them. 00:04:32

But the memory remains and remains beautiful as if it was a true memory. 00:04:37

Could you tell me what your own earliest memory is? 00:04:43

Well, actually, my earliest memory is a memory which I think is not a memory. 00:04:51

I was more or less eight months old, seven, eight months old. 00:04:56

and I was in the countryside at my grandmother's house 00:05:01

and I was on the top floor 00:05:08

and I can see in my memory myself falling down the stairs 00:05:09

in a terrible situation. 00:05:14

And the reason why I don't think it is a memory 00:05:18

is because I can see myself falling down the stairs. 00:05:20

I don't feel the falling. 00:05:23

And so I think that it is not a memory. 00:05:25

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. 00:05:27

I think that this is my first true memory. 00:05:45