Childhood Amnesia: Why Don’t We Remember The First Years Of Life?
What is your first memory? The answer to this question will in most cases be a situation or a brief image of some event or sensation we experienced in our early childhood , mostly corresponding to when we were between three and five years old. But by then we had been alive for several years. Our brains were already processing information from the environment and we were even capable of learning skills, information and ways of acting.
What happened before that first memory? Why can’t we remember something before it, such as when we learned to walk or talk? The explanation for this gap in memories has a name: it is called infantile amnesia.
Infantile amnesia is defined as inability to remember phenomena and situations that occurred in our early childhood , on an autobiographical level. That is, we retain, for example, the skills acquired at this stage (for example, walking or talking), but not how we did it.
This amnesia generally affects memories that occurred before the age of three. In fact, when we are asked about our first memories, most people usually indicate some type of element or situation that they experienced from that moment on. Occasionally it is possible to remember a previous element, but it is not frequent and would be limited to some very significant phenomenon or a sensation or image.
It has been shown that Babies have the capacity to generate memories, but they forget them quickly. And even at an autobiographical level: five-year-old children can identify and remember a situation that happened when they were two. It is not that children under three years old have no memory: they are capable of remembering what happens to them. These memories simply disappear over time. Thus, what would happen would be a true amnesia since it is not that they do not exist but that they fade over time.
There are cases of people who say they vividly remember previous phenomena. Although in some cases this could be the case, For the most part we will not be facing an authentic memory but rather in the face of an elaboration generated from the information we have in the present (for example, from what our parents have told us that happened). And in many cases, whoever says such a thing is not lying, but rather has generated a false memory that is experienced as true.
When does it appear?
This amnesia of the first events has always been observed in adults, but research shows that this amnesia is visible already in childhood. Specifically, experiments and research by Bauer and Larkina in 2013 indicate that generally Childhood amnesia appears at approximately seven years of age.
In addition, these investigations have allowed us to observe that younger children are capable of having more memories but that these were less clear and detailed, while older children were capable of evoking phenomena in a much more extensive, exact and detailed way despite their that they did not remember their early years.
Why don’t we remember anything about our early years?
The reason for childhood amnesia is something that has intrigued researchers dedicated to this area and has generated a large amount of research on the matter. Despite There is still no complete consensus on the exact causes For those of us who are not able to remember practically anything from our first years of life, there are various hypotheses in this regard. Some of the best known are the following.
1. Linguistic hypothesis
Some authors consider that childhood amnesia is due to the lack of inadequate coding due to the absence or lack of language development , as a structure that allows information to be organized. Until the development of this ability we would be using an iconic representation in which we would remember through images, but once the memory begins to be encoded and organized through language, these first memories would end up weakening and later being lost.
2. Neurological hypothesis
There are also neurological hypotheses. In this sense, some recent research seems to indicate that the absence of memory of this time could be linked to the immaturity of our brain and the neuronal overpopulation that we have during the first years of life.
During early childhood our hippocampus is immersed in a process of constant neurogenesis, the number of neurons we have growing spectacularly (especially in the dentate gyrus). This constant growth and creation of neurons makes it difficult to record information in a persistent and stable manner, thus losing autobiographical information.
The reason for this may be in the degradation of memories by replacing new neurons with pre-existing connections or in the fact that the new ones are more excitable and activate more than those that were already in the brain.
There may also be a link between this forgetfulness and neural pruning, in which part of the neurons in our brain die in a pre-programmed way to improve the efficiency of our nervous system, leaving only the most powerful and reinforced connections.
3. Hypotheses about the formation of the Ego
Another explanation that has been proposed suggests that we are incapable of remembering our first moments because at those ages we do not yet have a self-concept or an identity: we are not aware that we are, that we exist, with what we are. there is no “I” of which we can create a biography.
4. Other hypotheses
In addition to these, we can find many other hypotheses that have been surpassed by the development of Psychology. For example, from the classic psychoanalytic model it was proposed that forgetting is due to the repression of our instincts and the Oedipus conflict.
