Despite many decades of serious research, our brain still jealously guards a colossal number of secrets. At the moment, we have received answers to only a small part of the questions; today it is not even possible to say with certainty why we do not remember how we were born. What can we say about more serious topics.
Why is memory needed?
Human memory It’s hard to call it something frivolous; it’s a complex combination of biological processes created by nature:
- It is a collection of static pictures united into a dynamic idea of the past.
- Memory is individual and unique for everyone, even if people witnessed the same events.
- Modern theory suggests that information in the brain is stored in the form of constantly circulating nerve impulses.
- It is the connections between nerve cells that allow us to remember past events.
- The psyche leaves its mark on all memories, some of them are completely replaced, the rest are distorted.
- The memory of children is especially interesting in this regard. They can imagine events that never existed in reality and religiously believe in them. Such is self-deception.
When a person loses his memory, he loses a part of his personality.. Despite the fact that all the acquired skills and qualities remain, too important information about the past disappears. Sometimes irrevocably.
Why don't we remember the first years?
In one of the scenes of the film " Lucy“The main character remembers not only her childhood, but also the very moment of birth. Of course, she's on drugs and has Superman-level powers. But how realistic is it for the average person to remember something like that, and why most people have no memories of the first three years of life?
For a long time, this was explained based on two theories.
And both proposed hypotheses are not ideal:
- Every person has a dozen not-so-pleasant memories.
- For some, truly terrible moments in their lives are etched in their memories for many years.
- There are millions of deaf and mute people in the world, but they do not experience any special memory problems.
- With the right approach, already at the age of three, a child is able to read books, let alone speak and remember.
Destruction of interneuron connections
Recent studies conducted on rats have shown interesting result:
- It turned out that during intensive growth of nervous tissue, old neural connections are disrupted.
- This also happens with neurons located in the so-called “memory center”.
- And since we have come to the conclusion that memory is electrical impulses between cells, it is not difficult to come to a logical conclusion.
- At a certain age, nervous tissue grows too rapidly, old connections are destroyed, and new ones are formed. The memory of previous events is simply erased.
Of course, conducting any such experiments on children is doomed to failure; the ethics and moral side of the issue will not allow such research to proceed. Perhaps scientists will find another way to confirm or refute this theory in the near future. In the meantime, we can enjoy any of the three generally accepted explanations.
All this does not mean that a person cannot remember something from early childhood. Some people have fragmented memories of this period - vivid images, fragments of moments and life situations. So You need to spend time with your baby at any age., it is in these years that most mental characteristics.
Why are babies born blue?
When a mother is shown her baby for the first time in the delivery room, the joy of the baby's appearance may change worries about his life:
- In popular culture, the image of a newborn has formed - a rosy-cheeked, screaming baby.
- But in real life everything is a little different, the child will appear either cyanotic or purple.
- He will become that rosy-cheeked baby within the next couple of days, no need to worry.
"Abnormal" color may be physiological and pathological:
- From a physiological point of view, it is explained by the transition from placental to pulmonary circulation.
- As soon as the child takes his first breath and begins to breathe on his own, the color of his skin gradually turns pink.
- The presence of lubricant on the baby’s skin plays a role.
- Do not forget about the presence of fetal hemoglobin and a different blood picture from an adult.
WITH pathology everything is simpler. There are two options - either hypoxia or injury.
But here it’s up to the obstetricians to decide, so trust the opinion of the specialists. Don’t beat yourself up over nothing, these people have attended hundreds of births and seen plenty of newborns. If they think that everything is fine or that on the contrary, something is wrong - most likely it is.
What influences “children’s forgetfulness”?
Today we can explain the absence of memories of birth and the first three years of life with the following theories:
- Replacement and displacement from memory shocking information . Let's hope that people don't have access to such a source of stress in the coming decades. It’s certainly interesting to know what we were all like. But at the same time, negative emotions will not go away.
- The beginning of the formation of associative connections with words. For a period of 2-3 years, the active development of speech occurs, and only after this is it possible to fix massive blocks of information in memory.
- Destruction of connections between neurons due to their intensive growth. Experimentally proven on laboratory mice and rats. Looks like the most promising explanation at the moment.
But the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, it may turn out that all three hypotheses are true, but only partially. Memory formation is too complex a process to be influenced by just one factor.
It is not so important why we do not remember how we were born - whether it is due to intense cell growth or blocking shocking information. The main thing is that it is in 1-3 years that character and future child's inclinations, and not in some 7-10 years, as is commonly believed. So the baby needs to be given appropriate attention.
Video: remember how I was born
Below is a video with interesting explanations from psychologist Ivan Kadurin, who explains why a person does not remember how he was born and very vaguely remembers his childhood:
So what's the matter? After all, children absorb information like a sponge, forming 700 neural connections per second and learning language at a speed that any polyglot would envy.
Many believe the answer lies in the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, a 19th-century German psychologist. For the first time, he conducted a series of experiments on himself to find out the limits of human memory.
To do this, he composed series of meaningless syllables (“bov”, “gis”, “loch” and the like) and memorized them, and then checked how much information was stored in memory. As the forgetting curve, also developed by Ebbinghaus, confirms, we forget what we have learned extremely quickly. Without repetition, our brain forgets half of the new information within the first hour. By day 30, only 2–3% of the data collected is retained.
While studying forgetting curves in the 1980s, scientists discovered David C. Rubin. Autobiographical Memory. that we have far fewer memories from birth to 6–7 years of age than might be expected. At the same time, some remember individual events that occurred when they were only 2 years old, while others have no memories at all of events before they were 7–8 years old. On average, fragmentary memories appear only after three and a half years.
What's particularly interesting is that there are differences across countries in how memories are stored.
The role of culture
Psychologist Qi Wang from Cornell University conducted a study Qi Wang. Culture effects on adults’ earliest childhood recollection and self-description., in which she recorded the childhood memories of Chinese and American students. As national stereotypes might suggest, American stories were longer and more detailed, and significantly more self-centered. The Chinese students' stories, on the other hand, were brief and factual. In addition, their memories began, on average, six months later.
The difference is confirmed by other studies Qi Wang. The Emergence of Cultural Self-Constructs.. People whose memories are more self-centered have an easier time remembering.
“There is a big difference between such memories as “There were tigers at the zoo” and “I saw tigers at the zoo, they were scary, but it was still very interesting,” psychologists say. The emergence of a child’s interest in himself, the emergence of his own point of view helps to better remember what is happening, because this is what largely influences the perception of various events.
Ki Wang then conducted another experiment, this time interviewing American and Chinese mothers. Qi Wang, Stacey N. Doan, Qingfang Song. Talking about Internal States in Mother-Child Reminiscing Influences on Children's Self-Representations: A Cross-Cultural Study.. The results remained the same.
“In Eastern culture, childhood memories are not given as much importance,” Wang says. - When I lived in China, no one even asked me about this. If society instills that these memories are important, they are more retained in memory.”
Interestingly, the earliest memories are recorded among the indigenous population of New Zealand - the Maori S. MacDonald, K. Uesiliana, H. Hayne. Cross-cultural and gender differences in childhood amnesia.
. Their culture places great emphasis on childhood memories, and many Maori remember events that happened when they were only two and a half years old.
Role of the hippocampus
Some psychologists believe that the ability to remember comes to us only after we master a language. However, it has been proven that children who are deaf from birth have their first memories from the same period as others.
This has led to the theory that we do not remember the first years of life simply because our brains do not yet have the necessary “equipment” at that time. As you know, the hippocampus is responsible for our ability to remember. At a very early age, he is not yet fully developed. This has been seen not only among humans, but also among rats and monkeys Sheena A. Josselyn, Paul W. Frankland. Infantile amnesia: A neurogenic hypothesis..
However, some childhood events affect us even when we don’t remember them. Stella Li, Bridget L. Callaghan, Rick Richardson. Infantile amnesia: forgotten but not gone., therefore, some psychologists believe that the memory of these events is still stored, but it is inaccessible to us. So far, scientists have not yet been able to prove this experimentally.
Imaginary events
Many of our childhood memories often turn out to be unreal. We hear from relatives about some situation, we imagine the details, and over time it begins to seem like our own memory.
And even if we really remember about a particular event, this memory can change under the influence of the stories of others.
So perhaps the real question is not why we don't remember our early childhood, but whether we can trust any memory at all.
PHOTO Getty Images
Why don't we remember our dreams? This is also strange because dreams can be much more vivid and intense than everyday life. If some of the events that happen in a dream happened to us in reality - for example, falling from a roof or a romantic relationship with a movie star - this story would definitely remain in our memory (not to mention our social media feed).
There are several theories that help understand why dreams fade from memory so quickly. On the one hand, forgetting is a process that is extremely necessary from an evolutionary point of view: for a caveman, a dream that he jumped off a cliff while running away from a lion would not have ended well. Another evolutionary theory, developed by DNA discoverer Francis Crick, states that the main function of dreams is to forget unnecessary memories that accumulate in the brain over time.
We also forget dreams because it is unusual for us to remember what happened in the dream. We are accustomed to the fact that our past is organized chronologically, linearly: first one thing happened, then another, a third... Dreams are chaotic, full of associations and random, illogical turns.
In addition, everyday life, the need to get up on an alarm clock and immediately rush to do things does not contribute to remembering dreams - the first thing we think about (if we think at all) after waking up is: “Where to start, what should I do today?” Because of this, dreams dissipate like smoke.
What to do to remember a dream?
Before you go to bed, set two alarms: one to finally wake up, the other (musical) to focus on what you saw in your dream (the second should ring a little earlier than the first).
- Before going to bed, place a pen and a piece of paper on the nightstand near your bed. Or use the notebook app on your smartphone: write down everything you remember until you start to forget.
- When the “musical” alarm clock rings and you reach for paper and pencil, try to move as little as possible.
- Remember the feeling of the dream, its mood, write down what comes to mind. Do it in a free form, do not give events a sequence.
- Keep a notepad nearby throughout the day: perhaps sleep will continue to “flirt” with us. Flirting dreams is a term coined by Arthur Mindell: dream shards can appear throughout the day or even several days, “teasing” us and our brain.
- Once you learn to replay your dreams, it will be much easier for you to remember them.
Memory is the ability to store information and a complex set of biological processes. It is inherent in all living things, but is most developed in humans. Human memory is very individual; witnesses of the same event remember it differently.
What exactly do we not remember?
Memories take on a unique imprint of the psyche, which is capable of partially changing, replacing, and distorting them. The memory of children, for example, is capable of storing and reproducing absolutely invented events as real ones.
And this is not the only feature of children's memory. The fact that we do not remember how we were born seems completely surprising. In addition, almost no one can remember the first years of their life. What can we say about the fact that we are not able to remember anything about the time we were in the womb.
This phenomenon is called “infantile amnesia.” This is the only type of amnesia that has a universal human scale.
According to scientists, most people begin counting their childhood memories at about 3.5 years old. Until this moment, only a few can remember individual, very vivid life situations or fragmentary pictures. For most, even the most impressive moments are erased from memory.
Early childhood is the most information-rich period. This is the time for active and dynamic learning of a person, familiarizing him with the world around him. Of course, people learn almost throughout their entire lives, but with age this process slows down in intensity.
But during the first years of life, the baby has to process literally gigabytes of information in a short time. This is why they say that a small child “absorbs everything like a sponge.” Why don’t we remember such an important period of our lives? Psychologists and neuroscientists have asked these questions, but there is still no clear, universally accepted solution to this puzzle of nature.
Research into the causes of the phenomenon of “infantile amnesia”
And Freud again
The world famous guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is considered the discoverer of the phenomenon. He gave it the name “infantile amnesia.” In the course of his work, he noticed that patients did not remember events relating to the first three and sometimes five years of life.
The Austrian psychologist began to explore the problem deeper. His final conclusion was within the framework of the traditional postulates of his teaching.
Freud considered the cause of childhood amnesia to be the infant’s early sexual attachment to a parent of the opposite sex, and, accordingly, aggression towards another parent of the same sex as the child. Such emotional overload is beyond the strength of the child’s psyche, and is therefore repressed into the unconscious area, where it remains forever.
The version raised many questions. In particular, it did not explain in any way the absolute inselectivity of the psyche in this case. Not all infant experiences have a sexual connotation, and memory refuses to store all the events of this period. Thus, the theory was not supported by practically anyone and remained the opinion of one scientist.
First there was the word
For a certain time, the following version was a popular explanation for childhood amnesia: a person does not remember the period in which he was not yet able to speak fully. Its supporters believed that memory, when recreating events, puts them into words. Speech is fully mastered by a child by about three years of age.
Before this period, he simply cannot correlate phenomena and emotions with certain words, does not determine the connection between them, and therefore cannot record them in memory. An indirect confirmation of the theory was the too literal interpretation of the biblical quote: “In the beginning was the Word.”
However, this explanation also has weaknesses. There are many children who speak perfectly after the first year. This does not provide them with lasting memories of this period of life. In addition, a competent interpretation of the Gospel indicates that in the first line, “word” does not mean speech at all, but a certain thought form, an energetic message, something intangible.
Inability to form early memories
A number of scientists believe that the phenomenon is explained by the lack of abstract logical thinking, the inability to build individual events into a coherent picture. The child also cannot associate memories with a specific time and place. Young children do not yet have a sense of time. It turns out that we do not forget our childhood, but are simply unable to form memories.
"Lack of memory capacity"
Another group of researchers has put forward an interesting hypothesis: in the first years of childhood, a person absorbs and processes such an incredible amount of information that there is nowhere for new “files” to be stored and they are written over the old ones, erasing all memories.
Underdevelopment of the hippocampus
There are several classifications of memory. For example, according to the duration of information storage, it is divided into short-term and long-term. So, some experts believe that we do not remember our childhood, because during this period only short-term memory works.
According to the method of memorization, semantic and episodic memory are distinguished. The first leaves the imprints of the first acquaintance with the phenomenon, the second - the results of personal contact with it. Scientists believe that they are stored in different parts of the brain and are able to unite only after reaching the age of three through the hippocampus.
Paul Frankland, a Canadian scientist, drew attention to the functions of a special part of the brain - the hippocampus, which is responsible for the birth of emotions, as well as for the transformation, transportation and storage of human memories. It is what ensures the transition of information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
Having studied this part of the brain, Frankland found out that at human birth it is underdeveloped, but grows and develops as the individual matures. But even after the hippocampus has fully developed, it cannot organize old memories, but processes current portions of data.
Loss or gift of nature?
Each of the theories described above tries to figure out the mechanism of childhood memory loss and does not ask the question: why did the universe do this and deprive us of such valuable and dear memories? What is the meaning of such an irreparable loss?
In nature, everything is balanced and everything is not random. In all likelihood, the fact that we do not remember our birth and the first years of our development must be of some benefit to us. Only S. Freud touches on this point in his research. He raises the issue of traumatic experiences that are repressed from consciousness.
Indeed, the entire period of early childhood can hardly be called absolutely cloudless, happy and carefree. Maybe we're just used to thinking that way because we don't remember him?
It has long been a known fact that a baby at birth experiences physical pain no less than his mother, and the emotional experience of a baby during childbirth is akin to experiencing the process of death. Next begins the stage of familiarization with the world. But he is not always white and fluffy.
A little person is undoubtedly exposed to a huge amount of stress. Therefore, many modern scientists believe that Freud was right, at least, that infant amnesia has a protective function for the psyche. It protects the baby from emotional overloads that are too much for him and gives him the strength to develop further. This gives us another reason to thank nature for its foresight.
Parents should take into account the fact that it is at this tender age that the foundation of the child’s psyche is laid. Some of the brightest fragments of memories may still remain fragmentarily in the memory of a little person, and it is in the power of the father and mother to make these moments of his life full of light and love.
Video: why don’t we remember events from early childhood?
Imagine you are having lunch with someone you have known for several years. You celebrated holidays, birthdays together, had fun, went to parks and ate ice cream. You even lived together. Overall, this someone spent quite a lot of money on you - thousands. Only you can't remember any of this. The most dramatic moments in life - the day you were born, the first steps, the first words spoken, the first food and even the first years in kindergarten - most of us remember nothing about the first years of life. Even after our first precious memory, the rest seem distant and scattered. How so?
This gaping hole in the chronicle of our lives has frustrated parents and puzzled psychologists, neurologists and linguists for decades. Even Sigmund Freud studied this issue extensively, which is why he coined the term “infantile amnesia” more than 100 years ago.
Studying this tabula of race led to interesting questions. Do our first memories really tell us what happened to us, or were we made up? Can we remember events without words and describe them? Can we one day regain the missing memories?
Part of this puzzle stems from the fact that babies, like sponges for new information, form 700 new neural connections every second and have language learning skills that would make the most accomplished polyglots green with envy. The latest research has shown that they begin to train their minds in the womb.
But even in adults, information is lost over time if no attempt is made to preserve it. Therefore, one explanation is that childhood amnesia is simply a result of the natural process of forgetting things that we encounter during our lives.
19th-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted unusual experiments on himself to discover the limits of human memory. To give his mind a completely blank slate to start with, he invented “nonsense syllables”—made-up words made up of random letters, like “kag” or “slans”—and set about memorizing thousands of them.
His forgetting curve showed a disconcertingly rapid decline in our ability to remember what we've learned: Left alone, our brains clear out half of the material we've learned in an hour. By day 30 we leave only 2-3%.
Ebbinghaus discovered that the way in which all this was forgotten was quite predictable. To find out whether babies' memories are any different, we need to compare these curves. When scientists did calculations in the 1980s, they found that we remember much less from birth to age six or seven than would be expected based on these curves. Obviously something completely different is happening.
What is remarkable is that for some the veil is lifted earlier than for others. Some people can remember events from the age of two, while others do not remember anything that happened to them until they were seven or even eight years old. On average, blurry footage begins at three and a half years of age. What's even more remarkable is that the discrepancies vary from country to country, with differences in memories reaching an average of two years.
To understand the reasons for this, psychologist Qi Wang from Cornell University collected hundreds of memories from Chinese and American students. As national stereotypes would predict, American histories were longer, demonstrably more self-centered, and more complex. Chinese stories, on the other hand, were shorter and to the point; they also started six months later on average.
This state of affairs is supported by numerous other studies. Memories that are more detailed and self-directed are easier to recall. It is believed that narcissism helps with this, since gaining one’s own point of view gives meaning to events.
"There's a difference between thinking, 'There are tigers at the zoo,' and 'I saw the tigers at the zoo, and it was both scary and fun,'" says Robin Fivush, a psychologist at Emory University.
When Wang ran the experiment again, this time interviewing the children's mothers, she found the same pattern. So if your memories are hazy, blame your parents.
Wang's first memory is of hiking in the mountains near her family's home in Chongqing, China, with her mother and sister. She was about six. But she wasn't asked about it until she moved to the US. “In Eastern cultures, childhood memories are not particularly important. People are surprised that someone would ask that,” she says.
"If society tells you that these memories are important to you, you will keep them," Wang says. The record for earliest memories belongs to the Maori in New Zealand, whose culture includes a strong emphasis on the past. Many can remember events that occurred at the age of two and a half years.”
“Our culture may also shape how we talk about our memories, and some psychologists believe that memories only emerge when we acquire language.”
Language helps us provide structure to our memories, a narrative. By creating a story, the experience becomes more organized and therefore easier to remember for a long time, says Fivush. Some psychologists doubt that this plays a big role. They say there is no difference between the ages at which deaf children growing up without sign language report their earliest memories, for example.
All this leads us to the following theory: we cannot remember the early years simply because our brains have not acquired the necessary equipment. This explanation comes from the most famous person in the history of neuroscience, known as Patient HM. After unsuccessful surgery to treat his epilepsy, which damaged his hippocampus, HM could not remember any new events. “It is the center of our ability to learn and remember. If I didn't have a hippocampus, I wouldn't be able to remember that conversation,” says Jeffrey Fagen, who studies memory and learning at Saint John's University.
Remarkably, however, he was still able to learn other types of information - just like babies. When scientists asked him to copy the design of a five-pointed star while looking at it in a mirror (not as easy as it sounds), he got better with each round of practice, even though the experience itself was completely new to him.
Perhaps when we are very young, the hippocampus is simply not developed enough to create a rich memory of an event. Baby rats, monkeys and humans continue to gain new neurons in the hippocampus in the first few years of life, and none of us can create lasting memories in infancy - and all indications are that the moment we stop making new neurons, we suddenly start form long-term memory. "In infancy, the hippocampus remains extremely underdeveloped," Fagen says.
But does the underdeveloped hippocampus lose our long-term memories, or do they not form at all? Because childhood experiences can influence our behavior long after we erase them from memory, psychologists believe they must remain somewhere. "It's possible that memories are stored in a place that is no longer accessible to us, but it's very difficult to demonstrate this empirically," Fagen says.
That being said, our childhood is likely full of false memories of events that never happened.
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has devoted her career to studying this phenomenon. "People pick up ideas and visualize them - they become like memories," she says.
Imaginary events
Loftus knows first-hand how this happens. Her mother drowned in a swimming pool when she was just 16 years old. Several years later, a relative convinced her that she had seen her body floating. Memories flooded her mind until a week later when the same relative called and explained that Loftus had gotten it all wrong.
Of course, who would like to find out that their memories are not real? To convince skeptics, Loftus needs irrefutable evidence. Back in the 1980s, she invited volunteers for the study and seeded the memories herself.
Loftus spun an elaborate lie about a sad trip to a shopping center where they got lost and were later rescued by a gentle older woman and reunited with their family. To make the events even more true, she even brought in their families. “We usually tell study participants that we talked to your mom, your mom told you something that happened to you.” Almost a third of the subjects remembered this event in vivid detail. In fact, we are more confident in our imaginary memories than in those that actually happened.
Even if your memories are based on real events, they were likely cobbled together and reworked in hindsight - these memories are planted with conversations, not specific first-person memories.
Perhaps the biggest mystery is not why we can't remember our childhood, but whether we can trust our memories.
