ELi5 Why we don’t remember our first four years since birth?
In: 3
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.
Because you have to be at least 4 years of age before they can safely plug you into the matrix.
We do not remember this time, because the brain and cognition first need to develop enough to even make sense of the input. When a baby is born, they cannot “see” like we do, or understand what they are hearing. They even cannot move their limbs with sufficient coordination. It takes time for the brain to take full control and fine-tune the neuronal commands. Similarly, the cognitive understanding of a very small child is shattered into pieces which do not yet form a complete worldview. It seems that only after a few years, the personality of the baby is well-formed enough to “remember” in a meaningful way.
Memory is more a reconstruction of what must have happened rather than a stored movie. One needs to know a lot to be able to “remember” something, i.e., to reconstruct what must have happened.
I have many (nontraumatic) memories going back to age 2 and even slightly before, so it definitely varies from person to person.
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
I have hazy early memories. I can remember walking across the landing of my house in a sleep suit which is lemon. My mom thinks I was about two when I wore it.
I can remember being in the back of a car, no seatbelt and my legs and feet being as long as the seat so my knees were not bent.
I have lots of memories from nursery so I was 3/4 and onwards since then.
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
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.
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.
ELi5 Why we don’t remember our first four years since birth?
In: 3
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.
Because you have to be at least 4 years of age before they can safely plug you into the matrix.
We do not remember this time, because the brain and cognition first need to develop enough to even make sense of the input. When a baby is born, they cannot “see” like we do, or understand what they are hearing. They even cannot move their limbs with sufficient coordination. It takes time for the brain to take full control and fine-tune the neuronal commands. Similarly, the cognitive understanding of a very small child is shattered into pieces which do not yet form a complete worldview. It seems that only after a few years, the personality of the baby is well-formed enough to “remember” in a meaningful way.
Memory is more a reconstruction of what must have happened rather than a stored movie. One needs to know a lot to be able to “remember” something, i.e., to reconstruct what must have happened.
I have many (nontraumatic) memories going back to age 2 and even slightly before, so it definitely varies from person to person.
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
I have hazy early memories. I can remember walking across the landing of my house in a sleep suit which is lemon. My mom thinks I was about two when I wore it.
I can remember being in the back of a car, no seatbelt and my legs and feet being as long as the seat so my knees were not bent.
I have lots of memories from nursery so I was 3/4 and onwards since then.
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
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.
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.
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