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

Memory as a whole is something we’re very bad at explaining still. Some people confidently remember things from very young ages, others struggle to remember anything more than a few years back. At the end of the day, both are prime to being wildly inaccurate, and the human brain doesn’t really “record’ memories so much as associations, and rebuilds memories from scratch when certain associations are brought up. As such, we’re very prone to confidently remembering things that never happened, or happened very differently than we remember. Memory is fascinating, and one of the many fields people are confidently wrong about with surprising frequency.

Answer 2

Memory as a whole is something we’re very bad at explaining still. Some people confidently remember things from very young ages, others struggle to remember anything more than a few years back. At the end of the day, both are prime to being wildly inaccurate, and the human brain doesn’t really “record’ memories so much as associations, and rebuilds memories from scratch when certain associations are brought up. As such, we’re very prone to confidently remembering things that never happened, or happened very differently than we remember. Memory is fascinating, and one of the many fields people are confidently wrong about with surprising frequency.