Why We Can’t Remember Our Youngest Years
Childhood amnesia, the inability to recall our earliest years, is a fascinating psychological phenomenon. Delve into the mysteries of the human mind as we explore the scientific reasons behind our forgotten infancy and the profound implications it has on our adult lives.
Key points
Most adults can’t remember anything from before they were 2 or 3 years old
- Autobiographical memories often involve a sense of time passing, which is not something infants can think about until much later
- Any memories we have of events that happened before the age of 2/3 might have been constructed by someone else’s retelling of an event
- Infantile amnesia is a phenomenon psychologists call it, and it usually starts around the ages of 2-3
- Babies can learn to remember things from the moment they are born, and they can even remember their own faces within hours of birth
References
Bruck, M., & Ceci, S. J. (1999). The suggestibility of children’s memory. Developmental Psychology, 38(5), 705.
Autobiographical Memory
Any memories we claim to recall before the ages of 2 or 3 might have been constructed by someone else’s retelling of an event
- The inability to form memories isn’t what keeps us from remembering things from when we were babies.
- And memories aren’t always exact replicas of what actually happened to us; they can be constructed and reconstructed over time
- In fact, children are especially susceptible to suggestion in their remembering of events
Babies can form memories
Even as we get older, our memories don’t get filed away into our brains like video clips
- They can fade, and they are susceptible to change, especially when we share these memories with others who might retell them from a different perspective.
- If we want to remember more from our earliest days, the best thing we can do is to talk to other people who were there-our loved ones.