Robin Fivush

Thank you.

I'm so privileged to be here.

I really am looking forward to this interview.

Well, my father died when I was quite young, and my mother was in a very, very bad car accident.

She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks.

So she was in a coma when my father died.

And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine.

She was in a body cast.

But she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years.

So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood.

And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and

Not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.

He died of cancer.

I was three years old.

You know, it's interesting.

It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory is I was very young.

And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half.

That's a very strong research finding.

When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three.

But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood.