Adults are unable to remember episodes that happened in their earliest lives. In this sense, the first memories are, more or less, from the age of four. However, we were alive for a long time despite remembering nothing of this early stage.
This phenomenon is known as child amnesia, which is nothing more than the inability to remember very early experiences despite having this knowledge.
For example, very few people can remember their first steps or first words despite knowing how to walk and knowing how to speak.
These memory gaps usually affect memories that took place before three years and four months on average.
This phenomenon doesn’t mean that a young child, who is much closer to this experience, won’t remember it, but rather that by the time they become adults, they will have forgotten it.
Learning and Forgetting
In this line goes a study of brain imaging from Yale University and published in the journal Current Biology.
Thus, the lack of maturity in the children’s hippocampus, an area of the brain to encodes memory, would be behind this phenomenon.
To carry out this analysis, a new functional magnetic resonance imaging technology was used to capture the hippocampal activity of 17 infants between three months and two years of age.
They were presented with a group of messy, meaningless images from which no learning could be extracted and another with hidden patterns from which one could learn.
The results have shown that the children’s hippocampus reacted better to the sequence of orderly and meaningful images.
Therefore, even though very early memories are going to be lost over time, babies can learn from them.
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