ELi5 Why we don’t remember our first four years since birth?
In: 3
This is not exactly true. Many people can remember before their fourth birthday. I can, very well, actually – we moved to a new house a week before I turned four. All of my memories of the old house were from before. I can’t tell you the order of events, and I only remember certain things (mom setting up for a Tupperware party, watching spiders crawl on the stone wall along the driveway, a squirrel getting in the house, water on the floor after a bad storm, etc).
Regardless, there are limits. The structures in the brain that are responsible for forming long term memories mostly form after we’re born. It’s not until after age 1 that we can really start to form real long term memories, and it’s still an immature feature that takes a few years to fully develop. We generally have very limited memories until age 3 or 4, and never anything before 12-18 months.
Are we not suppose to have any memories? I have plenty from 2yrs and up. Scattered but what I do remember is clear.
You know how if you hear something in a different language, you can’t repeat the words because they have no meaning to you? I think part of it has
something to do with this. Babies have no context to organize their memories with. I
I have very accurate memories of being two. No one believed me until I was about 15 and drew out the house that we only lived in for that year. I remembered where each room was and even the fireplace etc. . I’ve been asked about trama of that time period but I far as I knew nothing was wrong.
I feel like I don’t have solid memories of anything until I was maybe 10. I have zero memories of my entire third grade year in school. Super small flashes of memories until fifth grade probably.
Man I hardly remember what year it is.. you guys remember being 5??!
The term for this is childhood amnesia or infantile amnesia and there are a lot of proposed explanations. Development of the prefrontal cortex, language acquisition, and others. One has to do with the child’s sense of self / theory of mind developing around age four. The ability of the child to relate past events to the present solidifies episodic memory now that they understand and can put events into context.
I specifically remember things from at least 18 months +. Not things I heard about or things I was shown. Things that no one else would even think of showing or talking to me about. And I can tell you exactly what I was thinking in those moments. No trauma involved with any of them.
I have a memory that has been identified by my parents as being the night my little sister was born, which was when I was a year and three months old.
I’ve always had pretty clear memories from an early age. Now I’ve got a toddler who’s nearly 3 and it’s hard to explain but I’ll watch him doing something and get these kind of flashbacks to doing the same thing. Like the way he might scoot around the bath tub or just experiment with the world and what he can do in it. Very fun and unexpected experience of being a dad!
Those memories he brings up aren’t in my head the way later memories are though. It’s more like the feeling of what he’s doing. Kind of like a smell? How it can bring back vivid memories without really having anything intellectual attached to it
ELi5 Why we don’t remember our first four years since birth?
In: 3
This is not exactly true. Many people can remember before their fourth birthday. I can, very well, actually – we moved to a new house a week before I turned four. All of my memories of the old house were from before. I can’t tell you the order of events, and I only remember certain things (mom setting up for a Tupperware party, watching spiders crawl on the stone wall along the driveway, a squirrel getting in the house, water on the floor after a bad storm, etc).
Regardless, there are limits. The structures in the brain that are responsible for forming long term memories mostly form after we’re born. It’s not until after age 1 that we can really start to form real long term memories, and it’s still an immature feature that takes a few years to fully develop. We generally have very limited memories until age 3 or 4, and never anything before 12-18 months.
Are we not suppose to have any memories? I have plenty from 2yrs and up. Scattered but what I do remember is clear.
You know how if you hear something in a different language, you can’t repeat the words because they have no meaning to you? I think part of it has
something to do with this. Babies have no context to organize their memories with. I
I have very accurate memories of being two. No one believed me until I was about 15 and drew out the house that we only lived in for that year. I remembered where each room was and even the fireplace etc. . I’ve been asked about trama of that time period but I far as I knew nothing was wrong.
I feel like I don’t have solid memories of anything until I was maybe 10. I have zero memories of my entire third grade year in school. Super small flashes of memories until fifth grade probably.
Man I hardly remember what year it is.. you guys remember being 5??!
The term for this is childhood amnesia or infantile amnesia and there are a lot of proposed explanations. Development of the prefrontal cortex, language acquisition, and others. One has to do with the child’s sense of self / theory of mind developing around age four. The ability of the child to relate past events to the present solidifies episodic memory now that they understand and can put events into context.
I specifically remember things from at least 18 months +. Not things I heard about or things I was shown. Things that no one else would even think of showing or talking to me about. And I can tell you exactly what I was thinking in those moments. No trauma involved with any of them.
I have a memory that has been identified by my parents as being the night my little sister was born, which was when I was a year and three months old.
I’ve always had pretty clear memories from an early age. Now I’ve got a toddler who’s nearly 3 and it’s hard to explain but I’ll watch him doing something and get these kind of flashbacks to doing the same thing. Like the way he might scoot around the bath tub or just experiment with the world and what he can do in it. Very fun and unexpected experience of being a dad!
Those memories he brings up aren’t in my head the way later memories are though. It’s more like the feeling of what he’s doing. Kind of like a smell? How it can bring back vivid memories without really having anything intellectual attached to it
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