We took our now 3,5 years old son for a trip to USA last fall … so he was 2,5 years old that time. We live in Europe. Next week i am traveling there again so i spoke with him about me traveling to USA and he started asking me questions about places we were last year. Also he was telling me many specific memories from that trip last year and was asking me about specific people we have met. That is not surprising, it was last year. But how is it possible, that he will not remember anything from it 15 years from now if he remember it year after? I mean, he will not remember he was in USA at all.
I would understand that kids and toddlers keep forgetting stuff and thats why they will never remember them as an adults. But if they remember things from year or more ago, why will they forgett them as an adults?
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Memory is a very complex thing, it’s not like a computer’s hard drive. Memory is connections between ideas. In the years children are in school we stuff their minds full of all sorts of ideas. This onrush of ideas causes reorganization of the ideas from before school, and some content is lost in that reorganization. Memory is not highly accurate, so content is lost all the time, but until that baseline of “stuff everybody knows” is loaded memories are particularly susceptible to loss during reorganization.
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