: Why can you not remember parts of your very young life , like when you were born your brain might not be old enough , but I mean around toddler age
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In fairness, you do remember the most important parts of your very young life. It’s just that these are practical memories, like how to walk. Those are stored very differently to autobiographical memories – the kinds of memories we typically think of when we think about “memories”.
You don’t remember the vast majority of your life, almost 100% of it, in autobiographical form. Your autobiographical memories are experiences that your brain has decided to remember, and it usually makes this decision based on emotions. An autobiographical memory is a set of associations, and your brain most often decides to remember these associations when your emotions are running high. It stores them because when you’re feeling strong emotions you’re usually in an important situation and it would benefit your survival chance to be able to recall this information later. However, associations that aren’t recalled regularly begin to decay, especially if you experience some of the members of that association in contexts that don’t trigger that same neural pathway. This is because it takes energy and attention to maintain memories. If your brain doesn’t think you need a memory, it will stop tending to it. A lot of the time, some of the associations of that memory remain, but the method of retrieving the memory, ie, how your brain knows the memory is there at all, can disappear. It’s often possible to retrieve a memory via manual electrical stimulation, but your brain has no need of it so it forgets where the memory is and how to get to it.
Nearly all of the memories you have of being very young are not useful to you anymore. The ones that are are skills and learned things, not autobiographical, and you remember those fine. The autobiographical memories are useless though, so your brain has no reason to keep tending to those connections, and they eventually fade to the point where you can’t recall them.
It’s also worth noting that everyone is different when it comes to memories. Some people do have memories left over from a very young age. Other people don’t keep any autobiographical memories on free recall longer than a few months. Some people have terrible spontaneous recall ability, but can have memories triggered by environment very easily. Others will retain the weirdest bits of information on free recall but will only draw blanks when the environment would normally remind them of a memory.
Your recent memory is more utilised and thus prioritised over longer memories. You remember things about your current friends more than your primary school friends because you come across them more and use those memories actively.
Toddlers can remember things about the womb; songs played during the end of the pregnancy can make a toddler very happy or relaxed even if they don’t hear it for a year or two after birth.
Adults don’t remember things about the womb or toddler life because as a small child you didn’t actively remember those and as such that’s discarded along the way
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