Finally, social theorists argue that episodic memories of personal experiences may hinge on an understanding of “self”, something that is clearly lacking in infants and young toddlers. Moreover, even if infants do form such early memories, older children and adults may not be able to access them because they may be employing very different, more linguistically based, retrieval cues than infants used when forming the memory. From the cognitive perspective, it has been suggested that the lack of linguistic skills of babies and toddlers limit their ability to mentally represent events thereby, reducing their ability to encode memory. From the biological perspective, it has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the immaturity of the infant brain, especially those areas that are crucial to the formation of autobiographical memory, such as the hippocampus. Several hypotheses have been proposed for this amnesia. As a result, older children and adults experience infantile amnesia, the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life. Memory requires a certain degree of brain maturation, so it should not be surprising that infant memory is rather fleeting and fragile. The material was selected by Nikolai Merzlyakov.\) Perhaps the biggest mystery is not why we can't remember our childhood,but whether we can even believe our memories. The third birthday cake that your mom made? Your older brother told you about it. The time you decided to turn your sister into a zebra with a marker? That's what you saw on the video. "Memories may be stored in an inaccessible place, but it is very difficult to demonstrate this empirically," Fagen suggests.Įven if your memories are based on real events, in hindsight they are most likely reshaped and altered through memories embedded later in conversations. "In infants and young children, the hippocampus is underdeveloped," says Fagen.īut are our memories lost due to an underdeveloped hippocampus, or are they not formed at all? Since childhood events can affect our behavior long after we forget them, some psychologists believe that they should be stored somewhere. And, apparently, as soon as we finish forming new neurons, we suddenly acquire this ability. Baby rats, monkeys, and humans continue to add new neurons to the hippocampus for the first few years of life, and we all fail to create lasting memories in infancy. Perhaps, at a very early age, the hippocampus is not sufficiently developed to build a complete memory of the event. If it wasn't for the hippocampus, I wouldn't be able to remember this conversation," says Jeffrey Fagen, who studies memory and learning at St. "This is the center of our learning and memory capabilities. After a botched operation to cure his epilepsy, during which his hippocampus was damaged, HM was unable to form memories for any new events. The explanation of the phenomenon appeared thanks to the most famous person in the history of neuroscience, who is simply called HM. On this basis, we can assume that we can not remember the first years of life, because the brain simply did not have time to develop the necessary equipment for this. For example, in children who are deaf from birth and grow up without sign language, the age of the first memories does not differ from others. But some psychologists are skeptical that it makes any difference. When you create a story, the experience becomes organized and easier to remember over time, " says Fivash. "Language helps to create structure, organization of memory, presentation. Our culture can also influence how we talk about memories, and some psychologists believe that memories only come when we master speech. So one explanation for infant amnesia is the result of a natural process of forgetting that occurs throughout life. Recent research suggests that they begin to train their brains while still in the womb.īut even adults lose information that they don't try to access. Part of the puzzle is that children absorb information like a sponge, forming about 700 new neural connections per second and demonstrating language learning skills that would be the envy of the best polyglot. It was one of the passions of the father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, who coined the term "infantile amnesia" more than 100 years ago. This "hole" in the records of our lives has frustrated parents and baffled psychologists, neuroscientists, and linguists for decades. Even after the very first memory, others remain rare, intermittent, until some point in childhood. From the most exciting moment of life – from the day of birth - to the nursery, most people do not remember anything from the first years of their lives.
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