Brain scans of infants reveal the moment we start making memories

&gt;Failure of any of these steps [encoding, long-term etching, and recall of memory] causes amnesia. So, which steps are responsible for the erosion of baby memories?<p>&gt;Who knows! Kids squirm around too much in MRI machines! But they start encoding things around a year, or maybe before, or maybe after!<p>I&#x27;ve been clickbaited

&quot;The early years are chaotic. The brain undergoes extensive rewiring. This makes it a difficult to form lasting memories.&quot;<p>That is reduced too much from the actual state of research, presumably for the sake of accessibility. We obviously already learn before the hippocampus starts to really develop (18-24 months). But what episodic memory means is that the learned things have no episodic context, i.e. they are learned and applied more broadly, not just in the situation where they were learned in the first place. Learning in the early years isn&#x27;t &quot;chaotic&quot;, it is just very generalized.

I didn&#x27;t read the article, but when I got kids I was surprised they can actually remember for a very long time. Both of my kids could at e.g. 3 remember things that happened a year earlier, which still surprised me with the younger one. There was however a point when the older one could no longer remember some things from the past, as if there was a cutoff line to a previous life and he had transitioned into a new phase of his life.

Something must be slightly unusual about me.. because I have retained some very early memories..<p>I have confirmed with my parents the placement and orientation of my crib. I can tell you the exact process that my parents performed to change my diaper. I remember being bathed in my tub with my toys.. list goes on. These are visual memories, I can see them right now. I&#x27;m nearly certain they are real.. it&#x27;s possible my brain has made some up, but I&#x27;ve confirmed enough with my parents that I feel confident that they are real.<p>I swear I remember waking up in the middle of the night once in my crib.. heart beating out of my chest.. I was really scared of something.. and I just remember this pure consciousness .. staring up into the darkness. Same consciousness I have now.

I have two early childhood memories.<p>I remember a brief moment standing in my crib during the morning. And a dream I had in Pre-K where my pre -k teacher was the moon above me at night. Pretty early memory?

I can remember very vividly experiences that cannot have happened after I turned 2.<p>It is nice to have something I can show people when this infrequently comes up, because I have had people insist that these must be false memories, as children cannot form memories before 3. Or before 5. Or in one case, before 10? Like what?

This supports the observations made by Dr. Piotr Wozniak, inventor of spaced-repetition algorithms, from anonymous data gathered from users of all ages: children up to around age 7 have poorer-memory than adults because their brains are focused on rewiring.

Curious to see if future studies tie this in with memory consolidation during sleep

the truth is the scans &quot;offer some intriguing clues&quot; but future studies &quot;might shed light on the minimal brain architecture needed to support vivid autobiographical memories.&quot;

Brain scans are like those scientists putting together the iguanodon skeleton… we may eventually get to a likely story but we’re gonna spend a lot of time on to be discredited

oh boy! another brain imaging story. I wonder if they can also identify the moment trout start making memories?