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.
If you have a book that has just one page of text, you will likely remember quite well what happened in what part of that page. As you age, you gain massive amount of new experiences of all kinds. Suddenly you are sitting with a trilogy, with each book having thousand pages, and you are trying to remember what exactly happened on page 41 of the first one.
What I read suggests that some research supports the idea that the development of language plays an important part in memory.
I have one memory from when I was between 1-3 years old. I’m playing with a wheel loader toy on a tile table. That’s it.
It’s a very complex subject for an ELI5
As someone who studied neuroscience the reality is that we do not have all the answers to how the brain works, or even most of them.
Worth remembering there is a difference between memory and recall. Your son will have been impacted by the trip and he will remember this in actions and responses even if he thinks he can’t remember. As an example, i was chased by a dog when I was of similar age. I remember it happened but can’t recall any specifics of the event. It did, however, cause me to have a phobia of dogs well into my teenage years.
You could start a fun experiment by asking him to recall as much as he can about the trip, write it down, and repeat your test every 6 months. As an additional arm to the test, ask him details about something else he remembers from a similar time then don’t ask him about it again for a couple of years. Compare accuracy of follow-up responses.
I have memories from when I was 3, possibly younger, on my grandfathers farm. And they are clear, vivid memories that i can’t even explain why I remember them. I also remember one of my aunts being around a lot when I was that age. My mom swears I shouldn’t remember her since she died when I was 4. However, I couldn’t tell you what I ate for breakfast yesterday without thinking about it for a second.
Some peoples memories are just different.
I read that people with an eidetic memory who have trauma experience cannot forget that experience and would take them a long time to overcome that. Forgetting things is another form of coping mechanism.
The hypocampus is not fully developed until about 5 years old.
It’s basically like having a computer with RAM but no actual Hard Drive. Young Kids can remember things for a few months, but there’s no long term storage.
What there is, is a scema for wiring up that hard drive once it arrives, and that will dictate how it operates, and is why your personality mostly coalesces around the age of 6
2.5 isn’t young enough to guarantee that he’s going to forget. I have a memory of visiting my father at the college he was studying at before my brother was born (making me younger than 2) that got rooted by a tupperware container that was a staple through my childhood.
The tupperware had been a point of fascination on that trip and there had been an exciting moment of seeing wild parrots outside an atrium window. Between that excitement and the super recognizable tupperware (it was one of those old 70s style ones in bright orange) that I saw over and over again afterward, the memory stuck. I have several others from shortly after as well, all sub 3-years-old, and then I have significant memories from 4 onward.
If you root the memories in a repeating sensory moment (be that a visual like mine or just talking about the stories repeatedly), they’ll be much more likely to stick around. Our brains make a habit of clearing out unimportant memories, so you just have to find a way to make the memories more important.
If you drop a red marble into an empty swimming pool with no water in it, you can go down into the pool and find that marble. That’s how it is when you’re very young – a large brain that doesn’t have many memories yet.
Each moment and experience in a young mind creates a new memory – a new marble – unique and related to other memories and impressions. Those are more marbles to add to the pool, of different shades and tones and colours and textures and sizes, distributed along the bottom of the pool; some touching others, some resting by themselves off to the side, soon to be connected by the many more marbles constantly coming in to fill up the pool.
After many years, the pool is starting to fill with a great many marbles, but it becomes more difficult to find that first red marble that’s now deep in the pile. But not impossible. Memories are linked to other memories, like how a marble is touching those around it. Just because you can’t find that original red marble doesn’t mean it’s lost, it just means you’re following a path of other marbles/memories that don’t lead to it.
There are different ways to help remember something, and they usually involve trying to remember things related to it – associations. Remembering something related to it can help you get in the right path to the original memory.
Memories aren’t just pictures in your head either. They can be sounds, smells, textures.
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