Why we don't remember early childhood: scientists have made a startling discovery
Have you ever wondered why you can't remember any moments from your early childhood, no matter how hard you try? A new study published in the journal Science suggests that these memories are actually stored, but we simply cannot access them later in life.
Scientists studied the memory of 26 babies aged 4 to almost 25 months, dividing them into two main groups: babies under one year old and children aged one to two years old. During the experiment, the children were placed in an MRI machine and shown a series of images, each of which was shown for two seconds. The purpose of the experiment was to record the activity of the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for emotions, memory, and the autonomic nervous system. CNN writes about it.
After a short pause, the kids were shown two images simultaneously: one they had already seen and a new one. Scientists monitored how long the babies' eyes were directed. If the child focused on the familiar image, it indicated that they recognized it, which meant that their memory was working. Otherwise, it could be assumed that the process of memorization is not yet sufficiently formed.
After analyzing the data, the scientists compared the MRI results of those infants who recognized the pictures with those who did not show interest in familiar images. It turned out that in older children, the hippocampus was significantly more active in memory formation. In addition, only this group activated the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain area responsible for decision-making and information recognition.
Why exactly the memory encoding process starts to work more actively in infants after 12 months is still not fully understood. However, researchers suggest that this is due to the intense changes that occur in the child's body during this period.
"The infant's brain is developing rapidly at this time: perception changes, language is formed, motor skills are improved, and the hippocampus increases significantly in volume," explains Yale University professor and lead author of the study Dr. Nick Turk-Brown.
His team continues to study why adults cannot recall their first experiences. According to Turk-Brown, the problem is probably that the hippocampus in adulthood does not receive the right "requests" to search for memories, as they were stored based on the unique childhood perception of the world around us.
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