4 ms·

The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and

The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that, despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form them, and then as we get older we forget them again. If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the early memories are completely lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memor...

hubert123 10y ago
Things learnt that early simply dont have value later on, that's how I would see it from the body's perspective.
- posterboy 10y ago
  Episodic memory is not really learned, is it? There's a semantically confusing syllogism in there. If a memory is pondered often enough, there might not be much more to learn from, thus you stop thinking about it and as with muscles, it deteriorates if not used. But what you have deduced from that memory might have value. Eventually you might learn later on that episodic memory is a valuable thing to keep as much as possible, thus we reminisce. On the other hand, maybe early childhood is just so terrible that it needs to be suppressed.
- laxatives 10y ago
  Even if you aren't able to recall useless events in your life, you still have memories of most of them with the appropriate cues. Tgat doesn't hold for early childhood.
posterboy 10y ago
>If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2 That is news to me, but then again I find it hard to ask a 5 year old about anything.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
batbomb 10y ago
I have quite a few memories before 4, going back to 2 years of age, more than I can remember. I will say that one thing that is a little different for me was that we moved every year until I was 7 so that had helped me place things and maybe retain memories a little better for some reason.
- secfirstmd 10y ago
  Am I just weird or is it unusual to have scant memories from between the age of one and two?
- eridius 10y ago
  How can you have more memories than you can remember? Isn't that a contradiction?
  - Kretiini 10y ago
    There are more things from that time he can recall than he can name at this moment, that's how I interpreted it.
  - batbomb 10y ago
    Theres no way to iterate all your memories, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. My guess is that I have about ~50 before the age of 3, 150 before the age of 4
agumonkey 10y ago
Maybe most of them are non verbal too, so differently stored, associated, and harder to communicate. I also imagine the first 4 years as a massive influx of raw stimuli to be processed, from which only a few abstraction will remains. Kinda like learning anything knew, the first period is mostly wrong perceptions, and you only remember the valuable bits after an integration period.
ktRolster 10y ago
My hypothesis (along with your observation) is that as we age, the way we remember things is different. At a young age, it's all sounds and images. Then language gets added to it, and we start seeing events in different ways. Our old ways of accessing information (in the brain) are used less often, and we forget.
- extr 10y ago
  This touches on an interesting aspect of my very early childhood memories. Do you ever have dreams where you "know" you're in a familiar location, like your old high school or childhood home, but they have a completely different feeling to them, and may or may not have the same layout as in real life? My very early childhood memories have a similar sort of dreamlike quality. I know objectively the memory takes place in the neighborhood I grew up in, but there is a certain atmosphere or feeling that isn't the same and that I can never quite relay or capture today. I've wondered if this isn't due to the way these early memories are formed and stored.
  - SubiculumCode 10y ago
    Sometimes, while dreaming I will recognize and recall that I've had this dream before, maybe many many times...then I feel a sense of loss, like losing a friend. A moment of de ja vu I guess. It is a weird feeling though, and I don't even know if I truly had the dream before, or if it is a false memory!!
- spc476 10y ago
  I recall as a teenager catching a whiff of tar and instantly recalling a memory from when I was very young (somewhere between 2 and 5) of being in a parking garage with the same smell. I can still "see" the garage and even smell it, but that's it. I have no other contextual clues to know when or where it happened (unlike my earliest memory of being in a large city---it was Chicago where we lived when I was 2, but I only know that because of what my parents have said over the years).
VLM 10y ago
I'd toss out an evolutionary argument that for the last million years memory is mostly useful for who owes what to who so we can play well known small tribe politics games... Given that as a (possibly obvious?) starting point, a subgroup that remembered every time some a 2-year old kid stole their pet dinosaur from another 2-year old kid, would mostly result in senseless adult strife. So we're better off not remembering our childhood as we get older. Subgroups that forget childhood animosity will outperform subgroups with perfect, but useless, memories. I'd even toss out the hypothesis that all relationships change at puberty so toss out all memories at puberty because its a whole nother ball game. However the same system that stores "how to hunt dinosaur" also stores "Little billy stole my toy dinosaur when I was 2-years old" so the erasure system optimizes at a certain relatively high level of forgetting stuff. And yes I know my years are all made up and the non-overlapping relative timespans of dinos and humans so I wrote in a very general flippant sunday afternoon sense.
SubiculumCode 10y ago
Agree. Let me add. Infantile/childhood amnesia has many causes, but being unable to form a memory is not one of them. Memories in infancy are fragile, and context dependent, and even if retained through life are likely fragmentary, non-verbal, non-conceptually embedded, that we'd not recognize it as an episodic memory. Moreover, the medial temporal lobes and hippocampus (brain region critical to relational memory formation) are still immature before age 2, before which time the dentate gyrus in the tri-synaptic circuit of the hippocampus may not be fully operational, potentially leading to massive interference between similar memories from less efficient representational separation and a bias towards pattern completion. The last tidbit is particularly interesting as such a bias to pattern completion may support the rapid semantic knowledge acquisitions occurring early in life, which may benefit from layering of similar representations to extract reoccurring key features about the world, as opposed to the more efficient pattern separation later in life that allows more fine grained memory distinctions to be retained and allowing individual events to be better remembered.

hubert123 10y ago

Things learnt that early simply dont have value later on, that's how I would see it from the body's perspective.

posterboy 10y ago
Episodic memory is not really learned, is it? There's a semantically confusing syllogism in there. If a memory is pondered often enough, there might not be much more to learn from, thus you stop thinking about it and as with muscles, it deteriorates if not used. But what you have deduced from that memory might have value. Eventually you might learn later on that episodic memory is a valuable thing to keep as much as possible, thus we reminisce. On the other hand, maybe early childhood is just so terrible that it needs to be suppressed.
laxatives 10y ago
Even if you aren't able to recall useless events in your life, you still have memories of most of them with the appropriate cues. Tgat doesn't hold for early childhood.

posterboy 10y ago

>If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that happened to them when they were 2 That is news to me, but then again I find it hard to ask a 5 year old about anything.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

batbomb 10y ago

I have quite a few memories before 4, going back to 2 years of age, more than I can remember. I will say that one thing that is a little different for me was that we moved every year until I was 7 so that had helped me place things and maybe retain memories a little better for some reason.

secfirstmd 10y ago
Am I just weird or is it unusual to have scant memories from between the age of one and two?
eridius 10y ago
How can you have more memories than you can remember? Isn't that a contradiction?
- Kretiini 10y ago
  There are more things from that time he can recall than he can name at this moment, that's how I interpreted it.
- batbomb 10y ago
  Theres no way to iterate all your memories, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. My guess is that I have about ~50 before the age of 3, 150 before the age of 4

agumonkey 10y ago

Maybe most of them are non verbal too, so differently stored, associated, and harder to communicate. I also imagine the first 4 years as a massive influx of raw stimuli to be processed, from which only a few abstraction will remains. Kinda like learning anything knew, the first period is mostly wrong perceptions, and you only remember the valuable bits after an integration period.

ktRolster 10y ago

My hypothesis (along with your observation) is that as we age, the way we remember things is different. At a young age, it's all sounds and images. Then language gets added to it, and we start seeing events in different ways. Our old ways of accessing information (in the brain) are used less often, and we forget.

extr 10y ago
This touches on an interesting aspect of my very early childhood memories. Do you ever have dreams where you "know" you're in a familiar location, like your old high school or childhood home, but they have a completely different feeling to them, and may or may not have the same layout as in real life? My very early childhood memories have a similar sort of dreamlike quality. I know objectively the memory takes place in the neighborhood I grew up in, but there is a certain atmosphere or feeling that isn't the same and that I can never quite relay or capture today. I've wondered if this isn't due to the way these early memories are formed and stored.
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  Sometimes, while dreaming I will recognize and recall that I've had this dream before, maybe many many times...then I feel a sense of loss, like losing a friend. A moment of de ja vu I guess. It is a weird feeling though, and I don't even know if I truly had the dream before, or if it is a false memory!!
spc476 10y ago
I recall as a teenager catching a whiff of tar and instantly recalling a memory from when I was very young (somewhere between 2 and 5) of being in a parking garage with the same smell. I can still "see" the garage and even smell it, but that's it. I have no other contextual clues to know when or where it happened (unlike my earliest memory of being in a large city---it was Chicago where we lived when I was 2, but I only know that because of what my parents have said over the years).

VLM 10y ago

I'd toss out an evolutionary argument that for the last million years memory is mostly useful for who owes what to who so we can play well known small tribe politics games... Given that as a (possibly obvious?) starting point, a subgroup that remembered every time some a 2-year old kid stole their pet dinosaur from another 2-year old kid, would mostly result in senseless adult strife. So we're better off not remembering our childhood as we get older. Subgroups that forget childhood animosity will outperform subgroups with perfect, but useless, memories. I'd even toss out the hypothesis that all relationships change at puberty so toss out all memories at puberty because its a whole nother ball game. However the same system that stores "how to hunt dinosaur" also stores "Little billy stole my toy dinosaur when I was 2-years old" so the erasure system optimizes at a certain relatively high level of forgetting stuff. And yes I know my years are all made up and the non-overlapping relative timespans of dinos and humans so I wrote in a very general flippant sunday afternoon sense.

SubiculumCode 10y ago

Agree. Let me add. Infantile/childhood amnesia has many causes, but being unable to form a memory is not one of them. Memories in infancy are fragile, and context dependent, and even if retained through life are likely fragmentary, non-verbal, non-conceptually embedded, that we'd not recognize it as an episodic memory. Moreover, the medial temporal lobes and hippocampus (brain region critical to relational memory formation) are still immature before age 2, before which time the dentate gyrus in the tri-synaptic circuit of the hippocampus may not be fully operational, potentially leading to massive interference between similar memories from less efficient representational separation and a bias towards pattern completion. The last tidbit is particularly interesting as such a bias to pattern completion may support the rapid semantic knowledge acquisitions occurring early in life, which may benefit from layering of similar representations to extract reoccurring key features about the world, as opposed to the more efficient pattern separation later in life that allows more fine grained memory distinctions to be retained and allowing individual events to be better remembered.