So what's the deal? After all, children absorb information like a sponge, forming 700 neural connections per second and learning a language at a speed that any polyglot would envy.

Many believe that the answer lies in the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who lived in the 19th century. For the first time, he conducted a series of experiments on himself that allowed him to know the limits of human memory.

To do this, he made up rows of meaningless syllables (“bov”, “gis”, “loch” and the like) and memorized them, and then checked how much information was stored in memory. As the Forgetting Curve, also developed by Ebbinghaus, confirms, we forget what we have learned very quickly. Without repetition, our brain forgets half of the new information within the first hour. By the 30th day, only 2–3% of the received data is retained.

Researching forgetting curves in the 1980s, scientists found David C. Rubin. Autobiographical memory. that we have far fewer memories from birth to 6 or 7 years of age than one might think. At the same time, some remember individual events that occurred when they were only 2 years old, while others have no memories of events before the age of 7–8 at all. On average, fragmentary memories appear only after three and a half years.

It is especially interesting that there are differences in how memories are stored in different countries.

Role of culture

Psychologist Qi Wang from Cornell University conducted a study Qi Wang. Culture effects on adults’ earliest childhood recollection and self-description ., in which she recorded childhood memories of Chinese and American students. As might be expected based on national stereotypes, the stories of Americans turned out to be longer and more detailed, and also much more self-centered. The stories of the Chinese students, on the other hand, were brief and reproduced facts. In addition, their memories began, on average, six months later.

Other studies confirm the difference Qi Wang. The Emergence of Cultural Self-Constructs.. People whose memories are more focused on their own personality have an easier time remembering.

“There is a big difference between such memories “There were tigers in the zoo” and “I saw tigers in the zoo, they were scary, but it was still very interesting,” psychologists say. The appearance of a child's interest in himself, the emergence of his own point of view helps to better remember what is happening, because this is what largely affects the perception of various events.

Then Ki Wang conducted another experiment, this time interviewing American and Chinese mothers. Qi Wang, Stacey N. Doan, Qingfang Song. Talking about Internal States in Mother-Child Reminiscing Influences Children’s Self-Representations: A Cross-Cultural Study .. The results are the same.

“In Eastern culture, childhood memories aren't given that much importance,” Wang says. - When I lived in China, no one even asked me about it. If society inspires that these memories are important, they are more deposited in the memory.

Interestingly, the earliest memories were recorded among the indigenous population of New Zealand - the Maori. S. MacDonald, K. Uesiliana, H. Hayne. Cross-cultural and gender differences in childhood amnesia.
. Their culture puts a lot of emphasis on childhood memories, and many Maori remember events that happened when they were only two and a half years old.

The role of the hippocampus

Some psychologists believe that the ability to remember comes to us only after we master the language. However, it has been proven that in children deaf from birth, the first memories belong to the same period as in the rest.

This led to the theory that we do not remember the first years of life simply because at this time our brain does not yet have the necessary “equipment”. As you know, the hippocampus is responsible for our ability to remember. At a very early age, he is still underdeveloped. This has been seen not only among humans, but also among rats and monkeys. Sheena A. Josselyn, Paul W. Frankland. Infantile amnesia: A neurogenic hypothesis..

However, some events from childhood affect us even when we do not remember them. Stella Li, Bridget L. Callaghan, Rick Richardson. Infantile amnesia: forgotten but not gone., so some psychologists believe that the memory of these events is still stored, but it is not available to us. So far, scientists have not yet been able to prove this experimentally.

imaginary events

Many of our childhood memories are often not real. We hear from relatives about some situation, we think of the details, and over time it begins to seem like our own memory.

And even if we really remember this or that event, this memory can change under the influence of the stories of others.

So perhaps the big question is not why we don't remember our early childhood, but whether we can even trust a single memory.

In a dream, we manage to overcome all conceivable and unthinkable obstacles, visit unknown countries and even fall in love, but, as a rule, with awakening, nightly adventures dissolve in consciousness. So how do our dreams arise, and why are they so completely erased from memory, and is it possible to keep a dream in memory with all the details? Experts have done a lot of research and are now one step closer to the truth.

Why do we fall asleep

Surely you have noticed more than once that the moment of “falling asleep”, when there is a disconnection from reality, cannot be tracked. So how do we fall asleep anyway? Scientists from Sweden came to the conclusion that we fall asleep at the moment when the brain centers that were at rest during the daytime come into play. And American experts have noticed that the lack of daylight plays an important role, which translates our biological clock to night time due to the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone. In any case, experts from different parts of the world have not come to a consensus. There is even an opinion that a person falls asleep due to the accumulation of certain metabolic products in the body during the day.

Everyone sleeps the same

All people sleep in exactly the same way, and in absolutely the same way they cannot do without sleep. We forget dreams because our brain is like a computer, which has an incompatibility with certain files - an encoding problem; let's say the same when we can't upload some non-standard video to YouTube.

According to recent research, all our dreams, even if we experience them as very long or several of them per night, last a very short time in reality - a few seconds before waking up (not necessarily in the morning, you can wake up in the middle of the night). That is, all our flights in a dream, incredible travels and great loves rush through the present time at an incredible speed. This circumstance prevents us from remembering our dreams in all details, and sometimes completely erases the picture from memory. Our brain is able to remember a maximum of three dreams a week, and even then it is completely fuzzy.

According to research, those dreams that we remember most vividly reflect our real dreams. What is sleep, scientists have not found a final solution, but by default, sleep can be called the encoding of everyday information and dreams into our subconscious.

Two phases of sleep

In a dream, our body, like a global machine, begins to work in a completely different mode. So, for example, the state of sleep is divided into two phases: slow and fast. Slow is from 75 to 80% of the total time of our rest, during this period, the processes that are usually active during wakefulness slow down, the heart beats less often, breathing becomes more rare, the activity of the digestive system decreases, and the body temperature decreases. Moreover, the muscles also relax to the maximum - this process, by the way, can be noticed even before falling asleep - you probably noticed how our limbs twitch from time to time. For the most part, athletes and dancers are subject to reflex movements - their muscles undergo a much greater load during the day than other, “ordinary” people.

As for the fast phase, everything happens the other way around here: the heart beat quickens, the pressure rises. Many scientists are sure that it is during the fast phase that our brain processes the information received over the past day. Dreams, it must be said, can be dreamed of by us both in the fast and in the slow phase, however, they are very different from each other. In fast we see vivid, emotionally colored dreams, sometimes indecipherable - in other words, a set of pictures. But in the slow phase, dreams become much more meaningful, realistic, as close as possible in content to the period of wakefulness, which is why, in slow sleep, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish dreams from reality. But if you wake up a person at the stage of REM sleep, he, no doubt, will remember his dream in great detail. And in the slow - no.

Where do our nightmares come from?

A nightmare is always bad, in other words, if you see bad dreams too often, you can be sure that your body is giving you alarm signals. As a rule, systematic nightmares indicate neurosis, increased emotionality and other mental disorders. “Random” nightmares are a sign of overwork, stress. Unpleasant dreams can occur in both fast and slow phases. The only thing is that being in the fast phase, you, as a rule, can be aware that you are sleeping, you have a nightmare. Moreover, you realize it so much that by an effort of will you can force yourself to wake up.

As for the slow phase, everything is much more complicated here. Since our dreams become more realistic in the slow period, perception changes, which means that it is not always possible to persuade ourselves to wake up.

But the conditionally good news is that you have already watched the lion's share of your nightmares. It turns out that children are more prone to nightmares than adults. Scientists have proven that from 3 to 8 years old, children have more nightmares than adults in their entire lives. And this is a reason to treat our children and their random night tears even a little more carefully.

Black and white dreams

It turns out that not all people can see colored dreams. However, there are very few lucky ones whose dreams are always monochrome. Studies from 1915 to the 1950s show that 12% of sighted people see only black and white dreams. The picture has changed since the 1960s. Today, 4.4% of people see black and white dreams.

Some interesting facts

We dream only of what we have seen. Sometimes, completely unfamiliar faces appear in our dreams. In fact, no matter how paradoxical it may sound, in a dream we see only what we know. Just imagine - hundreds of people pass by us every day, and every face they see is imprinted in our subconscious - in reality, we will quickly forget "unnecessary" information, but in a dream the brain may well helpfully slip it to us.

Dreams are seen by all healthy people. All people (except perhaps the sick, with serious mental changes) have dreams, however, according to research, men and women dream differently. Men mostly dream of representatives of their own sex, while women in dreams see representatives of both sexes in approximately the same proportion.

The blind also dream. If a person has lost his sight after birth, throughout his life he may dream of pictures “from a past life”, as for those who suffer from an illness from the cradle, then their dreams are filled with sounds, smells and tactile sensations.

Dreams prevent neurosis. Dreams are a reflection of our desires - both conscious and subconscious. It is dreams that help protect our nervous system. Relatively recently, a team of psychologists conducted an experiment: a group of volunteers were allowed to sleep for eight hours a day, however, they woke them up whenever the dream period began. After a short time, the volunteers began to hallucinate at the usual time of day, get nervous for no reason, and show aggression.

Mental disorders can be diagnosed with the help of dreams. A few years ago, the popular journal Neurology presented evidence that mental illnesses such as Parkinson's and schizophrenia make themselves felt in dreams long before their first real manifestation. The fact is that patients with these diseases, the cause of which lies in neurodegenerative disorders, constantly have nightmares, for which screams, blows, crying and groans reigning in a dream are especially characteristic.

Can you talk about what happened to you in early childhood? What is your very first memory and how old were you then? It is worth noting that most people only have difficulty remembering small fragments of their early childhood, for example, when they were about three, four or five years old. What is the reason for this and why do we not remember ourselves when we were still very young children? In this article we will try to find answers to this question.

Shelley Macdonald research

In one of her studies, Shelley MacDonald (psychologist from New Zealand) decided to find out why children do not remember themselves well in childhood and what exactly it depends on. To do this, she conducted an experiment in which New Zealanders of various origins (European and Asian), including representatives of the country's indigenous population, the Maori tribes, participated. As a result, it was possible to find out that representatives of Asian countries remember their childhood most poorly, because on average the first memories of their childhood in this group appear only after four and a half years.

A little better to remember what happened to them in the first years of life, may come from European countries. Most of them were able to recall some life episodes, starting at the age of three and a half. But the best memory in this regard was possessed by representatives of the Maori tribes. It turned out that, on average, they can talk about individual situations that happened to them when they were still two and a half years old.

Psychologist Shelley McDonald explained this by saying that the indigenous people of New Zealand have a very rich oral culture, a feature of which is to create an emphasis on events that took place in the past. Representatives of the Maori tribes pay a lot of attention to past events, which certainly affects the emotional situation in the family in which young children grow up.

Stress and communication with relatives

Similar studies were carried out in other parts of the world. For example, the Italian psychologist Federica Artioli conducted a series of studies in which Italians took part. She managed to find out that those participants in the experiment who lived in large families with grandparents, aunts and uncles can tell a lot more about what happened to them in early childhood than those who were raised only by their father and mother.

At the same time, the most vivid memories of that period are interesting stories and fairy tales that their parents and close relatives told them. In addition, stress can also influence the formation of memory. After all, children whose parents divorced when they were not yet six years old remember their early childhood much better.

What could be the reason?

Scientists and psychologists argue about the exact causes of poor memory in children today. Some believe that this is a consequence of the rapid perception of information that the child “absorbs like a sponge” in the first years. As a result, newer memories are "overwritten" in our memory on top of the old ones. Others explain this by an insufficient level of memory development in young children. An interesting theory was also proposed by Sigmund Freud, who described it in his work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. He coined the term "infantile amnesia". In his opinion, it is she who is the reason for the lack of clear memories of the first years of our lives.

Despite many decades of serious research, our brains still jealously keep a huge number of secrets. At the moment, we have received answers to only a small part of the questions, today it is even impossible to say with certainty why we do not remember how we were born. What can we say about more serious topics.

Why is memory needed?

human memory It is difficult to call something frivolous, this is a complex combination of biological processes created by nature:

• It is a collection of static pictures, combined into a dynamic representation of the past.
• Memory is individual and unique for everyone, even if people have witnessed the same events.
• Current theory suggests that information in the brain is stored in the form of constantly circulating nerve impulses.
• It is the connections between nerve cells that allow us to remember past events.
• The psyche leaves an imprint on all memories, some of them are completely replaced, the rest are distorted.
• Of particular interest in this respect is the memory of children. They can come up with events that never actually existed and believe in them sacredly. Such is self-deception.

Losing memory, a person parted with a piece of his personality. Despite the fact that all acquired skills and qualities remain, too important information about the past is gone. Sometimes irrevocably.

Why don't we remember the first years?

In one of the scenes in the movie Lucy The main character remembers not only her childhood, but also the very moment of birth. Of course, she is under the influence of drugs and has powers at the level of Superman. But how realistic is it for the average person to remember something like that, and why most people don't have any memories of the first three years of life?

For a long time, this was explained on the basis of two theories.

And both proposed hypotheses are not ideal:

1. Each person has a dozen not the most pleasant memories.
2. Some really terrible moments of life are imprinted in the memory for many years.
3. There are millions of deaf and dumb people in the world, but they do not experience any special memory problems.
4. With the right approach, already at the age of three, the baby is able to read books, to say nothing of speech and memorization.

Destruction of interneuronal connections

Recent studies in rats have shown interesting result:

• It turned out that during the intensive growth of the nervous tissue, old neural connections are broken.
• This also happens with neurons located in the so-called "memory center".
• And since we have come to the conclusion that memory is electrical impulses between cells, it is easy to come to a logical conclusion.
• At a certain age, the nervous tissue grows too intensively, old connections are destroyed, new ones are formed. The memory of previous events is simply erased.

Of course, conducting any such experiments on children is doomed to failure, ethics and the moral side of the issue will not give way to such research. Perhaps scientists will find another way to confirm or disprove this theory in the near future. In the meantime, we can enjoy any of the three conventional explanations.

All this does not mean that a person cannot remember something from early childhood. Some people have fragmented memories of this period - vivid images, fragments of moments and life situations. So that Make time for your child at any age, it is in these years that the majority of mental characteristics.

Why are babies born blue?

When mommy is first shown a baby in the delivery room, the joy of having a baby can change experiences for his life:

1. In mass culture, the image of a newborn has formed - a rosy-cheeked, screaming baby.
2. But in real life, everything is a little different, the child will appear either cyanotic or crimson.
3. Thus, he will become a rosy-cheeked baby over the next couple of days, you should not worry.

"abnormal" color may be physiological and pathological:

• From the point of view of physiology, it is explained by the transition from placental to pulmonary circulation.
• As soon as the child takes the first breath and begins to breathe on his own, the color of his skin gradually turns to pink.
• The presence of lubrication on the skin of the baby plays its role.
• Do not forget about the presence of fetal hemoglobin and a different blood picture from an adult.

FROM pathology everything is easier. There are two options - either hypoxia or trauma.

But here it is up to obstetricians to decide, so trust the opinion of experts. Do not wind yourself up from scratch, these people took hundreds of births and saw plenty of newborns. If they believe that everything is in order, or vice versa, something is wrong - most likely it is.

What affects "children's forgetfulness"?

Today, we can explain the lack of memories of birth and the first three years of life with the following theories:

• Substitution and exclusion from memory shocking information . Let's hope that in the coming decades, people will not have access to such a source of stress. Curious of course to know what we all were. But at the same time, negative emotions will not go anywhere.
• The beginning of the formation of associative links with words. For a period of 2-3 years, the active development of speech falls, and only after that is it possible to fix massive blocks of information in memory.
• The destruction of connections between neurons, due to their intensive growth. Experimentally proven in laboratory mice and rats. At the moment it looks like the most promising explanation.

But the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, it may turn out that all three hypotheses are true, but only partially. The formation of memory is too complex a process to be influenced by just one single factor.

It doesn't really matter why we don't remember how we were born, whether it's because of intense cell growth or blocking out shocking information. The main thing is that it is in 1-3 years that the character and future child's inclinations, and not in what not 7-10 years, as is commonly believed. So the attention to the baby should be given appropriate.

Video: remember how I was born

Below is a video with interesting explanations from psychologist Ivan Kadurin, who explains why a person does not remember how he was born and remembers his childhood very vaguely:

Memory is the ability to store information and the most 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 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 fragmentary pictures. For most, 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 a small child "absorbs everything like a sponge." Why do we not remember such an important period of our lives? 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.

Until this period, he simply cannot correlate phenomena and emotions with certain words, does not determine the connection between them, and therefore cannot fix it in 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 weaknesses. 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 also cannot associate memories with a specific time and place. Young children 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 an 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 of the 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 above theories 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 a baby at birth experiences physical pain no less than his mother, and the emotional experience of 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.

A small person is undoubtedly subjected to a huge amount of 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 brightest fragments of memories can still remain fragmentarily in the memory of a small person, and it is in the power of the 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?