That was a fun survey. I was recently playing the game We Are Not Strangers with my parents, brother, and his kid and my teen, and one of the questions was what’s your earliest happy memory. No one seemed able to come up with one that was specific. Everyone’s happy earliest memory was something they did many times and they were remembering it in general. Which makes me think most early, lasting singular memories are negative.
Extremely interesting that early happy memories are fuzzier, spread out. Hopefully will be able to answer that question with a bunch of data after this survey, thanks for the restack!
I may not be the target audience, but I've found the form hard to fill in, so I'm not going to muddy the survey waters.
I'm not entirely sure what kind of memories we're talking about. I feel like childhood memories are blurry mixtures of personal experiences, self narrative, and stories from family members. As in, I can't tell apart what I remember doing from what I was told I had been doing. How does this factor into this?
Also, I don't think I remember a "I am a self" moment. Looking back, it all obviously appears from the perspective of someone with a sense of self, but it's nigh impossible for me to examine the raw experiences at the time all these years later. Is a sense of self acquired the moment you start using the personal pronoun in sentences? Is it too superficial?
I'm sorry if this is irrelevant to the goals of the survey, I've just always found it hard to reminisce on these things, so I'm dropping in with questions when I see a forum for it.
There are a lot of problems with memory formation and recall and self-report, so the waters are already quite muddy. As such, please do respond and include the caveats you mentioned
fwiw, I also don't remember a moment of first self-awareness, though I do have an earliest memory
Nicholas Humphrey in his book Sentience makes the claim (at least this is how I read it) that curiosity is an evolved mechanism that serves to develop the subject-object / "I" distinction and, now that one can include themselves as a distinct mental representation, better manage their future state. Point being, might be interesting to track curiosity/awareness at an early age - more inclined to explore/question, the earlier the 'awakening'?
Yeah, one thing I'm curious about with the survey is how much curiousity/play vs pain is associated with self-awareness and early memories.
What's his timeline for curiousity? It seems that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom. Cats, famously. Whereas "I" is evolutionarily more recent
I should share that Humphrey also writes about the importance of the representation of sensation (eg pain) for developing sentience, it is not just curiosity-driven. While he does discuss this development in terms of evolutionary fit, I do not recall anything specific wrt timelines.
That was a fun survey. I was recently playing the game We Are Not Strangers with my parents, brother, and his kid and my teen, and one of the questions was what’s your earliest happy memory. No one seemed able to come up with one that was specific. Everyone’s happy earliest memory was something they did many times and they were remembering it in general. Which makes me think most early, lasting singular memories are negative.
Extremely interesting that early happy memories are fuzzier, spread out. Hopefully will be able to answer that question with a bunch of data after this survey, thanks for the restack!
I may not be the target audience, but I've found the form hard to fill in, so I'm not going to muddy the survey waters.
I'm not entirely sure what kind of memories we're talking about. I feel like childhood memories are blurry mixtures of personal experiences, self narrative, and stories from family members. As in, I can't tell apart what I remember doing from what I was told I had been doing. How does this factor into this?
Also, I don't think I remember a "I am a self" moment. Looking back, it all obviously appears from the perspective of someone with a sense of self, but it's nigh impossible for me to examine the raw experiences at the time all these years later. Is a sense of self acquired the moment you start using the personal pronoun in sentences? Is it too superficial?
I'm sorry if this is irrelevant to the goals of the survey, I've just always found it hard to reminisce on these things, so I'm dropping in with questions when I see a forum for it.
There are a lot of problems with memory formation and recall and self-report, so the waters are already quite muddy. As such, please do respond and include the caveats you mentioned
fwiw, I also don't remember a moment of first self-awareness, though I do have an earliest memory
Nicholas Humphrey in his book Sentience makes the claim (at least this is how I read it) that curiosity is an evolved mechanism that serves to develop the subject-object / "I" distinction and, now that one can include themselves as a distinct mental representation, better manage their future state. Point being, might be interesting to track curiosity/awareness at an early age - more inclined to explore/question, the earlier the 'awakening'?
Yeah, one thing I'm curious about with the survey is how much curiousity/play vs pain is associated with self-awareness and early memories.
What's his timeline for curiousity? It seems that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom. Cats, famously. Whereas "I" is evolutionarily more recent
I should share that Humphrey also writes about the importance of the representation of sensation (eg pain) for developing sentience, it is not just curiosity-driven. While he does discuss this development in terms of evolutionary fit, I do not recall anything specific wrt timelines.
1. It may be useful to keep in mind there will be some overlap between your and Scott's sample (I suspect I won't be the only one).
2. At least for the death question I was very uncertain about the age. Like I could easily be off by several years.
3. I suspect religion might be an important confounder at least for the death question.