How Accurate Are Your Memories of Your Own Life?

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As you think back on your early life, there are probably a few memories that stand out most strongly: your graduation dance (although probably not the ceremony), the name of the person you first dated, and your favorite teacher in high school. These are the memories you cultivate over the years, and they help stitch your life together into a meaningful whole.

But how sure are you that these memories are accurate? Consider this hypothetical situation: You bump into that high school teacher, whom you haven’t seen in years, while picking up an online order in your old neighborhood. The teacher recalls the time you and her oldest daughter volunteered for a local cleanup day and won an outstanding service award. Puzzled, you have no recall of this and say that, sadly, the teacher must be confusing you with someone else. The teacher seems just as puzzled, but admits it might be possible. You’re glad to get back in touch, though, and exchange phone numbers.

The next day, the teacher sends you the photo she took from the very day, prominently featuring you and your friend. How is it possible that you completely blocked the whole event out of your recall of the past?

The Vagaries of Autobiographical Memory

As you read that example, whether or not it applied to you, it’s possible you started to ask yourself the question of how much you remember from your early life, and why some events only stand out to you because they were captured in a photo. In a recent paper, the University of London’s Mark Howe explores questions regarding the fate of early life memories. Rarely do people remember much from their years of childhood once they reach adulthood. But are those memories repressed, or were they never formed? And, regardless of why they’re gone, how accurate are the ones that remain?

Howe refers back to ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato and early 20th-century psychologist Thorndike, who argue that all experiences are "permanently inscribed" in your brain. These claims, he argues, are “not backed by scientific fact": The neural substrate doesn’t exist that would make the consolidation of memories possible, resulting in what’s known as “infantile amnesia.”

What makes autobiographical memory for these early days so interesting is that the switch that occurs when memories start to be retrievable happens when children develop self-awareness. At that point, memories for experiences start to become memories for “my” experiences. Things change neurobiologically quite rapidly after that, as does the individual’s ability to use language. Even so, narrative memory can be a shaky proposition.

What Are Those Early Memories Really Like?

Language skills alone aren't the key to understanding why early memories might persist. Prior researchers, testing this out, concluded that all that remains of childhood memories are fragments. They can shape your adult behavior, mainly through unconscious associations, but they can also lead you astray into the land of false memories.

Early memories also become trimmed to make room for new “representations more pertinent to functioning in the organism’s current environment." In other words, you remember only what you need to remember, instead of all the trivial incidentals that came and went.

As he concludes his exploration of early life memories, Howe makes it clear that he has no use for one explanation for the poor memory of young children—namely, that we repress our early lives due to some desire to protect ourselves from the “psychologically overwhelming” memories that can shape our personalities. A combination of early brain development, rewriting with new experiences, and lack of language skills can just as efficiently explain why our early memories are so frail.

And Then There’s the Reminiscence Bump

If early childhood events dissipate into your neural network, or weren’t formed all that well in the first place, what about those that form once you’ve reached the age at which your brain is capable of retaining experiences?

A phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump describes the piling up of memories from the teens to the early 30s (Rubin, 2000) when you reach your middle and later years. In a more recent investigation of “vicarious” memories—those shared by family members or friends—University of New Hampshire’s Çağlayan Özdemir and colleagues (2024) found that these too show the same bump. Going even one step further, the middle-aged adults (average age 47 years) in the UNH sample produced a reminiscence bump when conjuring up the potential memories of a hypothetical 70-year-old individual.

All of this begs the question of whether those supposedly crystal-clear memories are, in fact, accurate. Özdemir et al. raise the possibility that cultural norms that govern the expected ages of certain life events can shape what you think is a memory, but which never happened. Additionally, because people jointly reminisce, they could shape each other’s recall into a well-honed, but possibly inaccurate, story.

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The fact remains that, regardless of whether they're accurate or not, the events in the bump can be understood from the standpoint of your sense of identity: These are the events that are central to the chronicle of your life story, and as you reflect on them over time, you also revise them as your life story evolves.

Now think back on that hypothetical example of the forgotten teacher. Though occurring during prime reminiscence bump formation, it was clearly missing some details and wrong in others. These rare instances when you can compare fact with recalled fiction can also be informative: Why did you forget this event? And what knowledge about yourself can you gain now by learning that it did? Maybe you were a better student in high school than you realized.

To sum up, maybe it doesn’t matter whether your memories are accurate or not. What sticks with you over the years is the core of your identity, an identity that becomes better defined and understood with time.

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