We are sure that you have thought about this more than once. We remember our childhood and youth, but we are not able to remember the moment when we came into the world - our birth. Why? We will explain in our article.
1. Neurogenesis in the first years of life
With the development of civilization and medical care, the moment of our birth no longer dangerous. We come into this world with the help of other people's hands that take us out of the mother's womb - so cozy, calm and safe. We will never again be able to find places where we would be so welcome and so sure of our safety.
But we are forced to go outside - into a world filled with light, shadows and sounds, not knowing exactly why we do this. Most likely, we are experiencing.
This is the first time we burst into the world in tears with our first cry (after that there will be many more such times that we will not be able to forget).
But what, besides pain, do we experience? Fear, joy, curiosity? We don't know, no one can answer these questions, because no one, or almost no one, can remember this moment.
It all happens this way through a process called neuronal neurogenesis. It sounds incomprehensible, but this is actually a fascinating process of forming new nerve cells.
Until the moment of birth, our brain continues to grow neurons. Some of them overlap. You may ask - why then do we not remember anything? Aren't memory and cognition related to neurons? Doesn't more neurons improve our memory?
For babies who have just entered the world, everything happens differently. At least not in the first months of their lives. Memories don't last because neutron neurogenesis becomes too intense, structures overlap and memories don't last very long because new neurons are constantly being created.
The memory is unstable during this time due to their continued growth. It takes at least five or six months for the process to stabilize. After that, new neurons continue to appear, but this process is not so intense.
But it can already stabilize and memories can persist for some time. After a child is six or seven years old, the process changes and some neurons begin to disappear.
Consequently, the most intense evolutionary period for a child lasts between the age of one and five years. At this time, the child absorbs everything like a sponge and strives for knowledge, so it is very easy for him to learn several languages at once. However, almost all children will never be able to remember the first days of their lives.
2. Significance of speech and memory
According to doctors and psychologists, we can only remember what we can explain in words. To test if this is true, try thinking about your first memory. Perhaps this is some kind of feeling, or a picture from the past: you are in your mother's arms, you are walking in the park.
Precisely at this time you have already begun to speak. There are many experiments that have proven that it is much easier for us to remember what we can put into words. The brain is better at structuring and storing in the hippocampus what it can associate with words. It is important to remember that language and the ability to speak are closely related to memory.
It is very difficult to remember the moments before and after our birth, when we still do not know how to speak. Nevertheless, there are cases when people could keep small memories of their birth, some sensations. Do you consider yourself one of these people? Tell us about your experience.
We remember our childhood very selectively. We have forgotten a lot. Why? Scientists seem to have found an explanation for this phenomenon.
According to Freud
Sigmund Freud drew attention to children's forgetfulness. In his 1905 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he reflected in particular on amnesia, which covers the first five years of a child's life. Freud was sure that childhood (infantile) amnesia is not a consequence of functional memory disorders, but stems from the desire to prevent early experiences from entering the child's mind - traumas that harm one's own "I". The father of psychoanalysis considered such traumas to be experiences associated with the knowledge of one's own body or based on sensory impressions from what one heard or saw. Fragments of memories that can still be observed in the child's mind, Freud called masking.
"Activation"
The results of a study by Emory University scientists Patricia Bayer and Marina Larkina, published in the journal Memory, support the theory of the birth time of childhood amnesia. According to scientists, its "activation" occurs in all, without exception, the inhabitants of the planet at the age of seven. The scientists conducted a series of experiments in which three-year-old children were asked to tell their parents about the most vivid impressions. Years later, the researchers returned to the tests: they invited the same children again and asked them to recall what they had been told. Five-seven-year-old participants in the experiment were able to recall 60% of what was happening to them at the age of three years, while eight-ten-year-olds - no more than 40%. Thus, scientists were able to put forward a hypothesis that childhood amnesia occurs at the age of 7 years.
Habitat
Canadian psychology professor Carol Peterson believes that, among other factors, the formation of childhood memories is influenced by the environment. He was able to confirm his hypothesis as a result of a large-scale experiment, in which Canadian and Chinese children became participants. They were asked to recall the most vivid memories of the first years of life in four minutes. Twice as many events came to life in the memory of Canadian children as in the memory of Chinese children. It is also interesting that Canadians predominantly recalled personal stories, while the Chinese shared memories in which their family or peer group was an accomplice.
Guilty without guilt?
The Ohio State Research University Medical Center believes that children cannot reconcile their memories with a specific place and time, so it becomes impossible to restore episodes from their own childhood at a later age. Discovering the world for himself, the child does not make it difficult to link what is happening to temporal or spatial criteria. According to one of the co-authors of the study, Simon Dennis, children do not feel the need to remember events along with "overlapping circumstances." A child may remember a merry clown at the circus, but is unlikely to say that the show started at 5:30 pm.
For a long time it was also believed that the reason for forgetting the memories of the first three years of life lies in the inability to associate them with specific words. The child cannot describe what happened due to the lack of speech skills, so his mind blocks "unnecessary" information. In 2002, a study on the relationship between language and childhood memory was published in the journal Psychological Science. Its authors Gabriel Simcock and Harleen Hein conducted a series of experiments in which they tried to prove that children who have not yet learned to speak are not able to "code" what is happening to them into memories.
Memory erasing cells
Canadian scientist Paul Frankland, who is actively studying the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, disagrees with his colleagues. He believes that the formation of childhood memories occurs in the zone of short-term memory. He insists that young children can remember their childhood, colorfully talk about ongoing events, in which they were recently involved. However, these memories fade over time. A group of scientists led by Frankland suggested that the loss of childhood memories may be associated with an active process of formation of new cells, which is called neurogenesis. According to Paul Frankland, it was previously thought that the formation of neurons leads to the formation of new memories, but recent studies have shown that neurogenesis is able to simultaneously erase information about the past. Why, then, do people not remember most often the first three years of life? The reason is that the most active period of neurogenesis falls on this time. The neurons then start reproducing at a slower rate and leave some of the childhood memories intact.
Experienced
To test their assumptions, Canadian scientists conducted an experiment on rodents. Mice were placed in a cage with a flooring, on which weak electrical discharges were fired. A repeated visit to the cage led adult mice to panic even after a month. But young rodents willingly visited the cage the very next day. Scientists have also been able to understand how neurogenesis affects memory. To do this, they artificially caused the acceleration of neurogenesis in the experimental subjects - the mice quickly forgot about the pain that arose when visiting the cage. According to Paul Frankland, neurogenesis is more of a blessing than a bad thing, because it helps protect the brain from an overabundance of information.
the first three or four years of life. Plus, we generally remember quite a bit about ourselves before the age of seven. “No, well, I still remember something,” you say, and you will be absolutely right. Another thing is that, upon reflection, it can be difficult to understand whether we are talking about real memories or second-order memories based on photographs and stories of parents.
The phenomenon known as "childhood amnesia" has been a mystery to psychologists for over a century. Despite the vast amount of information that can be used and technological developments, scientists still cannot say for sure why this happens. Although there are a number of popular theories that seem to them the most plausible.
The first reason is the development of the hippocampus
It might seem that the reason we don't remember ourselves in infancy is because babies and toddlers don't have full . But in fact, The Conversation adds, babies as young as 6 months old can form both short-term memories that last for a few minutes, and long-term memories related to the events of recent weeks and even months.
In one study, 6-month-olds who learned how to push a lever to operate a toy train remembered how to perform the action for 2-3 weeks after they last saw the toy. And preschoolers, according to another study, are able to remember what happened several years ago. But here, experts explain, again the question remains open: are these autobiographical memories or memories obtained with the help of someone or something.
The truth is that memory capabilities in childhood are really not the same as in adulthood (in fact, memory continues to develop into adolescence). And this is one of the most popular explanations for "childhood amnesia." It is important to understand that memory is not only the formation, but also the maintenance and subsequent retrieval of memories. At the same time, the hippocampus - the region of the brain responsible for all of this - continues to develop until at least the age of seven.
It is also interesting that the typical border of "childhood amnesia" at 3-4 years, apparently, shifts with age. There is evidence that children and adolescents generally have earlier memories than adults. And this, in turn, suggests that the issue may be less about the formation of memories, but more about their preservation.
The second reason is language proficiency
The second important factor that plays a role in childhood memories is language. Between the ages of one and six, children basically go through the complex process of forming speech to become fluent (or even languages, if we're talking about bilinguals). Scientists believe that the assumption that the ability to speak affects the ability to remember (here we include the presence of the words “remember”, “remember” in the lexicon) is to some extent true. In other words, the level of language proficiency in a particular period partially affects how well a child will remember this or another event.
This is evidenced, for example, by a study conducted with the participation of babies brought to the emergency room. As a result, children over 26 months of age who could recount the event at the time remembered it five years later, while children under 26 months of age who could not speak remembered little or nothing at all. That is, preverbal memories are indeed more likely to be lost if they are not translated into language.
Reason three - cultural characteristics
As opposed to the mere sharing of information, memories revolve around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family histories maintain the availability of memory over time, as well as increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and.
Maori, the natives of New Zealand, have the earliest childhood memories - they remember themselves as early as the age of 2.5 years. Researchers believe that this is due to the logic of Maori mothers' storytelling and the tradition of telling family stories from an early age. Data analysis on the topic also shows that adults in cultures that value autonomy (North America, Western Europe) tend to report earlier childhood memories than adults in cultures that value wholeness and connectedness (Asia, Africa).
Babies soak up information like a sponge—why, then, does it take us so long to form our first memory of ourselves? The BBC Future columnist decided to find out the reason for this phenomenon.
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, 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 “marks in memory” are sparse and patchy until older.
What is it connected 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, who coined the term "infantile amnesia" more than a hundred years ago, 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 puzzling, because otherwise, babies soak up new information like a sponge, forming 700 new neural connections every second 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.
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08/13/2016 But even in adults, information is lost over time if no attempts are made to save it. So one explanation is that infantile amnesia is just a consequence of the natural process of forgetting events that took place during our lives.The answer to this question can be found in the work of the 19th-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who conducted a series of groundbreaking 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 the ability of a person to remember what he has learned: in the absence of special efforts, the 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 conclusions of 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.
Interestingly, the veil over memories is lifted for everyone at 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.
Even more interesting, the degree of forgetfulness varies by country: the average age at which a person begins to remember himself can differ in different countries by 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, focused on oneself, seem to be 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 walking in the mountains near his home in the Chinese city of 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.
“In Eastern cultures, childhood memories are of no interest to anyone. People are just wondering, ‘Why are you doing this?’,” she says.
If society lets you know that these memories are important to you, you will keep them,” says Wang.
First of all, memories begin to form among the young representatives of the New Zealand Maori people, who are characterized by great attention to the past. Many people remember what happened to them at the age of only two and a half years.
The way we talk about our memories can also be influenced by cultural differences, with some psychologists suggesting that events begin to be stored in a person's memory only after he has mastered speech.
“Language helps structure, organize memories in the form of a narrative. If you put 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 H.M.'s hippocampus was damaged in an unsuccessful operation to treat epilepsy, he lost the ability to remember new events.
“This is the focus of our ability to learn and remember. If it weren't for the hippocampus, I wouldn't 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 absorb 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, baby monkeys, rats, and children continue to add neurons 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,” Feigen 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, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine (USA), has devoted her scientific research to this very 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 body.
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” with them 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 a set 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 later reformulated and reformatted to take into account conversations about the event, and not your 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 a 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 biggest mystery is not why we do not remember our earlier childhood, but whether our memories can be trusted at all.
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 empirically.
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.
