babies they absorb information like a sponge - why then does it take us so long to form the first memory of ourselves?

You met at dinner with people whom you have known for a long time. You organized holidays together, celebrated birthdays, went to the park, ate ice cream with pleasure, and even went on vacation with them. By the way, these people - your parents - have spent a lot of money on you over the years. The problem is that you don't remember it.

Most of us do not remember the first few years of our lives at all: from the most crucial moment - the birth - to the first steps, the first words, and even to kindergarten. Even after we have a precious first memory in our minds, the next memory nicks are sparse and patchy until we get older.

What does it have to do with? The gaping gap in the biography of children upsets parents and has baffled psychologists, neurologists and linguists for several decades now.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, coined the term "infantile amnesia", and was completely obsessed with this topic.

Exploring this mental vacuum, one involuntarily asks interesting questions. Is our first memory true, or is it made up? Do we remember the events themselves or only their verbal description? And is it possible one day to remember everything that seems not to have been preserved in our memory?

This phenomenon is doubly mysterious, because in all other respects, babies absorb new information like a sponge, forming 700 new information every second. neural connections and using language learning skills that any polyglot would envy.

Judging by the latest research, the child begins to train the brain even in the womb. But even in adults, information is lost over time if no attempt is made to preserve it. So one explanation is that infantile amnesia is just a consequence of natural process forgetting events that took place during our lives.

The answer to this question can be found in the work of a nineteenth-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who conducted a series of pioneering studies on himself to reveal the limits of human memory.

In order to make his brain look like a blank slate at the beginning of the experiment, he came up with the idea of ​​using meaningless rows of syllables - words made up at random from randomly selected letters, such as "kag" or "slans" - and began to memorize thousands of such combinations of letters.

The forgetting curve he compiled based on the results of the experiment indicates the presence of a strikingly rapid decline in a person’s ability to recall what has been learned: in the absence of special efforts human brain weeds out half of all new knowledge within an hour.

By the 30th day, a person remembers only 2-3% of what he learned.

One of the most important findings Ebbinghaus is that such forgetting of information is quite predictable. To find out how the memory of an infant differs from the memory of an adult, it is enough to simply compare the graphs.

In the 1980s, after making the appropriate calculations, scientists found that a person remembers surprisingly few events that took place in his life from birth to the age of six or seven. Obviously, there's something else going on here.

It is interesting that the veil over memories is lifted for everyone in different ages. Some people remember what happened to them at the age of two, and some do not have any memories of themselves until the age of 7-8 years. On average, fragments of memories begin to appear in a person from about three and a half years.

More interestingly, the degree of forgetfulness varies by country: average age in which a person begins to remember himself may differ in different countries for two years.

Can these findings shed any light on the nature of such a vacuum? In order to answer this question, psychologist Qi Wang from Cornell University (USA) collected hundreds of memories from groups of Chinese and American students.

In full accordance with national stereotypes, the stories of the Americans were longer, more detailed and with a clear emphasis on themselves. The Chinese were more concise and factual; in general, their childhood memories began six months later. This pattern is confirmed by many other studies. More detailed stories, concentrated on oneself, apparently, are remembered more easily.

It is believed that self-interest contributes to the work of memory, because if you have your own point of view, events are filled with meaning.

"It's all about the difference between the memories "There were tigers at the zoo" and "I saw tigers at the zoo, and although they were scary, I had a lot of fun," explains Robin Fivush, a psychologist at Emory University (USA).

Conducting the same experiment again, Wang interviewed the mothers of the children and found exactly the same pattern. In other words, if your memories are vague, your parents are to blame.

The first memory in Wang's life is a walk in the mountains in the vicinity of his home in Chinese city Chongqing with his mother and sister. She was then about six years old. However, until she moved to the United States, it never occurred to anyone to ask her about the age at which she remembers herself.

"AT Eastern cultures childhood memories are of no interest to anyone. People are just wondering: “Why are you doing this?”," she says. "If society makes you understand that these memories are important to you, you keep them," says Wang.

First of all, memories begin to form among the juvenile representatives of the New Zealand Maori people, which is characterized by great attention to the past. Many people remember what happened to them at the age of only two and a half years.

How we talk about our memories can be influenced by cultural characteristics, and some psychologists believe that events begin to be stored in a person’s memory only after he has mastered speech.

"Language helps to structure, organize memories in the form of a narrative. If you state the event in the form of a story, the impressions received become more ordered, and it is easier to remember them for a long time," says Fivush.

However, some psychologists are skeptical about the role of language in memory. For example, children who are born deaf and grow up without knowing sign language begin to remember themselves around the same age. This suggests that we cannot remember the first years of our lives just because our brain is not yet equipped with the necessary tools.

This explanation was the result of an examination of the most famous patient in the history of neurology, known under the pseudonym H.M. After during unsuccessful operation with the aim of curing epilepsy in H.M. the hippocampus was damaged, it lost the ability to remember new events.

"This is the center of our ability to learn and remember. If it were not for the hippocampus, I would not be able to remember our conversation later," explains Jeffrey Fagen, who researches issues related to memory and learning at St. John's University (USA).

It is interesting, however, to note that a patient with a hippocampal injury could still process other types of information - just like a baby. When scientists asked him to draw a five-pointed star from its reflection in a mirror (it's harder than it looks!), he improved with each attempt, although each time it seemed to him that he was drawing it for the first time.

Perhaps, at an early age, the hippocampus is simply not developed enough to form full-fledged memories of ongoing events. During the first few years of life in baby monkeys, rat pups and children, neurons continue to be added to the hippocampus, and in infancy none of them is able to remember anything for a long time.

At the same time, apparently, as soon as the body stops creating new neurons, they suddenly acquire this ability. "In young children and infants, the hippocampus is very underdeveloped," Fagen says.

But does this mean that in an underdeveloped state, the hippocampus loses accumulated memories over time? Or do they not form at all? Because childhood events can continue to influence our behavior long after we forget them, some psychologists believe that they certainly remain in our memory.

"Perhaps the memories are stored in some place that is currently inaccessible, but this is very difficult to prove empirically," Feigen explains.

However, one should not trust too much what we remember about that time - it is possible that our childhood memories are largely false and we remember events that never happened to us.

Elizabeth Loftes, psychologist University of California in the city of Irvine (USA) dedicated her scientific research exactly this topic.

"People can pick up ideas and start visualizing them, making them indistinguishable from memories," she says.

imaginary events

Loftes herself knows firsthand how it happens. When she was 16, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. Many years later, a relative convinced her that it was she who discovered the surfaced body. Loftes was flooded with "memories", but a week later the same relative called her back and explained that she was mistaken - someone else found the corpse.

Of course, no one likes to hear that his memories are not real. Loftes knew she needed hard evidence to convince her doubters. Back in the 1980s, she recruited volunteers for research and began to plant "memories" herself.

Loftes came up with a sophisticated lie about the childhood trauma they allegedly received after being lost in the store, where some kind old woman later found them and took them to her parents. For greater credibility, she dragged family members into the story.

"We told the study participants, 'We talked to your mother, and she told us about what happened to you.'"

Almost a third of the subjects fell into the trap: some managed to "remember" this event in all its details.

In fact, sometimes we are more confident in the accuracy of our imagined memories than in the events that actually took place. And even if your memories are based on real events, it is quite possible that they were subsequently reformulated and reformatted taking into account conversations about the event, and not their own memories of it.

Remember when you thought how fun it would be to turn your sister into a zebra with a permanent marker? Or did you just see it on family video? And that amazing cake your mom baked when you were three years old? Maybe your older brother told you about him?

Perhaps the most big mystery is not why we do not remember our earlier childhood, but whether our memories can be trusted at all.

Why, along with the death of a person, his wrist watch?
Why don't we remember our childhood and how we were born?
- Why do we sometimes see colorless flies flying in the air?
- Why are we so annoyed by the sound of our own voice in the recording?
Why do men have nipples too?
- Why do Armenians have surnames with YAN?

To teaching questions to which I did not know the answers ... and voila! Digging in nete they found! Maybe someone besides me will be interested)

1. Why does a person's wrist watch stop with the death of a person?

Investigators, especially those who are involved in solving murders, know that often at the same time as the death of a person, his watch stops. Even if they did not receive mechanical damage. The fact is that, being on the hand for a long time, a metal watch, perhaps (especially with an iron or leather strap on the left hand) becomes part of electromagnetic field of a person, as it were, are included in the electrical circuit, playing the role of a kind of grounding. All the energy of the body flows to this end point (in electronics, such a part is called a terminator, or a plug).

Gradually, after a few months of wearing, the terminator watch acquires the charge of the human field, is fed by it. The energy of the compressed spring is supplemented by the energy of the human field.
If a mechanical watches not in order, maybe you need to go first not to the workshop, but to see a doctor!

It should be remembered that this is just a theory and there is no documented evidence for this, despite the statements of the investigators. Therefore, the article was classified under the heading "Other".

2. Why don't we remember our childhood and how we were born?
The term "infantile amnesia" was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1899. According to Freud, adults are not able to remember the events of the first 3-5 years of their life, since during the first years of life the child experiences aggressive and often sexual impulses towards his parents. But this idea was one-sided and did not take root.

Perhaps the main cause of childhood amnesia is the differences in the coding of the information received in children and adults. And if an adult is able to store a lot of data in memory, then in a child they periodically disappear.

The process of forming memories is handled by the network nerve cells, which is created in 6-18 months. At this stage, short-term and long-term memory appears. But if our memory has already reached right level why do we forget our childhood? It turns out that this is due to the lack of the ability to connect events with words, since we still do not know how to speak, and we do not know the words that can describe any event.

3. Why do we sometimes see colorless flies flying in the air?
Many people see colorless "flies" flying in the air, especially when looking at a bright illuminated surface, for example, clear sky. This effect has a scientific name - destruction of the vitreous body. Ideally, the vitreous body of our eye is a transparent gelatinous substance, but due to illness, injury, increased eye strain, or simply age-related changes individual fibers in it thicken and lose transparency, which is perceived by us as flies. Usually, the destruction of the vitreous body is not dangerous and does not cause complications, but if the flies appear very abruptly, accompanied by flashes of light, this may indicate an imminent retinal detachment, which leads to blindness.

4. Why are we so annoyed by the sound of our own voice in the recording?

For many of us, hearing the sound of our own voice on a recording is a challenge. We don't recognize him, and we don't like him at all. It is thinner, taller and generally quite nasty. The recording cannot lie, which means that those around us hear our voice exactly like that.

This is explained by the fact that sound makes a certain path before getting into our inner ear. Every sound we hear is vibrations propagating through the air. The inner ear "catches" these vibrations and "poureds" them into the head through the external auditory canal, where they set the eardrums in motion.

Then these vibrations penetrate the inner ear and turn into signals that are transmitted along the auditory nerve to the brain, where they are decoded. However, the inner ear picks up not only those vibrations that come from the outside through the ear canal. It also perceives those vibrations that arise inside the body. Therefore, when you speak yourself, you hear a combination of these two kinds of vibrations. Sound is transmitted differently in different media. This explains the discrepancy that is so annoying when you hear your own voice in the recording.

5. Why do Armenian surnames always end with "yan", "yants"?
Armenian surnames usually end in -yan or -yants, which means belonging (in this case, to the genus). So, -ants (-yants) is the ending genitive plural(compare "nranz" - them). In modern Armenian the suffix -yan is used to form adjectives, for example, "moskovyan" - Moscow, "kievyan" - Kyiv. So, the surname "Sarkisyan" means belonging to the Sarkis family.

6. Why do men have nipples - what is their purpose?
Why are they needed for non-breastfeeding men? Consider the most common versions of their need. Immediately make a reservation that none of the versions is a scientifically proven fact.

So, according to one version, men need nipples for beauty. Indeed, the representative of the stronger sex without this part of the body looks, to put it mildly, not aesthetically pleasing. But the concepts of aesthetics and beauty are purely human, existing only in the minds of people. In nature, everything is thought out, and every organ plays certain role necessary for the maintenance and continuation of life on earth.

For the same reason, the version that nipples are necessary to cause pain and injury (if you grab the enemy by them and twist them) looks unfounded.
WHY do men have nipples? Many consider the nipples as an erogenous zone. But men have enough other organs involved in the excitation and occurrence sexual desire. Some men are generally annoyed by any touch on the chest. Some consider the presence of nipples as a "legacy" from the distant past, when all people were asexual creatures. According to this version, nipples are an organ that has lost its functions in the process of human development (rudiment).

An interesting fact is that, theoretically, males can have milk for breastfeeding. But the male hormonal background does not create for this favorable conditions. For full feeding, a certain amount of female hormones (estrogens) is necessary. Indeed, in life and medical practice there are men with abnormally enlarged breasts. This phenomenon is called gynecomastia and is associated with an excess of estrogen in the body, hormonal abnormalities. Gynecomastia is common with alcoholism.

Normally, the development of the mammary glands and nipples in boys is inhibited even in the early stages, and they acquire an unfinished appearance of the female breast. main function chest protection remains internal organs(first of all - the heart and lungs) from external adverse factors.

Scientifically substantiated is the version of the intrauterine formation of the nipples. According to scientists, between 10 and 15 weeks of fetal development, male and female embryos are exactly the same. After this period, a surge of hormones occurs, which are determined by the presence of male or female chromosomes in the fetus. This is followed by the formation of gender differences.

Nipples, along with arms, legs and other body parts, appear in fetuses of both sexes before the hormonal explosion. Thus, the presence of nipples in men is explained by the biological processes of the embryonic development of the fetus.

Imagine that you are having lunch with someone you have known for several years. You celebrated holidays, birthdays together, had fun, walked through the parks and ate ice cream. You even lived together. In general, this someone has spent quite a lot of money on you - thousands. Only you can't remember any of it. The most dramatic moments in life are your birthday, your first steps, your first words, your first meal, and even your first years of life. kindergarten- most of us do not remember anything about the first years of life. Even after our first precious memory, the rest seem far apart and scattered. How so?

This gaping hole in the record of our lives has been frustrating to parents and baffling psychologists, neurologists, and linguists for decades. Even Sigmund Freud carefully studied this issue, in connection with which he coined the term "infantile amnesia" more than 100 years ago.

The study of this tabula of rasa led to interesting questions. Do the first memories really tell what happened to us, or were they made up? Can we remember events without words and describe them? Can we one day bring back the missing memories?

Part of this puzzle stems from the fact that babies are like sponges for new information, form 700 new neural connections every second and have such language learning skills that the most accomplished polyglots would turn green with envy. Latest research showed that they begin to train their minds already in the womb.

But even in adults, information is lost over time if no effort is made to preserve it. So one explanation is that childhood amnesia is simply the result of a natural process of forgetting things that we encounter during our lives.

The 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus performed unusual experiments on himself to test the limits of human memory. To provide your mind with perfect Blank sheet where to start, he invented "meaningless syllables" - made-up words from random letters, like "kag" or "slans" - and began to memorize thousands of them.

His forgetting curve showed a disconcertingly rapid decline in our ability to recall what we've learned: Left alone, our brains clear out half of what we've learned in an hour. By day 30, we leave only 2-3%.

Ebbinghaus found that the way he forgot all this was quite predictable. To see if the infants' memories are any different, we need to compare these curves. After doing the calculations in the 1980s, scientists found that we remember much less from birth to six or seven years of age, which one would expect from these curves. Obviously something very different is going on.

Remarkably, for some the veil is lifted earlier than for others. Some people can remember events from the age of two, while others do not remember anything that happened to them until they were seven or even eight years old. On average, blurry footage starts at age three and a half. Even more remarkable, the discrepancies vary from country to country, with discrepancies in recall ranging up to two years on average.

To understand why, psychologist Qi Wang of Cornell University collected hundreds of testimonials from Chinese and American students. As national stereotypes predict, American stories have been longer, defiantly self-absorbed, and more complex. Chinese stories, on the other hand, were shorter and to the point; on average, they also started six months late.

This state of affairs is supported by numerous other studies. More detailed and self-focused memories are easier to recall. It is believed that narcissism helps in this, since gaining one's own point of view gives meaning to events.

"There's a difference between thinking 'There are tigers at the zoo' and 'I saw tigers at the zoo, it was both scary and fun,'" says Robin Fivush, a psychologist at Emory University.

When Wang ran the experiment again, this time by interviewing the mothers of the children, she found the same patterns. So if your memories are hazy, blame it on your parents.

Wang's first memory is of hiking in the mountains near her family's home in Chongqing, China, with her mother and sister. She was about six. But she wasn't asked about it until she moved to the US. “In Eastern cultures, childhood memories are not very important. People are surprised that someone can ask such a thing,” she says.

“If society tells you that these memories are important to you, you will keep them,” Wang says. The record for earliest memory is held by the Maori in New Zealand, whose culture includes a strong emphasis on the past. Many can remember the events that took place at the age of two and a half years.

"Our culture may also determine how we talk about our memories, and some psychologists believe that memories only appear when we learn to speak."

Language helps us provide the structure of our memories, the narrative. In the process of creating a story, the experience becomes more organized and therefore easier to remember for a long time, says Fivush. Some psychologists doubt that this is playing big role. They say there is no difference between the age at which deaf children growing up without sign language report their very first memories, for example.

All of this leads us to the following theory: we can't remember the early years simply because our brains haven't been equipped with the necessary equipment. This explanation stems from famous person in the history of neuroscience, known as patient HM. After a failed operation to treat his epilepsy that damaged his hippocampus, HM could not recall any new events. “It is the center of our ability to learn and remember. If I didn't have a hippocampus, I wouldn't be able to remember this conversation," says Jeffrey Fagen, who studies memory and learning at Saint John's University.

Remarkably, however, he was still able to learn other kinds of information - just like babies. When scientists asked him to copy a drawing five pointed star looking at him in the mirror (not as easy to do as it seems), he got better with each round of practice, despite the fact that the experience itself was completely new to him.

Perhaps when we are very young, the hippocampus is simply not developed enough to create a rich memory of the event. Baby rats, monkeys, and humans continue to get new neurons in the hippocampus for the first few years of life, and none of us can create lasting memories in infancy—and all indications are that the moment we stop making new neurons, we suddenly start form long-term memory. "During infancy, the hippocampus remains extremely underdeveloped," Fagen says.

But does the underformed hippocampus lose our long-term memories, or do they not form at all? Because events experienced in childhood can influence our behavior later for a long time after we erase them from memory, psychologists believe that they must remain somewhere. “Perhaps the memories are stored in a place that is no longer accessible to us, but it is very difficult to demonstrate this empirically,” Fagen says.

However, our childhood is probably full of false memories of events that never happened.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has devoted her career to studying this phenomenon. "People pick up thoughts and visualize them - they become like memories," she says.

imaginary events

Loftus knows firsthand how this happens. Her mother drowned in a swimming pool when she was only 16 years old. Several years later, a relative convinced her that she had seen her floating body. Memories flooded his mind until a week later, the same relative called and explained that Loftus had misunderstood everything.

Of course, who likes to know that his memories are not real? To convince skeptics, Loftus needs irrefutable evidence. Back in the 1980s, she invited volunteers for research and planted the memories herself.

Loftus unfolded complex lies about a sad trip to shopping center where they got lost and then were rescued by a gentle old woman and reunited with the family. To make events even more like the truth, she even dragged in their families. “We usually tell study participants that we talked to your mom, your mom told something that happened to you.” Almost a third of the subjects recalled this event in vivid detail. In fact, we are more confident in our imaginary memories than in those that actually happened.

Even if your memories are based on real events, they have probably been cobbled together and reworked in hindsight - these memories are planted with conversations, not specific first-person memories.

Perhaps the biggest mystery is not why we can't remember childhood, but whether we can trust our memories.

Memory is the ability to store information and is a complex set of biological processes. It is inherent in all living things, but is most developed in humans. Human memory is very individual, witnesses of the same event remember it differently.

What exactly do we not remember?

Memories take on a unique imprint of the psyche, which is able to partially change, replace, distort them. The memory of babies, for example, is capable of storing and reproducing absolutely invented events as real.

And this is not the only feature of children's memory. It is absolutely surprising that we do not remember how we were born. In addition, almost no one can recall the first years of his life. What can we say about the fact that we are not able to remember at least something about the time spent in the womb.

This phenomenon is called "childhood amnesia". This is the only type of amnesia that has a universal human scale.

According to scientists, most of People start counting childhood memories from about 3.5 years. Up to this point, only a few can remember separate, very vivid life situations or snapshots. Most have even the most impressive moments are erased from memory.

Early childhood is the most information-rich period. This is the time of active and dynamic learning of a person, familiarizing him with the outside world. Of course, people learn almost throughout their lives, but with age, this process slows down its intensity.

But during the first years of life, the baby has to process literally gigabytes of information in a short time. That is why they say that Small child“absorbs everything like a sponge.” Why don't we remember this critical period own life? These questions have been asked by psychologists and neuroscientists, but there is still no unambiguous, universally recognized solution to this puzzle of nature.

Research into the Causes of the Phenomenon of "Children's Amnesia"

And again Freud

The world famous guru of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud is considered to be the discoverer of the phenomenon. He gave it the name infantile amnesia". In the course of his work, he noticed that patients do not recall events related to the first three, and sometimes five years of life.

The Austrian psychologist began to explore the problem more deeply. His final conclusion turned out to be within the framework of the postulates traditional for his teaching.

Freud considered the cause of childhood amnesia to be the early sexual attachment of an infant to a parent of the opposite sex, and, accordingly, aggression towards another parent of the same sex with the baby. Such an emotional overload is beyond the power of the child's psyche, therefore it is forced into the unconscious area, where it remains forever.

The version raised many questions. In particular, she did not explain the absolute non-selectivity of the psyche in this case. Not all infantile experiences have a sexual connotation, and the memory refuses to store all the events of this period. Thus, the theory was not supported by almost anyone and so remained the opinion of one scientist.

First there was a word

For a certain time, the popular explanation for childhood amnesia was the following version: a person does not remember the period in which he still did not know how to fully speak. Its supporters believed that memory, when recreating events, puts them into words. Speech is fully mastered by the child by about three years.

Before this period, he simply cannot correlate phenomena and emotions with certain words, does not define the relationship between them, so it cannot be committed to memory. An indirect confirmation of the theory was the too literal interpretation of the biblical quote: "In the beginning was the Word."

Meanwhile, this explanation also has weak sides. There are many children who speak perfectly after the first year. This does not provide them with lasting memories of this period of life. In addition, a competent interpretation of the Gospel indicates that in the first line, the “word” does not mean speech at all, but a certain thought form, an energy message, something intangible.

Inability to form early memories

A number of scientists believe that the phenomenon is explained by the lack of abstract-logical thinking, the inability to build individual events into a whole picture. The child is also unable to associate memories with specific time and place. Children early age do not yet have a sense of time. It turns out that we do not forget our childhood, but simply are not able to form memories.

"Insufficient" memory

Another group of researchers put forward interesting hypothesis: in the first years of childhood, a person absorbs and processes such an incredible amount of information that there is no place to add new “files” and they are written over the old ones, erasing all memories.

Underdevelopment of the hippocampus

There are several classifications of memory. For example, according to the duration of information storage, it is divided into short-term and long-term. So, some experts believe that we do not remember our childhood, because only short-term memory works during this period.

According to the method of memorization, semantic and episodic memory are distinguished. The first leaves the imprints of the first acquaintance with the phenomenon, the second - the results of personal contact with it. Scientists believe that they are stored in different parts brain and are able to unite only after reaching the age of three through the hippocampus.

Paul Frankland, a Canadian scientist, drew attention to the functions of a special part of the brain - the hippocampus, which is responsible for the birth of emotions, as well as for the transformation, transportation and storage of human memories. It is she who ensures the transition of information from short-term memory to long-term.

Having studied this part of the brain, Frankland found that at the birth of a person it is underdeveloped, and grows and develops along with the maturation of the individual. But even after the full development of the hippocampus, it cannot organize old memories, but processes already current portions of data.

Loss or gift of nature?

Each of the theories described above tries to find out the mechanism of childhood memory loss and does not ask the question: why did the universe order it this way and deprive us of such valuable and dear memories? What is the meaning of such an irreparable loss?

In nature, everything is balanced and everything is not accidental. In all likelihood, the fact that we do not remember our birth and the first years of our development should be of some benefit to us. This point in his research concerns only Z. Freud. He raises the issue of traumatic experiences that are forced out of consciousness.

Indeed, the entire period of early childhood can hardly be called absolutely cloudless, happy and carefree. Maybe we're just used to thinking that way because we don't remember him?

It has long been known that the baby at birth experiences physical pain no less than his mother, but emotional experience a baby during childbirth is akin to experiencing the process of death. Then the stage of acquaintance with the world begins. And he is not always white and fluffy.

The little man is undoubtedly exposed a huge number stress. Therefore, many modern scientists believe that Freud was right, at least in that infantile amnesia has a protective function for the psyche. It protects the baby from emotional overload that is unbearable for him, gives strength to develop further. This gives us yet another reason to thank nature for its foresight.

Parents should take into account the fact that it is at this tender age that the foundation of the child's psyche is laid. Some of the most vivid fragments of memories can still be fragmented in memory little man, and in the power of father and mother to make these moments of his life full of light and love.

Video: why do we not remember events from early childhood?

Usually (and well if so) the most early memories people are associated with the age of 3 years, occasionally 2. But how we were born, how we drove home from the hospital, where the baby was placed, etc., people do not remember.

Of course, people do not remember what happened before birth, how conception took place, the development of the fetus, what happened before conception, what happened between lives, past lives.

Why can't we remember this and is it possible to return the memory of early events and past lives? Yes, you can. For example, I remember, I know a number of my past lives, and a couple of my earliest memories are the appearance of the first life on earth and the cataclysm (change, event), as a result of which the cosmos became what it is now - dead. Before that, the cosmos itself was alive...

But you can remember, and it's easy, and recent past lives. For example, almost everyone (who is under 40) has a memory of the 2nd World War. Why is this memory locked? Because energetically it "lies" outside our current personality. How so?

It's simple. In energy there is a body, it can be called the middle one. Which is formed during our life. This body is formed by all other energy bodies - both "higher" and "lower". As well as non-energetic manifestations of the human psyche. And of course, the environment, society, etc. I described how it all works and works in my book, but the essence of this article was not included in the book, but I want to tell you.

So this "middle" or "resulting" energy body is usually called astral. It stores everything that we consider ourselves in the current life. All our experiences, knowledge, skills... Everything.

For the sake of fairness, it is worth clarifying that what applies to other bodies and beings of the psyche is duplicated in these other components of a person. However, in those bodies and beings, the current life occupies a meager space. And in the astral there is nothing that does not belong to the current life. That is, there is no "default", and without special classes or the intervention of "fate" does not appear. And our ordinary consciousness is associated precisely with this energy body.

Since it is formed from the experience of our life, then, until enough personal experience, we can say that there is no personality yet. Here it is worth mentioning that there is a personality, because there is a soul and much more, but it is the astral consciousness as an independent unit that is formed a little earlier than our earliest memories. Therefore, it is our usual waking consciousness that does not yet exist until the age of about 3 years.

Further binding of consciousness to this energy body is carried out in the process of socialization and life in physical world with its most powerful material and emotional signals.

And since astral body formed in this life, there is nothing in it from other lives and from the period when the astral body was not yet sufficiently developed. And we naturally cannot access the missing data.

And for example, Kastanedov's first attention is just located in this body. And the second attention is the whole other energy world.

After death, this body disintegrates in 40 days. Of course, this is not the soul of a person, not his real person. This is a set of automatisms. Only and everything. Although there the widest range these automatisms are all our experiences, all our skills and abilities.

Do you want to distinguish "simple" schools of magic from more advanced ones? Very simple. the main objective"simple" magicians - to extend the existence of the astral body for more than 40 days after death, or at least "imprint" their astral body into the energy of an infant (a child under 3 years old) until the expiration of 40 days. This is the main goal of magicians who do not know how and do not know how to make their astral body "non-decaying" in order to exist as an energy being independently of the body.

I just want to put everyone at ease. All these things - with the imprinting of the formed energy and other things - occur exclusively at the desire and plan of the soul of an infant (or no longer an infant). If the soul does not need it, no energy is able to do anything. So live and don't be afraid!

But what about the memory of past lives?

It is both simple and complex. Simply, because all you need to do is shift your attention beyond the first attention. This is not difficult. For example, to the nearest immortal energy body. That is, to the buddhic. Or to the energy of the body or to ... but this is already beyond the scope of this article.

Remember, Castaneda has the concept of "gatekeeper"? So this is precisely the switching of attention from astral perception to others energy bodies. This usually opens the memory of the buddhic body (not all at once). The person remembers differently. At the same time, memories are brighter and clearer than data from the physical senses. Much! Compared to them, even excellent vision delivers a hazy, blurry and twitchy (due to eye jumps) picture.

Such a memory unfolds sequentially as a re-experiencing. That is, not something vague, which seemed to be so-and-so, namely, as a full-fledged sequential re-experiencing of events of amazing clarity and brightness. For this type of memory, there is no such thing as "forgot" or "can't remember." Remembering a newspaper, you can not only clearly see the letters, but also see the texture of the paper, lint, etc. in great detail...

There are also unusual ways work with such memory. You can, remembering how you drove to work, go out on the way from vehicle and visit another place and find out what happened there when you were driving to work... There are other interesting possibilities...

Entry into the egg, intrauterine development, birth, first days of life

"The lesson began with the fact that ... I had a little headache in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe temples ... we saw each other big eyes dragonflies on the sides of the head ... this design did not disappear, but was all drawn into another vortex - a funnel, with a diameter at the beginning of 8 cm. .

I became inside this dark gray funnel. I was at the beginning, and towards the end, it narrowed and, as it were, dissolved, and then there was light. I have seen such a light before, and now, as then, there is a feeling complete happiness.

I began to move towards the light, the funnel was left behind, I moved further in this light. Farther and farther, and the light began to thicken, becoming more and more whitish, enveloping me. I kept moving and suddenly found myself dense big ball, from matter. And there came strong tactile

sensations: feeling like a bursting ball and at the same time as if something was pressing on him. This is very unpleasant feeling I often had in childhood during illnesses (frequent sore throats, flu, colds). For me, flying in the light and experiencing happiness, this was new and super stressful.

condition.

I stayed in this state for 5-7 minutes. This is a very long time, because in childhood I experienced it for several seconds. And then this unpleasant state passed by itself. I was still a ball, but I was comfortable. I-ball began to grow and felt that nothing else was pressing. Then I saw a picture, as if I was touching something soft and plastic in front of me at a short distance with a pen, and I, being there, liked it and amused me. Several times I ran my hand over this plastic thing and then decided to try it with a leg. The viewing circle was small - I saw only in front of me. It was light gray and cloudy-opaque.

Then came the feeling that I was still growing up, and what was then in front of me at a distance began to put pressure on me, and I rested against it. I felt as if my legs and head were bent, and I rested my head, neck and back against it, and it was cramped and unpleasant. The feeling of confusion was replaced by the thought that I could come forward from this, and then I saw a light ahead, and it was as if I was taken out of there, and with my body I felt either coolness or phlegm.

It became funny to me ... the people I saw in this room, I knew that they perceive me differently, but I understand everything, I realize and feel.

Then I felt that I was lying straight, arms straight, a little cramped and uncomfortable. I see the white walls and ceiling converge in the corner. And there was a feeling that everything around was simple, very simple and uninteresting. No magic, which I vaguely remembered. As if before it was “magical”, but here everything is “simple”. And I felt like I could scream. It was nice to feel the scream coming out, to feel the throat or the ligaments. Then I realized that they were giving me something liquid. It pleasantly flows through the esophagus and fills the stomach (I clearly felt them). I closed my eyes and felt drowsy, and it was pleasant. I physically felt it in the area around the eyes and temples, and I was aware of it, and enjoyed it.