Why Can’t We Remember Being a Baby?

My parents always tell me stories about my childhood and when I was a baby. They tell me these funny memories and things I did when I was little. I always get mad because I don’t remember any of these things and I feel like they are making it up! But how come we don’t remember?

Most people, like me, can’t remember when they were really young unless someone reinforces these memories through pictures or retelling of the stories. We can’t remember because of a phenomenon called childhood amnesia.

One study showed that up until age 3, the children could recall events that happened during the past year. This recall of events continued through age 7. These children remembered about 72% of the same memories that they remembered when they were 3. However, it is interesting because once the participants turned 9, they could only remember 35% of the events they remembered when they were 7 and 3.

The researchers think that this happened because starting around age 7, children begin to store linear memories that start to include space and time. This new forming timeline of events causes them to forget the things that were not remembered this way.

When we are babies, we rely on episodic and semantic memory to remember things. Episodic memory comes from personal experience. Semantic memory is when you are processing ideas that do not come from personal experience, like numbers and colors. Over time, your episodic memory starts to become semantic. This is why you do not remember the actual event happening.

Scientists believe that we cannot recall events from our childhood because of how they are accessed and stored. When a child gets to age 2-4, their hippocampus finally connects these regions that store the information and puts it together. The connections let us remember long-term memories.

study conducted in 2014 blamed our circuits that are in our brains for not letting us remember our younger years. This study focused around the formation of cells in infant’s brains. Neurogenesis is the process of growing neurons. But babies however produce neurons at a faster rate in the hippocampus, where our memory is stored.

The researches then used rodents to test these new neurons. The researchers used drugs to lower the neurons in the rodents’ brains. And it turns out they were able to remember better. Increasing the neurons has the opposite effect.

Another really interesting hypothesis suggests that remembering being a baby could be connect to right and left-handedness. The Neuropsychology journal did a study on people who are right and left handed and their ability to remember childhood memories. They found that the people who were both left and right handed could remember more than the people who were solely right-handed.100 participants were in this study that were either ambidextrous or right-handed. They were asked to remember two events from their childhood. One memory had to be a story retold to them by a parent or other person and would later on be found out if it is true. The ambidextrous people personally remembered more memories than the right-handed people. They think this is because ambidextrous people have greater communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.

 

little child baby smiling lying under thr towel

http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/remember.aspx

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5695500/why-cant-you-remember-being-a-baby-science-explains

http://www.livescience.com/32963-why-dont-we-remember-being-babies.html

http://www.livescience.com/42920-semantic-memory.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10564312/Scientists-pinpoint-age-when-childhood-memories-fade.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201404/exploring-childhood-amnesia

http://www.livescience.com/32963-why-dont-we-remember-being-babies.html

7 thoughts on “Why Can’t We Remember Being a Baby?

  1. Jonathan Solimano

    I really enjoyed this post because like everyone else I have a very tough time remembering a lot of things that happened to me as a child. I always have to hear the memories and cannot picture them in my head which is very annoying to me. In fact, I even have trouble remembering some memories up to when I was 13. I found it interesting that there could be a relationship between being both right handed and left handed and remembering memories from when we were children. Although this could be due to chance, it is definitely an interesting idea that should be further looked into.

  2. Caitlin Emily Whelan

    I really enjoyed this post because I always wondered why I could never remember being a baby. Like you said, parents would reminisce and tell funny stories and I never understood why I didn’t remember. I also never would have guessed it would have anything to do with right-handedness and left-handedness. This article speaks about one’s first “memory” being his/her first retained memory, not memory in general. It also says to remember something, the memory must have emotion and be coherent. Those are two factors that determine if we will remember the childhood memory later in life.

  3. Margaret Kreienberg

    This is a great post because I always wonder why I can’t remember being a baby. How many participants were used in the first study that you mentioned? Was it a random sample, too? It is interesting to see how we begin to change how we store our memories. It is weird to think that our brains were unable to store linear memories when we were babies. I wonder if evolution would change this. As centuries go by, and the human brain becomes more advance, do you think that eventually babies will be able to hold onto their memories? That would be very cool if humans evolved in that direction!

  4. Emanuel Gabriel Mitchell

    Wow. This article shared tons of new information. I always wonder why I can’t remember things from when I was a baby. Although I can not, my little sister can. Her memory is phenomenal, as of right now she is 14 but she is able to remember things from when she was three years old. Additionally, she swears that remembers coming out of the womb, but I find that extremely hard to believe. Although my little sister has excellent, I do not believe she has hyperthymesia which is when an individual possesses a superior autobiographical memory, meaning they can recall a vast majority of personal experiences/events in his/her life. Here’s the link that goes into more depth about people with hyperthymesia.

  5. Taylor Leigh Mitchell

    So interesting that you wrote this blog post because I not only can’t remember when I was a baby I can barley remember specific memories from when I was 10. Do I have long-term memory loss? This blog has made my mind ponder so many questions, how are certain people’s memories better than others? Can you improve your memory? Does memory problems relate to other issues with the brain? I think it would be cool if a study was conducted on the way your memory improves as you get older. I also think that some memory failure issues relate to other things then just our brains deciding not to remember something but a bad memory or something scary that happen. When scary or bad things happen we tend to forget them so that they do not continue to affect us. This is a really great article that gives a little more detail about specific causes of memory loss http://www.webmd.com/brain/memory-loss .

  6. Alyssa Hope Cooper

    I have the worst memory and can never remember anything from my childhood. It gets annoying when my friends are telling me stories from their childhood and i can’t remember anything. Also, I have a time telling if I remember something from my childhood or if I only know about it because of my parents telling me. Can we say that as you grow up, you have a harder time remembering childhood events. This is similar to how older people have a bad remember. In conclusion, I think that age can be a causation of bad memory. This is what a psychologist says on the topic.
    https://askthepsych.com/atp/2007/07/02/cannot-remember-childhood/

  7. pxw5127

    This was so interesting! I actually think about this all the time. I never really thought that there was a scientific reason behind it. I always thought that we just could not remember because our brains weren’t developed well yet. I think that it is super weird and cool that we remember the same things at ages 3 and 7, but when age 9 comes around, we forget nearly all of it. I like to imagine what life would be like if we could remember things from when we were babies. I think that the world would be a very weird place. I found this article that tells about certain toddlers who describe their experiences in their mother’s womb. Most of their stories match up, so maybe it is possible to remember these things? You should definitely check this out, it is super weird. Thank you for sharing this 🙂

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