Why don't we remember how we were born? There is a question: why do we not remember ourselves in early childhood.

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Babies soak up information like a sponge - why then does it take us so long to form a first memory of ourselves? The observer 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 memory nicks are sparse and patchy until we get 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.

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.

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.

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 drew from his experience indicates that there is an astonishingly rapid decline in a person’s ability to recall what he has learned: in the absence of special efforts human brain weeds out half of all new knowledge within an hour.

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

One of the most important 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.

It is interesting that the veil over memories is lifted for everyone in different ages. Some people remember what happened to them at the age of two, and some do not have any memories of themselves until the age of 7-8 years.

On average, fragments of memories begin to appear in a person from about three and a half years.

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

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

In full accordance with national stereotypes, the stories of the Americans were longer, more detailed and with a clear emphasis on themselves.

The Chinese were more concise and factual; in general, their childhood memories began six months later.

This pattern is confirmed by many other studies. More detailed stories, focused on oneself, seem to be remembered more easily.

If your memories are vague, your parents are to blame

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 during unsuccessful operation with the aim of curing epilepsy in H.M. the hippocampus was damaged, it lost the ability to remember new events

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), dedicated her scientific research exactly this topic.

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

imaginary events

Loftes herself knows firsthand how it happens. When she was 16, her mother drowned in a swimming pool.

Many years later, a relative convinced her that it was she who discovered the surfaced body.

Loftes was flooded with "memories", but a week later the same relative called her back and explained that she was mistaken - someone else found the corpse.

Of course, no one likes to hear that his memories are not real. Loftes knew she needed hard evidence to convince her doubters.

Back in the 1980s, she recruited volunteers for research and began to plant "memories" herself.

The biggest mystery is not why we do not remember our earlier childhood, but whether our memories can be trusted at all.

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

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

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

In fact, sometimes we are more confident in the accuracy of our imagined memories than in the events that actually took place.

And even if your memories are based on real events, it is quite possible that they were subsequently reformulated and reformatted taking into account conversations about the event, and not their own memories of it.

Remember when you thought how fun it would be to turn your sister into a zebra with a permanent marker? Or did you just see it on 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.

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

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

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

According to scientists, most of People start counting childhood memories from about 3.5 years. Up to this point, only a few can remember separate, very vivid life situations or 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 weak sides. There are many children who speak perfectly after the first year. This does not provide them with lasting memories of this period of life. In addition, a competent interpretation of the Gospel indicates that in the first line, the “word” does not mean speech at all, but a certain thought form, an energy message, something intangible.

Inability to form early memories

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

"Insufficient" memory

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

Underdevelopment of the hippocampus

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

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

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

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

Loss or gift of nature?

Each of the 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.

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

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

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

Many people say that they would like to return to childhood - warm, cozy, carefree, with young (and alive) mothers and fathers, grandparents ... For all their tenderness for memories, these very memories are very few, fragmentary. Why does a person not remember childhood (meaning early)? After all, this time is so dear to us! ..

Memory small child resembles the ocean. Gentle waves lull and optimistic for the rest of our lives, but the trace of each storm - although the storm eventually ends and the mirror of water is smoothed out - remains in us forever ... Maybe this is the answer to the question why people forget what happened to them in childhood?

Every person around the age of 7 loses all of their earliest memories. Why can almost every one of us say about himself: “I don’t remember anything from my childhood”? Unknown. Neurologists and psychiatrists cannot yet explain this phenomenon, called "childhood amnesia" and can only make assumptions.

We forget, but our brains don't

Everyone agrees that it is in the first years of life that the character, the ability to learn and the perception of the world of a person are formed. Some even compare the human brain during this period with a mirror that reflects (but also remembers due to the development of certain neural networks) emotions that “fall” to us at this time.

A child loved and accepted by the family will be self-confident, creative and friendly towards the world of adults. And the unloved one? Offended? Overlooked, practically abandoned to the mercy of fate? Instead of focusing on understanding the world and self-development in the future, he will focus on repelling threats and preparing for defense. Such a child will later try to compensate for the feeling of anxiety and uncertainty by adopting a model of risky sexual behavior, bad habits, fits of anger, overeating.

Moreover, many people who, as children, experienced strong grievances, look for sources of a sense of self-worth, dignity, not in themselves, but “outside” - in acceptance by others. Therefore, they are doomed to the eternal pursuit of praise and words of recognition, they live, forced to constantly do something, prove, receive regular awards. At the same time, they remain ruthless in assessing themselves, do not spare punishments and humiliations for themselves.

Why can't I remember my childhood?

Before fourth year life, our personality is formed, and hence the way of functioning in society, - psychologists explain. Many of the skills acquired at this time are so deeply rooted in us that they are no longer subject to the further process of education. The same applies, unfortunately, to the traumas experienced during this period. They also constantly shape our adult behaviors, preferences, and fears.

But why then does it happen that a person remembers almost nothing from early childhood (at the level of consciousness)? It is strange that we lose such an important (if not the most important) stage of our life.

Childhood amnesia extends for a period up to about 3 years. According to scientists, this may be due to the development of the brain, and specifically the hippocampus, which is the "home" for human memory. Old memories must give way to new ones. And so we forget. We cannot go back to the moment when father took us in his arms for the first time, or when we consciously saw mother's smile for the first time... Memories perish, although we were shaped earlier. Not all, however, disappear without a trace...

Neurologists know the concept of the stress axis. It turns out that traumatic, intense emotional experiences from childhood cause permanent changes in the brain. The axis runs from the hypothalamus through the pituitary gland to the adrenal glands responsible for releasing stress hormones and is responsible for our response to stress. If she is disturbed by strong negative emotions in the first months and years of childhood, then all our life we ​​will react to such stimuli painfully sharply.

“My brother is happy to talk about how we built huts in the country, recalls our disputes, and quarrels, and how, secretly from our parents, we fed a stray dog ​​... I don’t have any memories,” 34-year-old Elizabeth is surprised .

Psychophysiologist Yuri Grinchenko recalls that the brain records everything that happens to us: "This information continues to be stored and does not disappear anywhere." What are the reasons for such amnesia?

hurting experiences

“The inability to remember, as a rule, is not associated with memory loss, but with an unconscious desire to forget the past,” explains child psychoanalytic psychologist Natalia Zueva. - Forgetfulness protects against moments of shame or humiliation experienced in childhood, feelings of grief or acute loneliness. It also protects from pleasant sensations that are prohibited.

In this way, for example, the sexual arousal experienced while playing with a brother or sister can be “forgotten” - and with it the game itself, and the whole day, and sometimes a more significant period of time, goes into darkness. If such a memory comes up, it will lead to hurtful experiences in the present.

Conscious refusal

Refusal to remember can be quite conscious if a person, for one reason or another, wants to cross out some period from life.

“Until the seventh grade, I was a real outsider,” recalls 30-year-old Yulia. - Then we moved, and in new school where no one knew me, I firmly decided that I would not allow anyone else to mistreat me. I erased the previous seven years of my life from memory and started all over again.

Reclaiming our memories, we restore our integrity

As psychoanalyst Virginie Meggle explains, “Those who avoid their memories are not ready to recognize in themselves the child they once were and who still lives in them. They are afraid that, having allowed the past to come to life, they will find there instead of themselves a different, unpleasant creature. It's really just a scared child who needs love."

The power of family rules

Another reason for "forgetfulness" is the rules of conduct adopted in the family.

“When there are secrets and secrets in the house, the child learns, by watching the elders, not to ask questions about the past, which means not to have a memory,” says Natalia Zueva. “He involuntarily obeys these rules of communication and applies them (intentionally or out of habit) to his own past.” For example, information about relatives who have ended up in prison, about previous marriages of parents, illegitimate children or illnesses can fall into the zone of silence ...

However, “each of us is the story of our life,” emphasizes Natalia Zueva. “And if we delete something from it, then we live only a part of ourselves and cannot perceive the world in its entirety.” By regaining our memories, we restore our integrity.

What to do?

Be more attentive to your emotions

“An event or experience in the past can cause such severe pain that you involuntarily try not to remember it,” says Natalia Zueva. - Try to find the boundaries of the forgotten. Ask yourself: what causes strong feelings? These emotions may be related to the current situation, or maybe they have already met in the past. When, why? The goal is to gradually trace the origin negative emotions until childhood."

Return to places of childhood

“Relive memories with the help of associations,” Yuri Grinchenko suggests. “They can be caused by objects preserved from childhood, toys or books ... If you succeed, visit the places where you grew up.” Watch the kids. At the sight of a little girl crying on a snowy hill while others ride down it, does your heart clench? The meaning of this experience will be revealed to you if you look into your own childhood.

Share feelings and listen to others

Listening to others' stories about their childhood and being sensitive to your own feelings that arise during these stories, advises Virginie Meggle. Often it is enough to start an exchange of cases from life, and something is remembered. She recommends moderate reliance on family sources: "This is not an objective account of events, they can be interpreted and explained at their discretion."

But even such a subjective presentation helps us fill in the gaps in our history, Natalia Zueva believes. Especially if we manage to ask ourselves questions or compare different versions. Gradually expanding the past, we begin to accept ourselves more.

Personal experience

Elena, 29 years old, referent-translator

“I never liked to remember my childhood. In memory, it looked somehow gloomy: the evil educators in kindergarten, a school child, a tired mother - besides, she was often sick, and she had almost no strength left for me. But one day I thought: this can not be! If my past was so hopelessly black, I simply would not be able to grow up. a normal person… And I forced myself to remember.

At first it was very difficult and unpleasant. But other pictures gradually arose: how I was in the theater for the first time, how my mother and I went to the sea ... I still didn’t find out why these images didn’t come to me for so long, but I can say with confidence: it became much easier for me to live since I managed to restore something from my childhood in my memory.

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. Overall, 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, your first steps, your first words spoken, your first meal, and even your first years in kindergarten - most of us don't 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 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 up of 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 is playing big role. They say there is no difference between the age at which deaf children growing up without sign language report their very first memories, for example.

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

Remarkably, however, he was still able to learn other kinds of information—just like babies. When scientists asked him to copy a drawing 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 events experienced in childhood can influence our behavior later for a long time after we erase them from memory, psychologists believe that they must remain somewhere. “Perhaps the memories are stored in a place that is no longer accessible to us, but it is very difficult to demonstrate this empirically,” Fagen says.

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

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

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

Of course, who likes to know that his memories are not real? To convince skeptics, Loftus needs 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.