

Does my two-year-old daughter remember the womb? - timinman

My mom once read a theory that very young children can sometimes remember the birth experiences, or even living in the womb, so when my younger brother was about one, she asked him if he remembered being born.  He didn't say anything, but what he did astounded us: He raised each of his arms and used his palms to press hard against both sides of his head, straining to squeeze his skull!  It seemed like his was trying to show us what it was like to be squeezed from the birth canal.<p>Fast Forward about twenty years.  Last night my two-year-old was afraid so my wife and I let her sleep in our bed with us.  After I woke up this morning I heard her quietly wispering to herself, over and over: "siss-SAW siss-SAW, siss-SAW sissSAW".<p>I listened for a long time, thinking she was probably 'talking' in her sleep, and finally quietly asked what she was saying, in case she wasn't asleep.<p>She wasn't.  She looked over at me and smiled. "Siss-SAW."<p>"Sister?"<p>"Siss-SAW."<p>We went back-and-forth like that a couple times.  I realised I didn't understand what she was saying, which is not uncommon, though her speech is getting clearer - she's almost three.  I decided to try a different angle, "Where did you hear that?<p>"Outside," she said first, and then she said, "when I was a baby in mommy's heart." I asked her if she meant she'd heard that sound before she was born, when she was living inside mommy's tummy (inaccurate, I know).  She said yes.<p>It hit me.  That siss-SAW sound was like the swishy sound a beating heart makes.  You hear it coming out of the speakers of a heart monitor.  We usually think "thump thump", but that is more a description of how a heartbeat feels than how it sounds.  Was my daughter just telling me what I wanted to hear, or was she waking up this morning reminiscing about her mother's heartbeat from inside the womb?
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michael_dorfman
_My mom once read a theory that very young children can sometimes remember the
birth experiences_

Is you mother a neurologist? A memory researcher? A cognitive scientist,
perhaps?

It's pretty well established that long-term memory formation doesn't really
begin until after age 1. Here's a brief interview with a researcher:
[http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/11.07/01-memory.htm...](http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/11.07/01-memory.html)

 _Was my daughter just telling me what I wanted to hear?_

Sure sounds that way.

~~~
jacquesm
That study tells of kids being given a toy for a little while, then revisiting
them months later and seeing if they remember what to do with the toy.

For some reason I find that less than convincing, maybe they weren't
interested in it, maybe it wasn't significant enough.

Birth is pretty much the single largest event in a babies first year of life
trauma wise, I wouldn't be surprised if some remnant of that experience
remained because of its intensity and I wouldn't be surprised if a baby
remembered the sounds of being in the womb because of the duration of the
exposure. Compared to either of those a toy seems to be pretty insignificant
and if there is one thing the brain is really good at it is discarding stuff
that isn't relevant. Older children that would remember the toy might have
been more captivated by it. Babies that I know can be utterly fascinated by
some things and completely oblivious to other things, then reverse their
interest a while later for no reason that I as an adult can fathom.

Of course the memories of any early experience will fade over time but I
wouldn't rule them out so quickly based on this specific experiment, which
seems to assume rather a lot about the subjects desire to remember that
particular toy and about vision, not memory per se. It's a pretty indirect
test.

If something doesn't interest me I won't remember it even today, and I take it
as read that my 'long term memory' has been formed by now.

Interesting reading:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=do+babies+remember+the+womb>

If there is a definitive study that babies can not form memories that could
make it through to the age of the OPs child then you'd have to wonder how come
babies age 1 can use words and seem to be able to understand some pretty
complicated concepts as well as having learned how to use a good part of their
bodies musculature, it's not at all rare to have 1 year olds that can walk or
even run. If they can do all that without long term memory you'd have to posit
some mechanism that allows them to do all this with a memory that spans at
most a day. After all, if every day is a new day then you would have to
explain the kind of character development you seen in babies during their
first year and all this other stuff that I think is definitely memory based
_without_ the ability to form long term memories.

Also, vision is a relatively new thing for a newborn, they've seen colours but
not actual objects and it takes them a fair amount of time to start to make
sense of our 3D world. Sound is different, babies can hear pretty good at a
relatively early time during the gestation period (about 5 months in), which
means that they then have 4 months to be exposed to their moms heartbeat in a
way that they could be aware of it.

Also, you can refresh memories by re-thinking of something that you still
remember and you can remember that experience as something by itself, so even
with only a shorter term memory you could theoretically carry things over a
longer period. Shades of 'memento' there.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I'm certainly not claiming that infants have the equivalent of Korsakoff's
syndrome. And there certainly has been research that indicates that babies
respond differently to the speech rhythms of the language they are exposed to
in utero than foreign languages, and that infants are calmed by recordings of
the fetal heartbeat/mother's heartbeat combination. In fact, when my eldest
daughter was born, I bought a CD ("Music to Be Born By", by Mickey Hart of the
Grateful Dead) designed for this specific purpose.

My point is that there is pretty broad agreement that 2 year olds do not have
conscious memories of birth or in utero life, of the nature described by the
OP's anecdote. In fact, the sound of the maternal heartbeat was presumably so
constant that it is difficult to imagine a fetus forming a conscious memory of
it, as it would lack the "novelty" necessary for memory formation.

~~~
jacquesm
> the sound of the maternal heartbeat was presumably so constant that it is
> difficult to imagine a fetus forming a conscious memory of it, as it would
> lack the "novelty" necessary for memory formation.

That's a good point, actually. If something is repetitive enough it fades in
to the background. I remember working next to an open window in Toronto while
there was major construction going on to replace the road right next to the
office. The windows were open because we didn't have money for AC and it was
right under a roof. The first two days were terrible, after that we stopped
hearing the jackhammers. Only when they finished did we notice...

~~~
timinman
You stopped noticing them, but you do all the same have a very vivid memory of
their existence.

------
JasonInman
I believe it.

~~~
timinman
Welcome to HN, Jason!

