Why do we not remember ourselves in infancy? Why don't we remember ourselves as children? (5 photos).

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 out 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 are sexually tinged, and 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 determine the connection between them, therefore he 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 early 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 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 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 fragmentarily remain 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?

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.

Think about the earliest moment in your life that you can remember. Perhaps images of a birthday celebration will appear in front of your eyes or scenes of a family vacation will come to mind. Now think about how old you were when all this happened. In fact, adults can remember themselves from 3 to 7 years of age and, as a rule, these are rather fragmentary memories, although family photo albums, some phrases from childhood can bring more details from memory.

Psychologists attribute the inability of most adults to remember the events of their early childhood, including the moment of birth, to a mental phenomenon called childhood amnesia.

The term infantile amnesia, now better known as childhood amnesia, was first coined by Sigmund Freud in 1899. After he noticed that his adult patients are not able to remember the events of the first 3-5 years of their lives. Freud suggested that this is because in the first years of life the child experiences aggressive and often sexual urges towards his parents. However, if this is true, then childhood amnesia would have to affect only events associated with sexual and aggressive thoughts, when in fact childhood amnesia extends to all events of the first years of life.

Most likely, the main reason is a significant difference in the coding of the received information in young children and adults.

Psychologists have found that children at both 3 and 6 months old can form long-term memories, but unlike adults, young children remember their experiences without any connection to adjacent events. If we compare memory with a colander, then an adult memory is a colander with very small holes, no larger than a wheat seed, small amounts of information seep through such holes. Whereas children's memory is a colander with large holes in which whole pieces of memories disappear. The ability to form memories depends on a network of nerve cells in the brain, parts of which develop at different times. A full-fledged network is more or less created between 6 and 18 months of age, and with it - short-term and long-term memory.

But if the memory of a child by 18 months already practically reaches the level of an adult, then why can't we remember what happened to us at this age?
Most likely, the earliest memories may be blocked in consciousness, because we did not have the opportunity to connect them with words describing the event, because. did not yet have sufficient language skills.

In 2004, a study of a group of 27- and 39-month-old boys and girls found that if the children did not know the words to describe what happened to them, they could not do it later, after learning relevant concepts. In addition, we enrich our knowledge of our past when we place memories in context, i.e. we connect them in time and space with other events of our life. Many preschool children can consistently recount various experiences from their past, such as a trip to the circus, but it is not until the age of five that children develop a sense of time and are able to relate their trip to the circus to a specific point in time in the past.

Challenging researchers of childhood amnesia, some people claim to remember themselves from an age when they had no language skills, i.e. insist that they have pre-verbal memories and even that they remember themselves in the womb. One form of psychoanalysis focuses on traumatic early memories, linking the person's existing suffering to the pain of birth, and thereby bringing back to patients, in a so-called rebirth process, memories of the day they were born. However, no scientific studies have yet confirmed the possibilities of this form of psychoanalysis described above and the reliability of the data obtained during therapy.

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 - your birthday, first steps, first spoken words, first food, and even the first years in 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, 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. The latest research has shown 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 give his mind a completely blank slate to start with, he invented "nonsense syllables"—made-up words made from random letters like "kag" or "slans"—and set about memorizing 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 plays a 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 the most famous person in the history of neuroscience, known as the HM patient. After a failed operation to treat his epilepsy that damaged his hippocampus, HM couldn't remember 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 of a five-pointed star by looking at it in a mirror (not as easy as it sounds), 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 childhood experiences can affect our behavior long after we erase them from memory, psychologists believe they must be left 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 hard evidence. Back in the 1980s, she invited volunteers for research and planted the memories herself.

Loftus unfolded an elaborate lie about a sad trip to the mall, where they got lost and were later rescued by an affectionate older woman and reunited with their 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.

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 "marks in memory" are sparse and fragmented until older age.

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 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. 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 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 a walk in the mountains in the vicinity of 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 only surprised:" Why do you need this? ", - she says. "If society lets you know that these memories are important to you, you 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 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 an unsuccessful operation to treat 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, 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," 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, 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, which makes 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 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.