I just understood an obvious trick on how to access your memories from the time before your brain's capacity to memorize events was developed. I think we all remember the earliest events, we just remember them differently than the events that happened later in our lives. The trick is to use implicit, or emotional memory, rather than the factual memory that we are used to.
The trigger for me was visiting the scientific museum full of toys for children. As we were walking up the floors the toys for 4-5 year old started to evolve into small experiment machines for older children. That felt like progressing through my own life as a child. Already when I was walking to the first floor and saw the big installation, to which I had to look up, something struck me:
I remembered clearly being 5. Being short and clumsy, wearing a bit too big clothes, I just remembered how it felt to be that child. And now I have to say that I have always had access to this information, I just thought that this is how all 5 years old feel. But not, I think that based only on how I felt! And then when I had to look up I spontaneously remembered how the world looked to me at that time. How I can summarize it: everything was very still, and very sad. Sad to the point of vacuum emptiness. And then I realized: this is not how the world was when I was 5, this is how I felt when I was 5! Because I was not self aware enough to understand that it is my internal state that is projected onto the world. And yes, I had access to that information, but I always thought that well, maybe my parents were not so rich, maybe the times were older, things were less colorful, that was different reality. But no, that was indeed my reality!
I automatically generalized all my early emotional memories, making them about the world not about me. Now I just need to take a second look at the generalizations and interpret them, similarly to how I try to interpret dreams. When I now think about it, it makes so much sense. When someone says "all women are like this and that", well this is also a generalization. Maybe there was an important event that through emotions was externalized to be projected to the outside world. It may be because of the tendency of the brain to always look for reasons. If the brain is left with an emotion without an event, it will fabricate something that matches. Then, by tracking back the emotions behind the fabrications we can at least get access to the memory of early emotions. And emotions can be a really rich source of information.