Have you ever been convinced that you remember being a baby? The moment in the crib or the taste of the first birthday cake?
Perhaps those memories are not real. Decades of research suggest that most people cannot remember personal experiences from the first few years of their lives.
But even if we don’t remember being babies, new research may find new evidence that babies are robbing the world around them, and they may also begin to form memories much faster than once thought.
How did the research work and what did you find?
A study published in science this month by researchers from Yale and Columbia University revealed that young 12-month-old babies can form memories through the hippocampus.
To observe this, the researchers used a brain scan specifically adapted for the infant during a single session. They could see how the baby’s brain reacted while they woke up and looked at images of their faces and objects. The parents stayed close to the baby, which helped them to calm and be wary.
This study showed a series of images in 26 infants between 4 and 25 months of age. We found that if a baby’s hippocampus became more active when he first saw a particular image, he looked at the same image longer when he reappeared next to a new image, suggesting that he recognized it.
“Our results suggest that the baby’s brain has the ability to form memories, but how long these memories last is still an open question,” said Tristan Yates, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s School of Psychology and a lead author of the study.
This is the first time a scientist has directly observed how memories begin to take shape in the awake baby’s brain. Previous studies relied on indirect observations, such as looking at whether babies respond to familiar things. However, this time, the researchers observed brain activity associated with specific memories formed in real time.
Past research into brain activity has been done while babies are sleeping, limiting researchers’ ability to learn about conscious memory construction.
What does this tell us about early life memories?
Findings suggest that episodic memories that help us remember specific events and the context in which they took place – begin to develop faster than previously believed scientists.
Until recently, it was widely believed that this type of memory did not begin to form after a baby’s first birthday, usually until 18-24 months ago. The results of scientific studies were the strongest in infants over 12 months of age, but the results were also observed in very young babies.
So, at what age do we start making memories?
It is understood that babies begin to form a limited type of memory when they are young for a few months. These include implicit memory (e.g. motor skills) and statistical learning. This helps infants detect language, face and routine patterns.
However, episodic memory, which can remember a particular event, can remember where and when it occurred, but it takes time to develop and requires hippocampal maturation.
According to Christina Maria Alberini, a professor of neuroscience at New York University, the period of early childhood when the hippocampus develops the ability to form and store memories may be “critical.” This window may be important not only for memory but also for “severe impacts on mental health and memory and cognitive impairments.”
Memory formed in childhood usually doesn’t last very long, but it is believed. Ongoing research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany allowed 20-month-old infants to remember which toys were in which space for up to six months, while younger children only retained memory for about a month.
Have you remembered anything since you were a child?
People who are unable to remember personal experiences before the age of three are known as infant amnesia.
For decades, scientists have believed this happens simply because a baby’s brain is too immature to store temporary memories.
However, scientific research shows that babies actually form memories. The mystery is why those memories become inaccessible as we age.
One explanation, according to scientists, is that a baby’s brain undergoes rapid neurogenesis. It is the fast-paced creation of new neurons in the brain. This rapid growth can disrupt or “write down” existing memories. In animal studies, when scientists slowed this process in baby mice, mice were able to retain memory longer as well as adult mice.
There is also the hypothesis that episodic memory requires language and their associated “sense of self” to explain them. These skills do not develop completely until around the age of 3 or 4, so the brain may still not have the tools to organize and retrieve memories like adults.
Some researchers also believe that the forgetting process may be useful for developmental purposes. By letting go of certain early experiences, the brain may be able to concentrate on building general knowledge – for example, understanding how the world functions is no longer distracted by detailed memories that are no longer useful for purposes.
Do some remember the events from their childhood?
Some people claim to remember being a baby, but there is no evidence that what they describe is a memory of a real episode.
According to Yale and Columbia studies, this belief usually stems from a psychological process known as “mised ejection of sources.”
People may remember information such as crying during their first haircut, but it’s not where that information came from. They may unconsciously attribute memories to personal experiences when they actually come from photographs, family stories, or parental narratives. Over time, the line between “real” and “reconstruction” becomes blurry.
Research shows that early family stories, frequent photo viewing, or cultural emphasis on early development can all contribute to this phenomenon.
Yale is currently conducting new research in which parents regularly photograph babies, either by calling a cell phone from the baby’s perspective or using head-mounted cameras on toddlers. Later, as children age, researchers will show the children these old videos, recognise experiences, primarily by monitoring brain activity, and find out how long their early memories last, Yates told Al Jazeera.
Will early memories be remembered later in life?
There is debate as to whether memories of early life have been completely erased or simply become inaccessible and ultimately recoverable.
Yates says that the latest research will not answer this question, but preliminary evidence from other Yale Lab studies shows that in childhood, it can be recalled in childhood.
“I think the idea that some of our childhood memories can exist in some way in our brains as adults,” she said.
Research in adult rodents shows that early memories can be brought back through approaches such as optogenetics, and activates specific brain cells that are thought to store those memories. This works by identifying brain cells involved in the formation of memory and then reactivating those same cells using light, causing the animal to recall memory.
Paul Frankland, a senior scientist at a hospital hospital in Toronto, says rodent research is not yet available in humans, but it does not suggest that memory exists at all, but that it is where the problem is located.
“Perhaps there are natural conditions where these early life memories become more accessible,” he added.
Psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud believed that childhood memories were not lost, but were buried deep within the unconscious, and that changing mental states would help psychotherapy bring them to the surface.
However, Frankland said this is a “controversial territory,” saying it would be “difficult to verify the truthfulness of recovered memories.”
