I’m fully aware of what I am about to write.
There isn’t a narrative though. In fact there isn’t anything I can say or write to back up these following words other than I can recall the first time I was given or experienced solid food.
A meat / veg puree of some kind.
I can recall the experience and shock of its unique, novel taste writing the first piece of data into my memory or mental storage!
That sensation representing the first time I’d known or felt or become … Me!
And it is likely that I experienced that event as a preverbal sensory memory between 10 – 18 months.
I’ve researched this phenomena since and learned that my own idiosyncratic account being represented as a sensation rather than as a mental recall makes it extra-ordinary but feasible for one important reason.
At anything from 12 months to 2½ years, it is extremely rare for a young human mind to be able to encode information in a retrievable narrative form and the average recall of early childhood experience is more likely to kick in at around 3 years.
This figures and adds up when I state that the experience of eating solid food for the first time was a sensation and not some memory I could see in my mind or describe as a story or relatable time stamped experience.
It’s funny though because, yes, if we explore ideas of being self aware, self conscious or either excited or tuned in to some experience of simply being alive then, I promise you, I absolutely hit the ground running as far as being hyper aware of my surroundings, being able to read the emotions of others and being acutely in tune with some innate, built in code as far as a concept of natural survival was concerned.
NOTE. Is this post a contradiction? I mean, in my pushchair post, I claim that “My first memory” is being traumatised by being pushed at breakneck speed in my wheelchair.
No. It is not a contradiction. This
About the Author
