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.
I’ve often wondered this, as most of my friends don’t remember things before 5-6 years of age. My older sister and I both remember a lot of things from our youth, in vivid detail, and never really undersood why others didn’t.
For example, I remember crawling to my grandfather in the house my grandparents lived in. I remember the chair he sat in and him picking me up. I was 15 months old when he passed away. I’ve described the setting to my mother who couldn’t believe it. I also remember where my bedroom was, where the closet was and where my crib was and the mobile that hung above the crib, which again has been verified by my parents. We moved out when I was less than 2 years old.
I’ve only come across a few others that remember things before the age of 3, so I’d love some insight about why some people remember things so vividly while others don’t.
There’s something here with trauma (at least anecdotally) at an early age that grants access to earlier memories. My very first memory of being alive is allegedly from when I was 2. At 5-5.5 years old I started getting pretty badly abused by my birth mother and step father. I spoke about a memory I have of my grandpa. He and my Grandma said it’s impossible I was only 2 when that happened. But none the less I have the memories.
There have been studies that show memories are held in our flesh, can and do get passed on to off spring. I think it was a study on epigenetics. In the study mice feet were shocked after a spray of citronella. Their kids after being born we’re exposed to the same stimuli and started freaking out from just the smell no shock. They say that’s why everyone is scared of the dark at some point in life, because huge animals used to eat us at night. ¯|_(ツ)_/¯
So I think we have the access to the memories but on a sub conscious level. Think about it as an operating system (early childhood memories) vs an app (adult memories). While we do see the OS it mainly does stuff behind the scenes while your browser is what you’re actively interacting with?
Early memories might not be able to be recalled clearly but chunks and segments of experiences are. The mind often fills in any missing pieces. Memory is a muscle that grows and gets stronger then diminishes and gets weaker near the end.
Early memories might not be able to be recalled clearly but chunks and segments of experiences are. The mind often fills in any missing pieces. Memory is a muscle that grows and gets stronger then diminishes and gets weaker near the end.
Early memories might not be able to be recalled clearly but chunks and segments of experiences are. The mind often fills in any missing pieces. Memory is a muscle that grows and gets stronger then diminishes and gets weaker near the end.
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