Childhood Amnesia: Why Don't Adults Remember Themselves in Infancy?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

From what age we are able to remember ourselves, and why exactly from him - this question was probably of interest to everyone. It is not surprising that many scientists were looking for the answer. Among them are the neurologist Sigmund Freud and the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Physicist Robert Wood had his own theory of memory. But it was Freud who coined the term "infantile / infant amnesia."

Typically, individual childhood memories begin at about three years old, and more detailed ones at about six or seven. True, there are exceptions: sometimes children talk about events that happened to them when they were not even one and a half years old. But in this case it is difficult to understand whether the child remembers it himself or whether the stories of adults "helped" him.

For example, Leo Tolstoy in his story “My Life” wrote that he remembers himself from the age of 10, from the christening: “These are my first memories. I am bound, I want to free my hands, and I cannot do it. I scream and cry, and I myself dislike my scream, but I cannot stop. Robert Wood believed that a child's memory of an event can be reinforced with complementary associations. To exclude the influence of adult stories on the child's memories, he set up the following experiment.

For a week, every day I put a statuette of a dog in the fireplace and put a piece of cannon powder on its head. Holding his one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth on his knees, Wood set fire to gunpowder, and it flashed brightly. At the same time, the physicist said: "This is fazi-wazi." When the granddaughter was about five, she once said, "Fazi-wazi." When Wood asked what it meant, she replied: "You put the dog in the fireplace and put fire on its head." However, childhood memories are unreliable.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftes confirmed this with an experiment: she wrote a plausible story about an experience that volunteers attracted to the experience allegedly experienced in childhood, when they were lost in a supermarket. And for persuasiveness, she referred to the stories of her parents. Of course, the parents did not say anything like that. As a result, 30% of the participants in the experiment recognized the story as true, and some even "remembered" it in detail.

L. N. Tolstoy in childhood and adulthood It turns out that if a person accepted an invention, later he simply supplements someone else's story with personal internal images and ceases to distinguish it from real memories.

Therefore, studying the memory of children is much more difficult than that of adults. Freud believed that memories are "erased" in order to supplant the child's first experiences. Trauma can be both early moments associated with knowing your body, and accidentally spied on parental sex. Scientists put forward other versions as well. The second explanation is more materialistic: the child does not have a sufficiently developed part of the brain responsible for recording memories - the hippocampus.

It is fully formed by the age of seven and continues to develop in adolescence, which is why childhood and adolescence is an ideal period for learning. And babies, alas, do not have a sensible instrument for recording events - there is no recording itself. Explanation three: the growing nerve cells are to blame for everything. We used to say that "nerve cells do not regenerate."

But early childhood is just the time of intensive development of brain cells and the formation of new structures from them. True, in the course of this development, some of the former structures become unnecessary. Fresh memories are actively accumulating - and old ones are just as actively "erased" so as not to overload the child's still fragile brain with information. Everything is logical: why store something that, from the point of view of a growing organism, will never be needed again? However, there is a hypothesis that early memories are stored somewhere, but we do not have access to them.

Explanation four: the ability to remember is associated in children with the development of speech. The child remembers only what he himself can express in words; no words - no memories. Children who learned to speak late reproduce fewer events than their more talkative peers. Finally, there is one more explanation: the parents are to blame for everything, and the lower limit of children's memory is determined by the characteristics of the environment.

It has been proven that in different countries the average age at which a person begins to remember himself differs by about two years. If in the culture of the country it is customary to take an interest in the memories of a child and talk with him, tell family stories, stories, he remembers himself at a younger age. If no one is interested in childhood memories, the child will remember himself much later. Hence the conclusion: if you deal with the baby, his memory will have a greater volume.