Throughout my life it has continuously occurred to me that I have always had vague memories of my childhood. The earlier stages of my life are completely unclear to me and seem to just be a complete blackout in my mind. In the past I would consistently ask my parents why I was unable to remember being a baby, let alone the years of being a toddler and even past then. They would always answer that it is normal to not remember being a baby, yet I have always struggled with remembering a lot from my childhood. However chances are most of you are unable to remember your first couple of birthday parties or countless other events that have occurred in your early childhood. I think it is safe to say you are not alone and most people if not all experience this. It is normal to not recall your initial life experiences, despite their vital and influential nature. This is a phenomenon that scientists call childhood amnesia. Childhood amnesia, also known as infantile amnesia, is the incapability of adults to recover memories before the age of two-four. Research has demonstrated that children can remember events from before the age of three-four, but these memories decline, as children get older. While some of you may have been able to remember and describe your first trip to the park in tremendous detail for months after it occurred, a year later those memories most likely faded and, eventually, are lost altogether. Up until age three, children in a scientific study could recall significant events that happened to them within the last year. The high rate of remembrance continued until the age of seven, with the study’s participants remembering up to seventy-two percent of the same events they’d recalled as three year-olds. By age eight or nine, however, most could recollect only thirty-five percent of the life experiences they had so thoroughly depicted at age three. We are unable to remember everything that happens in our lives because our ability to store memories in our brain is limited.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/12330/why-cant-you-remember-being-baby
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-can-t-you-remember-being-a-baby/
I have always wonder what it was like during my infant years. I often would hear stories from my parents but I can’t remember the events actually happening. In my psychology class, I learned that infants don’t have any memories until about the age of three. So before that age, we basically have no memory of anything. However, today, it is not a problem to keep tract of our infant years because we technically don’t have to “store” or memories . We have technologies like video cameras to document our every moment. So in the future, when our kids ask about their infant years, we can simply show them the moments that they can ‘t remember. I guess this is a solution to our childhood amnesia.
I think it is very sad that we can’t remember such a huge chunk of our lives. I would be willing to pay to remember something like my first birthday party, losing my first tooth, my first day of kindergarten…after all these are all such special times for us. It sure would be neat if we could remember everything.
There is so much of my childhood that I do not remember, including my infant years. Even in the more recent years of my life, there are many things that have slipped from my memory including certain events, people, feelings, etc. The things that I do remember though are random and unimportant such as an outfit I wore for a birthday party or a grade I had gotten on some test. Why do our minds remember certain things but forget about other things?
I could never remember much from my childhood either, as expected. I can only remember vague, blurry details of significant events. Or if I look at pictures, I may be able to remember small details about that day. I found this post really interesting because I did not know that childhood amnesia existed. I also found it really interesting to know that we have limited ability to store memories.