ELi5 Why we don’t remember our first four years since birth?

Question

ELi5 Why we don’t remember our first four years since birth?

In: 3

Answer 1

I don’t really have a source for this, but I think it’s related to how memory works. You don’t actually remember things, you remember a sort of point cloud of concepts tangled together. Every time you access the memory, the point cloud rearranges and gets updated with new concepts and perceptions.

Babies don’t have the point of reference to create complex enough point clouds to be called a memory. Eventually, you have enough concepts to create a map that you can look back on and say “yeah that’s what that looked like” without immediately overwriting it, which is apparently around 4

Answer 2

I don’t really have a source for this, but I think it’s related to how memory works. You don’t actually remember things, you remember a sort of point cloud of concepts tangled together. Every time you access the memory, the point cloud rearranges and gets updated with new concepts and perceptions.

Babies don’t have the point of reference to create complex enough point clouds to be called a memory. Eventually, you have enough concepts to create a map that you can look back on and say “yeah that’s what that looked like” without immediately overwriting it, which is apparently around 4