The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and then as we get older we forget them again.<p>If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the early memories are completely lost.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memories" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memor...</a>
Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they were amazed that I knew.<p>But I realized a few years ago that the memory, despite having true elements and feeling legitimate, takes place in the wrong location: the house that we moved into shortly after he was born. So I'm sure at some point I either was told this story and confused it for a memory, or I held onto the "gist" of the original memory long enough and then recalled/rewrote it enough times that the setting was changed to the place where the majority of my childhood took place. But I find it amazing that I still feel like it's a real memory.
I'm not an expert, but I have read few books about brain development. It's amazing that we can remember things from the childhood. Retained memories have likely result of multiple recall-rewrite cycles.<p>Human brains practically rebuild themselves few times during development. Neural migration stops when the child is born, but synaptic pruning, myelination, synaptogenesis, apoptosis continues years after the birth. Cortical white matter continues to increase until the child is 9-12 years old, grey matter development continues in phases. Superior temporal cortex is not mature until the child reaches adulthood 17-18 years. Our first memories are from brains that were very different.<p>This is why child neurologists are their own specialty among neurologists. Child brain and adult brain are different things.
I actually did some casual research into this 3 years ago before my kids were born. All the theories and speculation in the article have been disproven - specifically theories about autobiographical memory or narrative memory being important. What actually happens is the brain undergoes periods of shift/growth/change that nuke the ability to recall earlier memories. Most of the incorrect explanations come from adult-oriented bias: The memories are so far gone we can't even remember that we were once capable of remembering earlier times.<p>Children can remember events clearly from before they acquired language. No adult has ever been shown to have this ability (it is always due to mis-remembering the time period or making educated guesses based on other knowledge). As children get older and gain a better mastery of language they can often describe _more_ memories from very early childhood, indicating that the memories exist even when kids lack the ability to describe them in words. These abilities to remember early childhood (even <1 yr old) begins fading around ~10 yrs old. By your teenage years those early memories are mostly gone.
I wonder what kind of effect today's technology has.<p>I mean, my son is 3, and already has hours of videos stored. And he likes watching those videos of himself and family even now.<p>How is this going to affect memory formation later in life? Should we hide those videos from him to avoid some kind of a feedback-loop that can somehow mess with his memory?
I read recently that our memories are us recalling the last time we remembered it. They did a study which showed those that intoduced errors in their memories later recalled them as facts the next time.<p>So my thought is that childhood amnesia could be down to children living in the moment and simply don't spend time recalling past events. Only later do we consider events as being past, present and future.
Isn't it simply because of this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning</a> ?
I think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories from before we could talk.<p>It seems to me that we can go a layer deeper than words and language. An infant has an incredibly shallow model of the world in their brain. At birth, it is almost entirely blank. As we become toddlers, we build up our model of the world at an astonishing rate. I wonder if it most memories don't survive this process. Perhaps the world model grows too quickly, and the old memories are unable to be integrated. I do agree that language plays a role in this, but I would guess that most of this happens at a level beneath language.<p>At some point though, the existing model is robust enough that new memories more firmly take root and can be better integrated into future changes of the model (even though it is still being developed at a rapid rate throughout childhood). Naturally, this point occurs at different ages.
My earliest memory was from 13 months old. It was the second surgery I had on my foot, and I woke up towards the end of the surgery. Apparently anesthesia for small children is quite difficult. I have a couple other very faint memories from 2 and 3 years of age, but none nearly as strong as my first.
I remember my 1 year old birthday party and plenty of stuff before that. I remember finding an unprotected outlet and putting a butter knife in it. It made me involuntarily fling the knife across the room. My mom came in and got mad at me for crying for "no reason".
I remember one distinct memory from when I later figured I was 1.5 years old (18 months).<p>My great grandmother (mom's mom's mom) was on her deathbed. I remember meeting her, with my parents one last time before she passed away. I distinctly remember the tile on the wall was robin's egg blue up to about 5 feet tall. She had such frail skin, it was like tissue paper.. I held her hand knowing that she was nearing the end.<p>I was later (years later) told that my parents were terrified that I was going to do something and rip her skin. I also found out she stayed alive long enough to see me off. She died by away the next morning.<p>By all accounts, I shouldn't remember this. But I told them details from what my own parents forgot.
My theory is that memory is more about the stories that we tell and retell ourselves, than any sort of objective reflection of reality. If you're not refreshing the stuff in your cache, it ages out and goes away.
Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? My guess is it's because human memories are <i>ideas</i> and like all our ideas they depend on other ideas for their meaning.<p>However when we were young our ideas about the world were very different from what they are now: much simpler and with many falsehoods. So our earliest memories don't make sense to us and can't be recalled.<p>What we call our 'first memory' may just be the earliest thing we can <i>recall</i> and make sense of <i>now</i>.
I have a memory of age one, bathing in a tin tub in the garden of father's boss. No language, but the impression that life can be good had such an impact that I remembered.
I find this mystifying. I have numerous memories from being a toddler. Among friends' children, some have more fully-formed personalities than others. My favorite one has an excellent memory (like she remembers where things are in our house even though she only visits every 2 or 3 months) and also highly developed preferences on clothing (colors, acceptable combinations of what to wear etc.).
I'm pretty sure most of my early memories are not of the actual event, but of the times I thought of the memory.<p>Like others have mentioned, at 5 years old I could remember details of being 2-3yrs. I think I'm now going back to the 5-year-old rather than the 2-year-old.
The article also goes into some detail on false memories. There have been some horrific instances of injustices caused by this, particularly false memories of child abuse and sex abuse.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome</a><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memories-abuse-convict-innocent" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memori...</a>
Louis CK on the subject : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU</a>
Could this working of the brain be related to how, when you're sleeping, something happening in the real world is incorporated in real time into a dream you're having? That always amazes me, how our brains do that.
The hypothesis that natural language acquisition "restructures our memories" is promising one. We cannot recall what has been stored using a different "encoding". There are no associated labels (which is what words are) attached to earlier experiences, so "search" returns nothing, or something we mistakenly attributed to the prior-language experiences.
Another item in the long list of obvious stuff so called experts in intelligence purport not to know.<p>simple answer you wont get from her majesties propoganda channel.<p>"memory" is a learnt skill. just like everything else, it takes a few years to learn it.