Daily Times

Your earliest memory may be a lie, scientists have concluded, after finding nearly 40 per cent of people recall events that they could not possible remember.

Academics at City, University of London have carried out one of the largest surveys of early memories ever conducted and discovered a large number of people have a first memory which is fictional.

Current research suggests that memories cannot form before the age of three, but when 6,641 people were asked about their earliest memory 38.6 per cent claimed to have memories from two or younger, with 893 people claiming memories from one or younger.

Researchers found it was particularly prevalent among middle-aged people and older adults.

Professor Martin Conway, Director Centre for Memory and Law at City, University of London and co-author of the paper, said: “Crucially, the person remembering them doesn’t know this is fictional.

“In fact when people are told that their memories are false they often don’t believe it.

“When we looked through the responses we found that a lot of these first ‘memories’ were frequently related to infancy, and a typical example would be a memory based around a pram.

“For this person, this type of memory could have resulted from someone saying something like ‘mother had a large green pram’. The person then imagines what it would have looked like. Over time these fragments then becomes a memory and often the person will start to add things in such as a string of toys along the top.”

Memories are stored by neurons in the brain, which fire when the recollection is made and again when recalled.

Published in Daily Times, July 19^th 2018.