exp #1: my first memory*

The instructions were to recall the first memory that each person in the class experienced. My first memory was when I was about 3 years old and in a Japanese nursery school in Tokyo. I was drawing and coloring on butcher paper with a group of other children in a typical Japanese classroom with a teacher. I remember this blonde girl particularly well because she was really mean to the other kids. Then we shared our first memories, and found that the mean age when our first memory occurs is around 3 to 4 years old.

However, we found out that this is highly unlikely because we can only start remembering things when we are 4-5 years old, and the reason we think we remember things before that is because of pictures and other people telling us about our first memory. Out of all the memories, we found that around half of them were sad (throwing up, falling, crying), and the other half was happy memories (playing, eating, school), and this is significant because we discovered that memories have emotional elements that make them memorable. Memories are usually malleable; they are flexible and somewhat reconstructed from various elements. Most of the time, it is like watching a video of ourselves in an omnipotent way.

-- yuki