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No. 388790
>>388777
My memories don't come with metadata that tells me the time they were created, so I cannot possibly know which is the "first" or "oldest". I can never know when they took place within a margin of error of a few years unless I can associate them with something that I know had a definite date. Also, they start to get very corrupted due to copying/accessing errors and partial loss of data due to the age and not being well taken care of. Biological memory is a crapshoot.
Before about age 5 or so, I remember very little. A few quick flashes of images, like being in a crib, playing with toys, being at a relative's house, nightmares I had, or other such things. For the most part, the things I remember before age 10 or so are very vague, and a lot of times have become false memories. I remember doing something, and the basic "description" of what happened is still there (as a writer, I tend to remember things in descriptions rather than images) and I use that "description" to compose an image based on newer memories such as when I looked at pictures and when I encountered the same location. They're more "memories of a reconstructed image of an older memory", now.
It's like this: Suppose there was a holocaust survivor, and she is in her late 90's — doesn't remember what happened very well anymore. She is approached by a film director who wants to make a movie based on what happened to her. To help her remember, he provides her with pictures of the other people that were there, maps of the concentration camp, letters that she wrote to her family, historical facts, etc.. The film that is later produced is only in part the actual events as she remembers them; a great deal of it is the story she and the director reconstructed, as well as some creative leaps that director had to take to fill in the holes.
So my older memories are reconstructed a bit like that, except all taking place inside my mind. Based on what I know about the human brain/mind/memory, everyone (at least those who don't have eidetic memory) does the same, except they aren't consciously aware of the process and mistakenly believe all their memories to be pure and perfect. The degree, of course, varies between individuals. Personally, I tend to forget nearly everything that I don't consider important, which is nearly everything.
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