We fly into space, search for the elixir of youth, and want to travel through time. And yet we still know so little about the brain, the fundamental organ of every human being. And we know even less about childhood amnesia: a phenomenon that has captivated neuroscientists and psychologists for more than 100 years.
Why is it that people remember almost nothing of what they experienced during the first three years of their lives? How is it possible that they erase from their brains all those incredible experiences associated with discovering the world into which they were recently born? The phenomenon of childhood amnesia was first described by the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud, who claimed that children repress memories from early childhood because of their sexual nature (breastfeeding, etc.). Today, this theory tends to elicit a smile.
It Fades with Age
For example, in their 1999 study (“Childhood Amnesia”), Denisa Šobková and Alena Plháková published the findings of a study showing that children under the age of 9 remember the first years of their lives quite well. According to them, so-called childhood amnesia paradoxically begins to manifest itself only later—the older a person gets, the less they remember from the early years of their life.
This theory is also confirmed to some extent by Canadian neuroscientists Paul W. Frankland and Sheena A. Josselyn, who argue that forgetting occurs the destruction of old neural connections. As the brain learns and develops very rapidly at a young age, it simply “discards” old neural connections (to free up capacity for new information. However, through this process, it discards the very earliest memories stored in its memory.
According to another theory, childhood amnesia is caused by a child’s inability to speak. Because they cannot translate their experiences into verbal form, they are unable to remember them. Another theory, in turn, claims that children cannot remember their experiences because they do not yet understand time and are unable to arrange them chronologically. This creates emotional chaos in the child’s mind that cannot be sustained over the long term. Other researchers, however, have proposed that childhood amnesia stems from a child’s inability to develop self-awareness.
Today, the officially accepted cause of childhood amnesia is that children under the age of three do not have a sufficiently developed hippocampus —the part of the brain directly responsible for storing information and spatial orientation. In fact, Alzheimer’s disease, which causes an inability to store information in the brain, is (especially in its early stages) a manifestation of damage to the hippocampus.
Don’t forget to practice
While childhood amnesia is a predictable and acceptable loss of memory, in adulthood, neither you nor your children should experience anything like it. That’s why it’s necessary to constantly train and strengthen your memory. There are hundreds and thousands of different exercises, tasks, and tests that can help you do this. In collaboration with scientists and educators, we’ve turned the best and most interesting of them into fun games—you can find them all here on Mente.
