Why can’t we remember our early years? Do babies create memories at all? | News of science and technology

Have you ever been convinced that you remember being a child? A moment in a crib or taste of cake for your first birthday?

There are great chances that these memories are not real. Decades of research suggest that most people cannot remember personal experiences from the first few years of life.

However, although we cannot remember as a child, a new study has discovered new evidence that babies take into the world around them, and can also begin to form memories far earlier than she once thought.

How did the study function and what did she find?

A study published this month in the science of researchers from Yale and Columbia University has revealed that babies at the age of 12 months can form memories through the hypocampus – a part of the brain that also stores memories in adults.

To watch this, researchers used a specially adapted brain scan for newborns during one session. This allowed them to watch the baby’s brains reacted while they were awake and watched the pictures of the face and object. The parents remained close to their babies, which helped them be calm and awake.

The study is 26 newborns between the ages of four to 25 months displayed a number of pictures. It was found that if the baby’s Hippocampus was more active for the first time they saw a particular picture, they would look at the same picture longer when it appeared for a short time, next to the new one – suggesting that they recognized it.

“Our results suggest that the baby’s brain has the ability to form a memorial-but how long these memories have been an open question,” said Tristan Yates, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Columbia University of Psychology and the leading author of the study.

This is the first time scientists have directly noticed that the memory begins to shape in the brain of a waking baby. The previous one research He relied on indirect observations, such as watching whether babies respond to something known. This time, however, the researchers noticed a brain activity associated with certain memories of how they form in real time.

Most of the studies of past brain activities were done while babies were sleeping, which limited what researchers could learn about conscious memory construction.

What does this tell us about memories in early life?

The findings suggest that episodic memory – a type of memory that helps us remember certain events and contexts in which they took place – begins to develop earlier than scientists have previously believed.

Until recently, it was widely believed that this type of memory did not begin to form only after the baby’s first birthday, usually about 18 to 24 months. Although the findings from the scientific study were the strongest in infants over 12 months of age, the results were also noticed in many younger babies.

So what age do we start making memories?

It is now understood that babies begin to form limited types of memory when young are two or three months. They include implicit memories (such as motor skills) and statistical learning, which helps infants to discover patterns in language, faces and routines.

However, episodic memory, which allows us to recall certain events, as well as when they have happened, take a long time to develop and requires the maturation of the hypokampus.

According to Cristina Maria Alberini, a professor of neural sciences at New York University, a period of infant age when Hippocampus develops its ability to form and store memories can be “critical”. This window could be important not only for memory, but also “great consequences on mental health and memory or cognitive disorders,” she added.

Memories created in early childhood usually do not last a very long time, it is believed, which could explain why we cannot remember them later in life. In a permanent study at the Human Development Institute Max Planck in Germany, 20-month-old toddler managed to remember Which toy was in which room up to six months, while the younger children only kept memory for about a month.

Why don’t we remember anything from infant age?

People are almost universal inability to recall personal experiences from about three years ago the phenomenon is known as “infantile amnesia”.

For decades, scientists have believed that this was happening simply because the baby’s brain was too immature to store episodic memories.

But a scientific study found that babies really create memories. It’s a mystery why These memories become inaccessible as we become older.

One explanationScientists say, it is that babies brains are undergoing a fast neurogenesis-there to the point of making new neurons in the brain. This fast growth can disrupt or “write” existing memories. In animals studies, when scientists slowed the process with children’s mice, mice could keep memories much longer – similar to adult mice.

There is also a hypothesis that episodic memory requires a language to describe them and a “sense of yourself” to connect with them. Since these skills are not completely developed for up to three or four years, the brain may not yet have a tool to organize and retrieve memories of the way adults do.

Some researchers also think that the process of oblivion could serve a developmental purpose. Leaving himself with certain early experiences, the brain could better focus on the construction of general knowledge – to realize how the world works, for example – without disturbing detailed memories that no longer serve the purpose.

Can some remember the events of infant age?

Some claim that they can remember that they are a child, but there is no evidence that what they describe is true episodic memories.

According to a Yale and Columbia study, this belief usually stems from a psychological process called “original wrong influence”.

People can remember information, such as those who cried during their first hairstyles, but not where that information came from. They could unconsciously attribute the memory of personal experience when it actually came from a photo, family stories or a parental retelling. Over time, the line between “real” and “reconstructed” is blurred.

The study shows that early family stories, frequent representations of photographs or cultural emphasis on early development can contribute to this phenomenon.

Yale is currently conducting a new study in which parents will regularly record their babies, whether with their phones tilted from the child’s point of view or using a camera on the toddler. Later, as children become older, researchers will show children of these old videos to see if they recognize experiences, primarily by monitoring brain activity, to discover how long they can take early memories, Yates told Al Jazeera.

Can an early memories recall later in life?

It is discussed whether the memories in early life are completely deleted or simply become inaccessible and can eventually recover.

Yates said that, although the latest study does not answer this question, preliminary evidence from other studies in the Laboratory of Yale shows that memories in early life can be revoked in early childhood, but not later childhood.

“I think the idea is that at least some of our memories in early life can exist in some form in our brain because it is adult fascinating,” she said.

Adult rodent studies have shown that early memories can come back through approaches such as optogenetics – activating specific brain cells that are believed to store these memories. This acts by identifying brain cells involved in memory design and then later by reactivating the reactivation of these same cells, causing the animal to remember the memory.

Techniques such as optogenetics cannot yet be used in humans, but the study of rodents suggests that the procedure we reach for is a memory where the problem is, and not that the memories exist at all, according to Paul Frankland, a senior scientist at a hospital for sick children in Toronto.

“There may be natural conditions in which these memories in early life become more affordable,” he added.

Psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud believed that memories in early childhood were not lost, but buried deep in unconscious and that psychotherapy could help them bring them to the surface by changing mental states.

However, Frankland said this was a “controversial area” because it was “difficult to check the truth of recovered memories.”