eli5: Why do most people have no memories from before age 4 or 5 years old?
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In neuroscience, there appears to be in inverse relationship between speed of learning and depth of retention. If a neural network is more flexible it can learn faster, but isn’t stable enough to reliably retain memories. This has been shown both in animal experiments, and in computer models of complex neural networks.
So there’s this tradeoff that your brain has to make. When you’re young, it trades memory-retention for fast learning because memories are less important at that stage than getting up to speed. As you age, memories become increasingly important. You learn slower relatively to a bb, but you retain more explicit memories.
When you’re extremely young your brain is making that tradeoff to its maximum extent.
Also, your memories are stored distributed over your entire brain, accessing them requires activating these subset-networks of neurons, each of which correspond to a memory. Babies don’t have any coherent networks to access, which further prevents memory formation. They don’t have the necessary apparatus to store the memories.
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