The first three to four years of life. Plus, we generally remember pretty little about ourselves until the age of seven. “No, well, I still remember something,” you say, and you will be absolutely right. Another thing is that, upon reflection, it can be difficult to understand in question real memories or second-order memories based on photos and stories from parents.

The phenomenon known as "childhood amnesia" has been a mystery for psychologists for over a century without a clue. In spite of great amount information that can be used and technological advances, scientists still cannot say for sure why this is happening. Although there are a number of popular theories that seem to them the most plausible.

The first reason is the development of the hippocampus

It might seem that the reason we don't remember ourselves in infancy is because babies and toddlers do not fully have. But in fact, The Conversation adds, children as young as 6 months old can form both short-term memories that last for a few minutes, and long-term memories associated with events. last weeks and even months.

In one study on the topic, 6-month-old toddlers who learned how to pull a lever to operate a toy train remembered how to perform this action for 2-3 weeks after they were in last time saw the toy. And preschoolers, according to another study, are able to remember what happened several years ago. But here, experts explain, the question remains open again: these are autobiographical memories or memories obtained with the help of someone or something.

The truth is that the possibilities of memory in childhood are really not the same as in adulthood (moreover, memory continues to develop in adolescence). And this is one of the most popular explanations for "childhood amnesia." It is important to understand that memory is not only about the formation, but also the maintenance and subsequent retrieval of memories. At the same time, the hippocampus - the region of the brain responsible for all of this - continues to develop until at least seven years of age.

It is also interesting that the typical border of "childhood amnesia" at 3-4 years, apparently, shifts with age. There is evidence that children and adolescents generally have earlier memories than adults. And this, in turn, suggests that the question may be less connected with the formation of memories, but more with their preservation.

The second reason is language proficiency

The second important factor that plays a role in childhood memories is language. Between the ages of one and six years, children mostly go through the difficult process of forming speech to become fluent (or even languages, if we are talking about bilinguals). Scientists believe that the assumption that the ability to speak affects the ability to remember (here we also include the presence of the words "remember", "remember" in the lexicon) is to some extent true. In other words, the level of language proficiency in a given period partially affects how well a child will remember this or another event.

This is indicated, for example, by a study conducted with the participation of babies delivered to the department. emergency care... As a result, children over 26 months who could talk about the event at that time recalled it five years later, while children under 26 months old who could not speak remembered little and did not remember anything at all. That is, pre-verbal memories are indeed more likely to be lost if they are not translated into language.

Reason three - cultural characteristics

Unlike simple exchange of information, memories revolve around the social function of sharing experiences with others. Thus, family stories maintain memory availability over time; and increase narrative consistency, including the chronology of events, their theme, etc.

The Maori, aborigines of New Zealand, have the earliest childhood memories - they remember themselves as early as the age of 2.5 years. The researchers believe that this is due to the consistency of the storytelling of the Maori mothers and the tradition of telling family stories from an early age. Data analysis on the topic also shows that adults in cultures that value autonomy ( North America, Western Europe) tend to report earlier childhood memories than adults in cultures that value integrity and connectedness (Asia, Africa).

What was your first childhood memory? I remember how during lunch at kindergarten they brought us six apples for dessert, one for each child who sat at the table. But I wanted the sweetest apple, so, without hesitation, I took a bite of them all - and chose the most delicious.

I was about three years old. Only 5% of people remember themselves before this age. And our memories up to 6-7 years old can usually be counted on one hand. Psychologists call this phenomenon "infantile amnesia."

Like many discoveries in psychology, it belongs to the controversial psychologist Sigmund Freud. Talking to his patients, he noticed that most of them could not remember themselves in small age Moreover, if you ask about the period after six years, the number of memories increases dramatically.

Why do we remember childhood so badly?

Until scientists and psychologists have come to a single version, there are several theories about what causes infantile amnesia.

Some scientists believe that a child cannot retain memories, because he has not yet become an independent person, has not separated himself from the environment, and does not know what from the experience is his experience. Psychologist Hark Hawn conducted an experiment: he asked children to hide a toy animal in his laboratory. Two weeks later, he asked the kids where they put the toy. Only those children who already recognized themselves in the mirror (this simple psychological test helps to determine whether the child's "I" has developed), told the scientist where the animal lies. The rest did not remember where they put the toy.

Researchers Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hein published a study in Psychological Science in 2002 that found that children's memories of events are closely related to language skills. Since young children do not have enough language skills, they cannot “encode” what is happening in their life into memories.

How, then, do children not forget who their parents are, what is their name, where is their home?
Responsible for the safety of this information special kind memory - semantic memory. It is a type of long-term storage memory general concepts about the world, there are also stored rules and guidelines, information about the people around, and the knowledge that a chocolate bar is on the top shelf, and for a birthday the parents promised to buy a constructor.

“The problem is not that children cannot form memories, but that they form them in the short-term memory zone,” says scientist Paul Frankland of Toronto. - When I was doing research on the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, I constantly turned to my four year old daughter... I asked her questions about the places where we were two or three months ago, and she told what she remembers, and in some detail. But I know that in four years she will not remember it. "

Canadian researchers confirm that young children remember their early childhood better than adults. They asked 140 children between the ages of 3 and 13 to describe three of their earliest memories, and two years later they repeated the survey. Of the 50 youngest participants in the study, who at the time of the first contact with scientists were from 4 to 6 (and, accordingly, 6-8 at the time of the second survey), only five children named the same memories as the earliest. Most toddlers have forgotten what they have said about themselves before. Whereas, of the older children, more than 30% have reproduced the same memorable moments as two years earlier.

Frankland's research focused on how the hippocampus works, a part of the brain's limbic system that acts as a "transport company" for transporting and archiving our memories.

We are all born with an underdeveloped hippocampus - it takes several years to get ready for work. And while this area of the brain is "under development", our memories are stored in episodic memory, "stores" of which are scattered across the entire surface of the cortex, in other words, the cerebral cortex. Auditory memories are deposited on the lateral surfaces of the cortex, while visual memories are deposited on the posterior surface. Patricia Bayer from the University of Atlanta advises to imagine these areas as flowers - then it turns out that our whole brain is a large meadow of flowers. And the hippocampus is needed to collect a bouquet of flowers.

Frankland explains: the hippocampus starting to work in full force, is too busy transporting and archiving the child's current life, he has no time to be distracted and deal with the affairs of bygone days. Just like an accountant at the time of delivery annual report will not check data from five years ago, the hippocampus does not spend energy laying paths-connections to our earliest childhood memories, focusing on remembering as much of our life today as possible.

Canadian scientist proved his theory on rats. He took several mice, which normally have the same long-term memory problems as children, and with the help of drugs slowed down the formation of new neural connections in the hippocampus. Mice, who had previously forgotten the correct "path" in the labyrinth to cheese for several days, were able to preserve this memory for a long time and successfully found a treat weeks later. Freed from current tasks, their hippocampus found the resources to move the memory of the correct road to cheese from short-term memory to long-term memory. Soon, the scientist plans to test his theory on children with cancer - one of the effects of the drugs they are prescribed is to slow down the formation of neural connections in the hippocampus.

Freud believed that the phenomenon of childhood amnesia is associated with the need to erase the traumatic events of childhood from memory. Modern scientists still don't know why early memories don't find their place in our storage of memory, but they figured out when they start to fade.

A recent study by Patricia Bayer and Marina Larkina showed that the phenomenon of childhood amnesia “activates” at the age of 7 years. They recorded the conversation of mothers with three-year-old children about the last six bright events in the child's life - a visit to the zoo, the first day in kindergarten etc. After a while, the researchers contacted the families again and asked the children what they remembered about the six events. Since the aim of the study was to establish at what age we forget our childhood, the scientists talked to different children from the test group in different ages- with some at five, with others at six, seven, eight, nine. Thus, they were able to record how much information at what age children can reproduce.

It turned out that the guys who at the time of the survey were 5-7 years old remembered 60% of what happened to them at the age of three. Whereas those with whom they spoke at the age of 8-9 could reproduce no more than 40%.

As another group of Canadian scientists, led by Dr. Petersen, found out, the formation of childhood memories is also influenced by the environment in which the child grows. In 2009, he conducted a large-scale experiment in which 225 Canadian children and 113 children from China, aged 8, 11 and 14, participated. They were asked to write as many memories of their childhood as possible in four minutes. The guys from Canada were able to remember twice Moreover what happened to them in childhood than Chinese children, while they remembered themselves on average six months younger. Interestingly, most of their memories were associated with their own experience, while children from China recalled more what was associated with family and group activities.

This study showed that how well we remember childhood (and what we remember) is influenced by our environment. Overall, our memories of early childhood usually more visual than auditory, and more often positive than negative.

To help the child retain the memory, it is necessary to discuss the incident with as much as possible. big amount details. Do not tell the child the facts, for the formation of memories it is much more effective to nudge the child to talk about what happened. Do you remember how we went to the zoo? What did you see there? What color was the lion's fur? What sounds did the gorilla make?

It may be that when he grows up, your child will not remember how he fed the fish in the Maldives at the age of three, but regular discussion of your adventures together enriches vocabulary toddler, builds self-confidence, teaches to cooperate and brings you closer.

Photo - photobank Lori

Despite many decades of serious research, our brains still jealously hold a colossal amount of secrets. On this moment we received answers to only a small part of the questions, today it is not even possible to say with certainty why we do not remember how we were born. What can we say about more serious topics.

Why do you need memory?

Human memory can hardly be called something frivolous, this is a complex combination of biological processes created by nature:

It is a collection of static pictures that combine into a dynamic view of the past.
Memory is individual and unique for everyone, even if people witnessed the same events.
Modern theory suggests that information in the brain is stored in the form of constantly circulating nerve impulses.
It is precisely the links between nerve cells allow us to remember past events.
The psyche leaves an imprint on all memories, some of them are completely replaced, the rest are distorted.
The memory of children is especially interesting in this regard. They can come up with events that never existed in reality and sacredly believe in them. Such is self-deception.

Losing memory, a person leaves a part of his personality... Despite the fact that all the acquired skills and qualities remain, too important information about the past is leaving. Sometimes irrevocably.

Why don't we remember the early years?

In one of the scenes of the film “ Lucy»The main character recalls not only her childhood, but also the very moment of birth. Of course, she is under the influence of drugs and has abilities on the level of Superman. But how realistic is it for the average person to remember something like this, and why most do not have any memories of the first three years of life?

For a long time, this was explained on the basis of two theories.

And both proposed hypotheses are not ideal:

Each person has a dozen not the most pleasant memories.
For some, the really terrible moments of life are imprinted in their memory for many years.
There are millions of deaf and dumb people in the world, but they do not experience any special memory problems.
With the right approach, already at the age of three, the baby is able to read books, let alone speech and memorization.

Disruption of interneuronal connections

Recent studies in rats have given interesting result:

It turned out that during the intensive growth of nervous tissue, old neural connections are broken.
This also happens with neurons located in the so-called "memory center".
And since we have come to the conclusion that memory is electrical impulses between cells, it's not hard to come to a logical conclusion.
At a certain age, the nervous tissue grows too intensively, old connections are destroyed, new ones are formed. The memory of previous events is simply erased.

Of course, conducting any such experiments on children is doomed to failure, ethics and the moral side of the issue will not give way to such research. Perhaps scientists will find another way to confirm or disprove this theory in the near future. Until then, we can enjoy any of the three conventional explanations.

All this does not mean that a person cannot remember something from early childhood. Some people have fragmented memories of this period - bright images, scraps of moments and life situations... So it is necessary to devote time to the baby at any age, it was during these years that most features of the psyche.

Why are babies born blue?

When mom is first shown a baby in the delivery room, the joy of having a baby can change. experiences for his life:

V popular culture the image of a newborn was formed - a pink-cheeked screaming baby.
But in real life everything is a little different, the child will appear either cyanotic or crimson.
Thus, he will become a rosy-cheeked baby within the next couple of days, there is no need to worry.

"Abnormal" color may be physiological and pathological:

From the point of view of physiology, it is explained by the transition from placental to pulmonary circulation.
As soon as the child takes the first breath and begins to breathe on his own, the color of his skin gradually comes to pink color.
The presence of lubrication on the baby's skin plays a role.
Do not forget about the presence of fetal hemoglobin and a different blood picture from an adult.

WITH pathology everything is simpler. There are two options - either hypoxia or trauma.

But here it is already up to obstetricians to decide, so trust the opinion of specialists. Do not cheat yourself from scratch, these people have taken hundreds of births and have seen plenty of newborns. If they think that everything is in order, or that on the contrary, something is wrong, most likely it is.

What influences “childhood forgetfulness”?

Today we can explain the lack of memories of birth and the first three years of life with the following theories:

Replacement and memory eviction shocking information ... Hopefully, in the coming decades, people will not have access to such a source of stress. Curious of course to find out what we all were. But at the same time, negative emotions will not go anywhere.
The beginning of the formation of associative links with words. For a period of 2-3 years, it falls active development speech and only after that it is possible to fix massive blocks of information in memory.
Disruption of connections between neurons, due to their intensive growth. Experimentally proven in laboratory mice and rats. Looks like the most promising explanation at the moment.

But the truth is always somewhere in between. Ultimately, it may turn out that all three hypotheses are correct, but only partially. The formation of memory is too complex a process to be influenced by just one factor.

It is not so important why we do not remember how we were born - whether it is due to the intensive growth of cells or the blocking of shocking information. The main thing is that it is in 1-3 years that the character and future child's inclinations, and not in what not 7-10 years, as is commonly believed. So, attention should be paid to the baby accordingly.

Video: remember how I was born

Below is a video with interesting explanations from psychologist Ivan Kadurin, who tells why a person does not remember how he was born and very vaguely remembers his childhood:

Many people say that they would like to return to childhood - warm, cozy, carefree, with young (and living) mums and dads, grandparents ... With all the fondness for memories, these very memories are very few, fragmentary. Why doesn't a person remember childhood (meaning early)? After all, this time is so dear to us! ..

The memory of a young child is like an ocean. Gentle waves lull and optimistically set us up for the rest of our lives, but the trail of every storm - although the storm eventually ends and the water mirror is smoothed out - remains in us forever ... Maybe this is the answer to the question of why people forget what happened to them childhood? ..

Everyone around the age of 7 loses all of their earliest memories. Why can practically each of us say about ourselves: “I don't remember anything from my childhood”? Unknown. Neurologists and psychiatrists cannot yet explain this phenomenon, called "childhood amnesia" and can only make assumptions.

We forget, but our brains don't

All agree that it is in the first years of life that character, learning ability and perception of the human world are formed. Some even compare the human brain during this period with a mirror, which reflects (but also remembers due to the development of certain neural networks) emotions "falling" to us at this time.

A child loved and accepted by the family will be self-confident, creative and friendly towards the adult world. And the unloved one? Offended? Overlooked, practically abandoned to the mercy of fate? Instead of focusing on learning the world and self-development in the future, he will focus on repelling threats and preparing for defense. Such a child will later try to compensate for the feeling of anxiety and uncertainty by adopting a model of risky sexual behavior, bad habits, fits of anger, overeating.

Moreover, many people who, as children, have experienced strong grievances, are looking for sources of self-worth, dignity not in themselves, but “outside” - in their acceptance by others. Therefore, they are doomed to the eternal pursuit of praise and words of recognition, they live, forced to do something constantly, to prove, to receive regular awards. At the same time, they remain ruthless in assessing themselves, do not spare punishment and humiliation for themselves.

Why don't I remember my childhood?

Until the fourth year of life, our personality is formed, which means the way of functioning in society, psychologists explain. Many skills acquired at this time are so strongly rooted in us that they are no longer subject to further education. The same applies, unfortunately, to the traumas experienced during this period. They also constantly shape our adult behavior, preferences and fears.

But why then does it happen that a person remembers almost nothing from early childhood (at the level of consciousness)? It is strange that we are losing all such an important (if not the most important) stage of our life.

Childhood amnesia extends over a period of up to about 3 years. According to scientists, this may be due to the development of the brain, and specifically - the hippocampus, which is the "home" for human memory. Old memories must make way for new ones. And so we forget. We can’t return neither to the moment when our father first took us in his arms, nor when for the first time consciously saw the smile of our mother ... Memories are dying, although they formed us earlier. Not all, however, disappear without a trace ...

Neurologists know the concept of the "stress axis". It turns out that traumatic, intense emotional experiences from childhood cause permanent changes in the brain. An axis runs from the hypothalamus through the pituitary gland to the adrenal glands responsible for the release of stress hormones and is responsible for our response to stress. If she is alarmed by the strong negative emotions in the first months and years of childhood, then all our life we will react to such stimuli with a painful sharpness.

Babies absorb information like a sponge - why then does it take so long for us to form the first memory of ourselves? The BBC Future columnist decided to find out the reason for this phenomenon.

You met for lunch with people you have known for a long time. Together you organized parties, celebrated birthdays, went to the park, enjoyed eating ice cream, and even went on vacation with them.

By the way, these people - your parents - have spent a lot of money on you over the years. The problem is that you don't remember it.

Most of us do not remember the first few years of our life at all: from the most crucial moment - birth - to the first steps, the first words, and even to kindergarten.

Even after we have a precious first memory in our heads, the following "notches in memory" are rare and fragmentary until older age.

What is the reason for this? The gaping gap in the biography of children upsets parents and has baffled psychologists, neurologists and linguists for several decades.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who coined the term "infant amnesia" more than a hundred years ago, was completely obsessed with this topic.

Exploring this mental vacuum, you involuntarily wonder interesting questions... Is our first memory true or is it made up? Do we remember the events themselves or only their verbal descriptions?

And is it possible one day to remember everything that seems to have not been preserved in our memory?

This phenomenon is doubly mysterious, because otherwise babies absorb new information like a sponge, forming 700 new neural connections every second and using language learning skills that any polyglot would envy.

Judging by the latest research, the baby begins to train the brain while in the womb.

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08/13/2016 But even in adults, information is lost over time, if no attempts are made to save it. Therefore, one explanation is that infant amnesia is simply a consequence of the natural process of forgetting events that took place during our life.

The answer to this question can be found in the work of the 19th-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who conducted a series of pioneering studies on himself to uncover the limits of human memory.

In order to make your brain at the beginning of the experiment like clean slate, he came up with the idea of using meaningless rows of syllables - words composed at random from randomly selected letters, such as "kag" or "slans" - and began to memorize thousands of such letter combinations.

The forgetting curve that he compiled from the experience indicates the presence of a surprisingly rapid decline in a person's ability to remember what he has learned: in the absence of special efforts the human brain weeds out half of all new knowledge within an hour.

By the 30th day, a person remembers only 2-3% of what he learned.

One of Ebbinghaus's most important takeaways is that forgetting about information is predictable. To find out how much the memory of an infant differs from that of an adult, simply compare the graphs.

In the 1980s, making appropriate calculations, scientists found that a person remembers surprisingly few events that took place in his life from birth to six or seven years of age. Obviously, there is something else here.

Interestingly, the veil over memories is lifted for everyone at different ages. Some people remember what happened to them at the age of two, and some did not have any memories of themselves until the age of 7-8 years.

On average, snatches of memories begin to appear in a person from about three and a half years old.

More interestingly, the degree of forgetfulness varies from country to country: average age, in which a person begins to remember himself, may differ in different countries for two years.

Can these findings shed any light on the nature of such a vacuum? To find the answer to this question, psychologist Qi Wang of Cornell University (USA) collected hundreds of memories in groups of Chinese and American students.

In full accordance with national stereotypes, the Americans' stories were longer, more detailed and with a clear emphasis on themselves.

The Chinese expressed themselves more succinctly and with an emphasis on facts; in general, their childhood memories began six months later.

This pattern is supported by many other studies. Longer, more self-centered stories seem to be easier to remember.

Self-interest is believed to contribute to memory function, because when there is own point events are filled with meaning.

“It's all about the difference between the memories 'There were tigers in the zoo' and 'I saw tigers in the zoo, and although they were scary, I had a lot of fun,' explains Robin Fivush, a psychologist at Emory University (USA).

Repeatedly conducting the same experiment, Wang interviewed the mothers of the children and found exactly the same pattern.

In other words, if your memories are vague, your parents are to blame.

The first memory in Wang's life is a walk in the mountains near her home in the Chinese city of Chongqing with her mother and sister. She was then about six years old.

However, until she moved to the United States, it never occurred to anyone to ask her how old she remembered herself.

“In Eastern cultures, childhood memories are of no interest to anyone. People are only surprised: “Why do you need this?”, She says.

If society lets you know that these memories are important to you, you will keep them, ”says Wang.

First of all, memories begin to form in young representatives of the New Zealand Maori people, which is characterized by great attention to the past. Many people remember what happened to them when they were only two and a half years old.

The way we talk about our memories can also be influenced by cultural characteristics, and some psychologists believe that events begin to persist in a person's memory only after he has mastered speech.

“Language helps to structure, organize memories in the form of a narrative. Putting the event in the form of a story, the impressions received become more orderly and easier to remember over time, ”says Fivush.

However, some psychologists are skeptical about the role of language in memorization. For example, children who are born deaf and grow up without knowing sign language begin to remember themselves from about the same age.

This suggests that we cannot remember the first years of our life just because our brain is not yet equipped with the necessary instrumentation.

This explanation was the result of an examination of the most famous patient in the history of neurology, known under the pseudonym H. M.

After the hippocampus was damaged in H. M. during an unsuccessful operation to cure epilepsy, he lost the ability to remember new events.

“This is the focus of our ability to learn and remember. If it weren't for the hippocampus, I wouldn't have been able to remember our conversation later, ”explains Jeffrey Feigen, who researches issues related to memory and learning at St. John's University (USA).

It is interesting to note, however, that a patient with a hippocampal injury could nevertheless assimilate other types of information - just like a baby.

When scientists asked him to draw a five-pointed star from its reflection in a mirror (it's harder than it seems!), He improved with every attempt, although every time it seemed to him as if he was drawing it for the first time.

Perhaps in early age the hippocampus is simply not sufficiently developed to form full-fledged memories of current events.

During the first few years of life in baby monkeys, rats, and children, neurons continue to be added to the hippocampus, and infancy none of them are capable of memorizing anything for long.

At the same time, apparently, as soon as the body stops creating new neurons, they suddenly acquire this ability. “In young children and babies, the hippocampus is very poorly developed,” says Feigen.

But does this mean that in an underdeveloped state, the hippocampus eventually loses its accumulated memories? Or are they not forming at all?

Since childhood events can continue to influence our behavior long after we forget about them, some psychologists believe that they will probably remain in our memory.

“The memories may be stored in some place that is currently inaccessible, but this is very difficult to prove empirically,” explains Feigen.

However, we should not overly trust what we remember about that time - it is possible that our childhood memories are largely false and we remember events that never happened to us.

Elizabeth Loftes, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine (USA), has dedicated her scientific research exactly this topic.

“People can pick up ideas and start visualizing them, making them indistinguishable from memories,” she says.

Imaginary events

Loftes herself knows firsthand how it happens. When she was 16, her mother drowned in the pool.

Many years later, a relative convinced her that it was she who discovered the surfaced body.

Loftes was flooded with "memories", but a week later the same relative called her back and explained that she was mistaken - the body was found by someone else.

Of course, no one likes to hear that his memories are not real. Loftes knew that she needed indisputable evidence to convince doubters.

Back in the 1980s, she recruited volunteers for research and began tossing “memories” at them herself.

Loftes came up with a sophisticated lie about childhood trauma, which they allegedly got lost in a store, where they were later found by some kind old woman and taken to their parents. For more credibility, she dragged into the story of family members.

“We told the study participants, 'We talked to your mother, and she told us about what happened to you.'

Almost a third of the subjects fell into a set trap: some managed to "remember" this event in all its details.

In fact, sometimes we are more confident in the accuracy of our imaginary memories than in the events that actually took place.

And even if your memories are based on real events, it is quite possible that they were subsequently reformulated and reformatted taking into account the conversations about the event, and not their own memories of it.

Remember when you thought how much fun it would be to transform your sister into a zebra with a permanent marker? Or did you just see it on a family video?

And that awesome cake that your mom baked when you were three? Maybe your older brother told you about him?

Perhaps the biggest mystery is not why we do not remember our earlier childhood, but whether our memories can be believed at all.