Listener Mail: Through The Nothing

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It always resulted in stiff competition and dogged tribalism if the groups weren't mixed up every few games. This makes me wonder if the in group preference, etc. Is stronger at different stages of life. Maybe hormonal teams would show the effect more strongly, with a tapering off in midlife, then more negative associations coming up again with the traditionally stuffy old man yelling at kids to get off their lawn.

But old Uncle John probably just had a bad temper because of arthritis, not an in out group mentality against the local scooter gang. Anyway, Thanks for stimulating some thought and a touch of nostalgia. Keep up a good work, regards Tim.

back to at some point. I guess we'll come back to it eventually, because when my son becomes a teenager and I have to make sense of it all a little all over again.

Nothing at all springs to mind from zero to six. I guess ages zero to six, and I've spent an hour or so trying to think of something. I was talking with my wife and she easily rattled off a dozen memories of preschool in kindergarten, and that seems like the normal experience. I'm often aware of some differences in the way I think and the way my brain works. But your podcast was really a very striking episode to me, as I'd never really considered how unique my experience might be.

I was six when the first thing that I can remember happened. I distinctly remember being in the office of my father's business, finding everything to be much too loud, and removing my hearing aid to place it on the nearby countertop. I contracted bacterial meningitis when I was just a few weeks old and was stricken deaf by the disease. Not an unusual consequence. What is unusual is that over time my hearing completely restored, and now I hear with

one hundred percent acuity. This is the first moment I remember being able to hear, and also the first moment I remember at all. I did some research and there are some really fascinating angles in the development of autobiographical memory in deaf children as well as neurodivergent children. I'm neurodiverse,

but not on the autism spectrum. Maybe you talked about this in your second episode, so apologies if it's redundant, but I found it all very interesting, although not particularly satisfying, as an explanation of my unique experience of autobiographical Memory. And then Joseph here includes a couple of links to scientific papers, so I took a look. They were both pretty interesting, so I dug up the citations and added summaries.

So the first one is a paper by Tiffany west Weigel and Patricia Bauer published in the journal Memory in the year two thousand. The title of the paper is Deaf and Hearing Adults Recollections of Childhood and Beyond. So this one investigated one of the ideas we discussed in the series, the possibility that the horizon of earliest memories may be influenced by differences in narrative socialization, sort of the culture of autobiographical storytelling that the child grows up within.

So if early formation of lasting memories is to some degree dependent on exposure to adult patterns of storytelling for events, then you would expect children who have later acquisition of language itself to have later earliest memories. So the author's right quote. In the present research, we tested the hypothesis that, by virtue of later exposure to language, individuals born deaf to hearing parents will have earliest memories from later in

life relative to hearing individuals, and what did they find. Actually, the hypothesis was not supported. The age of earliest memory did not vary between deaf children and children with typical hearing. However, there were some interesting differences, so the core hypothesis was falsified,

but there were differences observed they write quote. Nevertheless, adults who are deaf were found to have less dense representations of early autobiographical memories and to include in their narrative reports fewer categories of information, including visual spatial information, relative to hearing adults. So I thought that was really really

interesting in this study. At least children with less early exposure to language based narrative by virtue of the fact that they were deaf children born to hearing adults don't seem to have a different temporally different horizon of earliest memory. But their very earliest memories do seem to have less elaborative detail in the words of some of the stuff we were looking at in the series, and that includes

details that would not be affected by deafness itself. So, at least on the surface, this is interesting but frustrating right like it would appear to provide some evidence both for and against the role of language and narrative culture in establishing capabilities for early memory. There's some relationship between these variables in the study apparent in those differences in like the detailed density, but the average age of the

earliest memories were not significantly different. Now, the second study that Joseph linked was about the earliest memories of people on the autism spectrum. This was by zemashik at All Vera zamashik at All, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry in twenty sixteen, called Earliest Memories of Individuals on

the Autism Spectrum assessed using online self reports. And I was going to just read from the abstract here, but I found that it relies on a specialized concept that the authors call quote no events know no events versus remember events. So I'm pulling a section from later in the paper to define that difference. First, the authors write quote when participants knew that an event occurred meaning in their lives, but could not relive any details relating to it,

these events are referred to as no events. These events are based on external sources, such as photographs or stories told by friends and family. In their description of the no events, participants had to indicate the source of their memory, remember events our memories that are pure personal recollections specific to time and place. These events could be relived by the participant and relied on no other sources. So with that in mind, the paper begins by observing conflicting accounts

in the literature. They say, on the one hand, quote, autobiographical accounts by people with autism reveal vivid memories of early childhood, and yet at the same time they say that a lot of previous experiments have found that people with autism quote have deficits in personal autobiographic memory compared to people without autism. So to read from the abstract

here quote. To assess this contradiction empirically, we implemented an online questionnaire on early childhood events to compare people on the autism spectrum and non autistic people with respect to their earliest autobiographical episodic memories and the earliest semantic no

event as told by another person. Results indicate that people on the autism spectrum do not differ from non autistic people in the age of their earliest no events, but they remember events from an earlier age in childhood and with more sensory details contradicting the assumption of an overall deficit in personal episodic memory in autism. Furthermore, our results emphasize the supporting influence of language for memory formation and give evidence for an important role of sensory features in

memories of people on the autism spectrum. So I don't know quite what to make of that, but I find it interesting that you have these studies that have come to completely opposite conclusions and results on that whether people on the autism spectrum compared to people not on the spectrum, tend to have deficits in early childhood autobiographical memory or have richer, more detailed memories, as this study seems to find fascinating.

to anything from modified memories or even wholly false memories. Anyways, onto my memory, I remember visiting the doctor in my early life, and during that visit, the doctor took out a glass's case and took out a ballpoint pin, places it against my heel and clicked it to draw blood, and then pressed an index card against my bloody heel to leave an imprint on several points along the card.

For further context, I first related this memory of my mother when I was a teen, and she pointed out the similarities to how the newborn blood spot test is performed, which, should this be a true memory, would have happened when I was approximately one week old. But anyway, for a bit more insight and possible discussion, the specific details that are most vivid in this memory are and then we

have a list here. First the ballpoint pen being one of those generic white pins you might find at a bank or insurance office with the company name printed on the side. Secondly the characteristic lines of the standard three y five index card, then the light pink color of the walls in the room, and then finally a plant in the corner of the room with fern like leaves and matt notes. Not all of these are relevant to the retelling of the story, but that's how they sit

in my memory banks. You can probably already see how some of these details don't quite fit with what would have been the literal reality of the situation believed to be the source of this memory, but hopefully you can also see how they might be connected via more common substitutes with similar looking objects. Also, to be clear, I did not concisely know of this test before relating the memory, nor was I led into it in any way that

I recall beyond talking about our earliest memories in general. Anyways, did you know that the first official high five only occurred in nineteen seventy seven during a Dodgers game. Love what you are doing? And thanks for the stimulating audio to help me with my long commute to work every day. Matt.

But this is very interesting because here you're at least sort of like relaying a sense memory that you wouldn't have had, at least you believe informational context to make sense of, Like you wouldn't have known why you would have a memory of a ballpoint pin and a card, but there actually was a medical test that would resemble these types of objects.

you sure? I'm I'm pretty sure, But I suspect that my doctor maybe looked faintly like Geene Shallette, and I would have seen Gene Shalatt on the television at some point and it just became Gene Shalat in my memory in this, you know, this very faint childhood memory.

given several presentations that relate to this. She has mentioned that in her work with deaf children, if she taught them sign language, it improved their ability to recall information or phrasing and hopefully not totally off base in my summary, she hypothesizes that pre language children have not yet developed a self echoic verbal skill i e. Our inside voice or self talk, which is why they recall much less and less accurately than children who have learned a language.

In various experiments, she's found that disrupting the self echoic in children who have developed a language affects recall accuracy, eg. Trying to learn or remember a phone number while someone is saying random numbers out loud, because it prevents you from quote hearing your self echoic repetition of the phone

number you're trying to remember. When working on recalling events, she has used a phrase to describe how to teach children to recall or to improve their recall by ensuring that they are quote verbally present at the time the event is occurring. The adult describes what is happening in the present moment and prompts the child to describe what is happening and or answer what, when, where type questions about what is happening in the present moment to ensure

they are verbally present. This helps increase the salience of what is happening and improves delayed recall. Oh that's very interesting. I'd almost want to try that out. So, like, under this idea, recall of information learned in a setting would be better if during that setting you ask children like, where are you right now? What are we doing, so that they have a kind of yeah, have that like

verbal awareness of their immediate situation. Anyway, Selena goes on to say, anecdotally, in my work with children as a behavior analyst. The point at which autistic children who are language delayed can recall events is strongly correlated with the development of the verbal prerequisites mentioned by doctor Espinosa. The information she presented was in the context of a presentation at Penn State Conferences for Applied Behavior Analysis, which is

the acronym's ABA slash verbal behavior. Selena gives some caveats about how she can't dig up specific references at the moment totally understands Selena. She goes on to say language development can happen at different times for kids slash. People with different learning histories. If the hippocampal theory supposes recall occurs after the hippocampus developed sufficiently, then in theory, adults should be able to recall events regardless of having learned

a language. However, in a book called A Journey into the Deaf World by Laine Hoffmeister in Bhan I believe there are examples provided of deaf people who had no functional form of communication until someone taught them sign language

at an adult age. Following the hippocampal theory, the adults should be able to recall events from their pre language adult lives, however, and sadly, their recall of life before learning a language is largely unremembered, like having infantile amnesia for most of their life until they learned to sign language. What they could recall was extremely vague and more sensory

than specific details or events. And then she notes that it's been over two decades since she read the book, so recall is fuzzy about whether this was a single case of a deaf person acquiring a sign language as an adult or multiple cases. But anyway, Selena goes on to say, the flip side of this might be what if learning a language is one of the processes that develops the hippocampus chicken or egg. Regarding the early memories that are forgotten in adolescents, synaptic pruning probably plays a

major role. Use it or lose it. With regards to what I can personally recalls my earliest memories, it's mostly from kindergarten, although I have some memories from preschool. For example, in preschool I used to make wishes on dandelions in the grass during outside play periods. I can still remember three of my wishes. They didn't come true. Oh well, there are other events from my childhood that my parents

have described to me and I don't recall them. For example, I was present when my sister uttered her first words, but I have no personal memory of this event. Appreciate the multi episode deep dives on topics. Thanks Selena, Oh, Selena, what a fantastic email. Thank you so much. I love it when people with direct expertise on something we talk about get in touch to fill in things like this.

to get to more of the memory responses in future episodes. Now, to kick things off about Weird House Cinema, we got a pronunciation note from our listener Carrie, in response to the episode on the Never End Story where we make reference to the other Wolfgang Peterson movie, the nineteen eighty one film about a German submarine, and we pronounced the

title dos boot. Carrie informs us that while the German word is spelled boot, it is pronounced the same as the English word boat, so it's actually dos boat meaning the boat. Carrie hate to break it to you, but I think literally every English speaker I've ever heard make reference to this film said boot. I don't know what explains that. Maybe this is just something we do in the anglophone world. We kind of like take an incorrect pronunciation and just cement it. So I accept the correction

and appreciate it. But on the other hand, I would say it's almost just the case that in the English speaking world the movie is called dos Boot.

like an enactment of Bastion's Night in the School. I was eleven when the motion picture was released, and by that time I must have read it thirty times and knew it by heart. I'm afraid to report that I found the movie adaptation loathsome for me, both the characters and Fantasia as was translated into Spanish were more somber, stern and beautiful and German than anything that was betrayed

in the movie. Leaving the ending aside, my favorite chapters were Lacking Zia Day and the Seeing Hand Castle Perilyn, the Night Jungle, Miss and I don't remember how oh see, I'm not sure how this was pronounced, and and I'm a little foggy on this chapter of Miss Aula and her ever changing home. Come on anyhow, thank you for featuring it as one of your Weird House Cinema episodes. Through your eyes, I came to appreciate many features that

as a child felt like treason. Guess Michael Into himself must have felt the same way, since he hated the movie. By the way, you mentioned that Inda's father was a surrealist painter, and it came to mind one of my favorite Indo's books, The Mirror in the Mirror, a surrealist book, if ever there was one. I strongly recommend it all the best. Maya.

and re experience it again. But there's there's kind of this ritual to it sometimes with young readers. I think, where yet you just have to read it again and again to experience it again and again. It has maybe a different way to reality to the reader totally.

that you didn't find the previous time. And you know that, I think in my own experience there, you know, there there are a few books that I definitely see this end definitely Doomed by Frank Herbert. Every time I've read it, it's spoken to me a little differently, and I suspect it's that way with never ending story. I never read it as a child, but it has that level of depth to it that I feel like anytime you read it, you're likely to get a different experience. You're can to

pick up on different things. There's stuff in there that's very much for the child reader, there's stuff in there for the adult, and there's probably stuff that you know is intended to speak into in different ways to those different audiences.