Comment by hnbad

I think it's important to understand that being an adult doesn't magically make you immune to this. I wonder how many people's childhood memories are heavily shaped by retellings of other people and photographs or videos.

The reason you remember falling down the stairs is that this was a big and important event and there was a lot of pain and fear and you heavily empathized with the person it happened to. Empathy in children is often more direct and unfiltered but this is also not unique to children. The pain and hurt and fear happened to you, it just wasn't yours directly. You didn't physically fall down those stairs but you experienced the event itself. This can still happen as an adult.

It's not so much that memories are unreliable, it's more that our self-narratives are unreliable. We have memories of moments and emotions that feel intense or important but it can be difficult to lump them into a coherent narrative, especially when that narrative contradicts how we think of ourselves.

That photo of your nephew on the other hand demonstrates the cognitive development of Theory of Mind: your nephew likely wasn't yet able to understand that other people know and see different things than he does.

EDIT: To help get the point across about adults not being immune: this is essentially the basis for how propaganda works. National pride doesn't make sense if you look at it from your self-narrative: none of the accomplishments are your own and your association with them is completely arbitrary. Likewise nothing "your enemy" has done likely happened to you personally - often it didn't even happen to "your country". And yet you're taught to heavily empathize with "your enemy's" alleged victims and to dehumanize "your country's". The brave Mujahideen warriors defend the innocent Afghan people from the Soviet brutes - it could happen here - only to later return as the crazed Taliban who hate our freedom and need to be defeated because they want to hurt your family. None of this ever was true but it felt emotionally true.