
Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? - logikblok
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160726-the-mystery-of-why-you-cant-remember-being-a-baby
======
vilhelm_s
The thing I find most interesting about childhood amnesia is that that,
despite this headline, it's not that we don't form early memories. We do form
them, and then as we get older we forget them again.

If you ask a 5-year-old child, they will accurately remember things that
happened to them when they were 2. Then they gradually forget, and at 11, the
early memories are completely lost.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Fading_memories)

~~~
ktRolster
My hypothesis (along with your observation) is that as we age, the way we
remember things is different. At a young age, it's all sounds and images. Then
language gets added to it, and we start seeing events in different ways. Our
old ways of accessing information (in the brain) are used less often, and we
forget.

~~~
extr
This touches on an interesting aspect of my very early childhood memories. Do
you ever have dreams where you "know" you're in a familiar location, like your
old high school or childhood home, but they have a completely different
feeling to them, and may or may not have the same layout as in real life? My
very early childhood memories have a similar sort of dreamlike quality. I know
objectively the memory takes place in the neighborhood I grew up in, but there
is a certain atmosphere or feeling that isn't the same and that I can never
quite relay or capture today. I've wondered if this isn't due to the way these
early memories are formed and stored.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Sometimes, while dreaming I will recognize and recall that I've had this dream
before, maybe many many times...then I feel a sense of loss, like losing a
friend. A moment of de ja vu I guess. It is a weird feeling though, and I
don't even know if I truly had the dream before, or if it is a false memory!!

------
extr
Perhaps someone on HN has had a similar experience to me. I can "remember" my
mother telling my father that she was pregnant with my little brother, which
means I was less than 21 months old at the time. I have some specific details
I've corroborated with my parents (like the fact that my mother put a sign in
the driveway to surprise my father when he got home from work), which they
were amazed that I knew.

But I realized a few years ago that the memory, despite having true elements
and feeling legitimate, takes place in the wrong location: the house that we
moved into shortly after he was born. So I'm sure at some point I either was
told this story and confused it for a memory, or I held onto the "gist" of the
original memory long enough and then recalled/rewrote it enough times that the
setting was changed to the place where the majority of my childhood took
place. But I find it amazing that I still feel like it's a real memory.

~~~
kem
Don't be so sure that its from something you heard and imagined that you later
incorrectly recalled as a memory. You can also have retroactive interference,
which is when a real memory gets contaminated by events that happened later.

So it's possible you do have a "real" memory of your mom telling your father
she was pregnant, but that your brain substituted details from later.

Retroactive interference is a very established phenomenon. My guess is a lot
of things like what you described are real memories, and people assume they're
imagined events recast as memories because they simply don't believe in early
memories. I doubt your parents were discussing details like that later, but
you'll probably never really know.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
That happened to me. I have a very early memory of a trivial thing (eating a
radish and not liking it) from when I about two. It happened at my family's
apartment, before we moved into our first house. I later visited that
apartment when I was ten, and a lot of the details match my memory(e.g. the
location of my Dad's little garden relative to the stairs) EXCEPT the actual
visualization of the apartment building, which got replaced with an image of
one near our new house twisted to fit the memory.

------
nabla9
I'm not an expert, but I have read few books about brain development. It's
amazing that we can remember things from the childhood. Retained memories have
likely result of multiple recall-rewrite cycles.

Human brains practically rebuild themselves few times during development.
Neural migration stops when the child is born, but synaptic pruning,
myelination, synaptogenesis, apoptosis continues years after the birth.
Cortical white matter continues to increase until the child is 9-12 years old,
grey matter development continues in phases. Superior temporal cortex is not
mature until the child reaches adulthood 17-18 years. Our first memories are
from brains that were very different.

This is why child neurologists are their own specialty among neurologists.
Child brain and adult brain are different things.

~~~
woliveirajr
Could you list some of those books?

~~~
nabla9
Adolescent Brain Development: Implications for Behavior. 978-0123979162

Fundamentals of Brain Development
[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674026742&co...](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674026742&content=toc)

------
xenadu02
I actually did some casual research into this 3 years ago before my kids were
born. All the theories and speculation in the article have been disproven -
specifically theories about autobiographical memory or narrative memory being
important. What actually happens is the brain undergoes periods of
shift/growth/change that nuke the ability to recall earlier memories. Most of
the incorrect explanations come from adult-oriented bias: The memories are so
far gone we can't even remember that we were once capable of remembering
earlier times.

Children can remember events clearly from before they acquired language. No
adult has ever been shown to have this ability (it is always due to mis-
remembering the time period or making educated guesses based on other
knowledge). As children get older and gain a better mastery of language they
can often describe _more_ memories from very early childhood, indicating that
the memories exist even when kids lack the ability to describe them in words.
These abilities to remember early childhood (even <1 yr old) begins fading
around ~10 yrs old. By your teenage years those early memories are mostly
gone.

~~~
absurdmind
Where have you read about the very early memories, like <1 year? There is a
thing that puzzles me most of my life. When I was a teenager we had a family
discussion about early memories. I have described several ones I've always
assumed to be my earliest, but I've never knew what age they are related to.
In one of them my cradle was involved and I was told by my mom that I was
removed out of cradle at the age of 3 months.

------
gingerlime
I wonder what kind of effect today's technology has.

I mean, my son is 3, and already has hours of videos stored. And he likes
watching those videos of himself and family even now.

How is this going to affect memory formation later in life? Should we hide
those videos from him to avoid some kind of a feedback-loop that can somehow
mess with his memory?

~~~
ljf
I wonder the exact same thing, our boy is 2 and as soon as he could hold a
phone his favourite videos were of himself. Going to be interesting "do you
really remember X happening or is the video something that you rewatched so
much you couldn't help but recall?"

~~~
visarga
We mostly recall only what we photograph. I'm conscious of this every time I
take photos.

~~~
ljf
I'm not sure that's true. I barely took any photos until I was about 20 but
have a rich memory of unphotographed periods of my life and experiences.

How did people remember before cameras?

------
martin-adams
I read recently that our memories are us recalling the last time we remembered
it. They did a study which showed those that intoduced errors in their
memories later recalled them as facts the next time.

So my thought is that childhood amnesia could be down to children living in
the moment and simply don't spend time recalling past events. Only later do we
consider events as being past, present and future.

~~~
thret
They absolutely do though. I only see my nieces and nephews a few times a
year, and they always remind me of things we did the last time I visited.

~~~
martin-adams
That's sort of the point. You're seeing them giving them a reason to recall
the memory. They will then carry those memories into adulthood.

My first memories are roughly when I was 3 years old. So recalling the first
2-3 years of my life is pretty much impossible. That also happens to be the
age when I probably didn't communicate previous experiences to anyone else.

But lets face it, I actually have no clue on this topic, just trying to piece
together what I've read about and my own understanding.

------
scotty79
Isn't it simply because of this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning)
?

------
dwaltrip
I think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are
onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories
from before we could talk.

It seems to me that we can go a layer deeper than words and language. An
infant has an incredibly shallow model of the world in their brain. At birth,
it is almost entirely blank. As we become toddlers, we build up our model of
the world at an astonishing rate. I wonder if it most memories don't survive
this process. Perhaps the world model grows too quickly, and the old memories
are unable to be integrated. I do agree that language plays a role in this,
but I would guess that most of this happens at a level beneath language.

At some point though, the existing model is robust enough that new memories
more firmly take root and can be better integrated into future changes of the
model (even though it is still being developed at a rapid rate throughout
childhood). Naturally, this point occurs at different ages.

------
senorsmile
My earliest memory was from 13 months old. It was the second surgery I had on
my foot, and I woke up towards the end of the surgery. Apparently anesthesia
for small children is quite difficult. I have a couple other very faint
memories from 2 and 3 years of age, but none nearly as strong as my first.

------
robotjosh
I remember my 1 year old birthday party and plenty of stuff before that. I
remember finding an unprotected outlet and putting a butter knife in it. It
made me involuntarily fling the knife across the room. My mom came in and got
mad at me for crying for "no reason".

------
kefka
I remember one distinct memory from when I later figured I was 1.5 years old
(18 months).

My great grandmother (mom's mom's mom) was on her deathbed. I remember meeting
her, with my parents one last time before she passed away. I distinctly
remember the tile on the wall was robin's egg blue up to about 5 feet tall.
She had such frail skin, it was like tissue paper.. I held her hand knowing
that she was nearing the end.

I was later (years later) told that my parents were terrified that I was going
to do something and rip her skin. I also found out she stayed alive long
enough to see me off. She died by away the next morning.

By all accounts, I shouldn't remember this. But I told them details from what
my own parents forgot.

------
douche
My theory is that memory is more about the stories that we tell and retell
ourselves, than any sort of objective reflection of reality. If you're not
refreshing the stuff in your cache, it ages out and goes away.

~~~
jackvalentine
My understanding is that's correct - memories are reformed when you retrieve
them. This is also how you can introduce errors in to your recall.

------
joggery
Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? My guess is it's
because human memories are _ideas_ and like all our ideas they depend on other
ideas for their meaning.

However when we were young our ideas about the world were very different from
what they are now: much simpler and with many falsehoods. So our earliest
memories don't make sense to us and can't be recalled.

What we call our 'first memory' may just be the earliest thing we can _recall_
and make sense of _now_.

------
Stenzel
I have a memory of age one, bathing in a tin tub in the garden of father's
boss. No language, but the impression that life can be good had such an impact
that I remembered.

------
anigbrowl
I find this mystifying. I have numerous memories from being a toddler. Among
friends' children, some have more fully-formed personalities than others. My
favorite one has an excellent memory (like she remembers where things are in
our house even though she only visits every 2 or 3 months) and also highly
developed preferences on clothing (colors, acceptable combinations of what to
wear etc.).

------
Dramatize
I'm pretty sure most of my early memories are not of the actual event, but of
the times I thought of the memory.

Like others have mentioned, at 5 years old I could remember details of being
2-3yrs. I think I'm now going back to the 5-year-old rather than the 2-year-
old.

------
SeanDav
The article also goes into some detail on false memories. There have been some
horrific instances of injustices caused by this, particularly false memories
of child abuse and sex abuse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome)

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-
memori...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memories-
abuse-convict-innocent)

------
Joyfield
Louis CK on the subject : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-
SU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_OFbDn-SU)

~~~
crummy
Calvin & Hobbes also:
[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/01](http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/01)

------
eva1984
First memory when I was about 1.5 years old, where my family, specifically the
man who I now called father is having a dinner.

------
DavidWanjiru
Could this working of the brain be related to how, when you're sleeping,
something happening in the real world is incorporated in real time into a
dream you're having? That always amazes me, how our brains do that.

------
jack9
I still have a few memories from when I was 2.

Nothing from ages 1,3,4. I can actually recall things from every other year.

~~~
CoryG89
Including year/age 0?

~~~
jack9
No, not 0 either.

------
dschiptsov
The hypothesis that natural language acquisition "restructures our memories"
is promising one. We cannot recall what has been stored using a different
"encoding". There are no associated labels (which is what words are) attached
to earlier experiences, so "search" returns nothing, or something we
mistakenly attributed to the prior-language experiences.

------
mSparks
Another item in the long list of obvious stuff so called experts in
intelligence purport not to know.

simple answer you wont get from her majesties propoganda channel.

"memory" is a learnt skill. just like everything else, it takes a few years to
learn it.

~~~
orf
Not everything is a learned skill, and you have absolutely nothing to base
that opinion on other than obviously loathing those pesky experts and... the
BBC?

~~~
mSparks
no, i loath the "experts" rolled out by the bbc as experts.

that memory is something we learn is not a new thing (technicallly the skill
of forgetting, which is where autism comes from), the second post even pointed
out synaptic pruning.

its not just known to be a learnt skill, we know the exact biologic process by
which it manifests itself.

the "experts" are the ones building the ai that will take all your jobs. and
you wont find them giving interviews on the beeg.

~~~
daveguy
You speak as if you know quite a bit about this subject. I'm curious, what
makes you an expert rather than an "expert"?

~~~
mSparks
i have been building such stuff for the last 20 years.

even had stuff stolen by darpa. which is why i dont share much now.

[http://www.theborgmatrix.com](http://www.theborgmatrix.com)

~~~
cknoxrun
I should point out that your link doesn't work for me. I should also point out
that it is unwise to claim absolute authority in science, especially the
biological sciences.

~~~
mSparks
Yeah I saw, rogue c&p in the "hide it from most of the internet" script.

It's an old site migrated from my first machinations back in the early 2000s.

And I make no claim to "absolutely authority".

But take your pick which "expert" you want to listen to.

The experts rolled out by the "love thee blue blooded leader appointed
appointed by god" channel.

Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been
doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwYAv--
inN0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwYAv--inN0)

~~~
orf
> Or some random guy on the internet who likes downvotes and says he's been
> doing it so long it now pays for him to do this every other day.

It says on your site you graduated in 2007. I'd take the experts any day.

~~~
mSparks
finished electronic engineering in 98, just as all the sensible engineers f'd
off to south korea and china.

2007 was the second time round.

around the time of

[http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-
plagarism](http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagarism)

and

[http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-
plagiarism-2](http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/darpa-plagiarism-2)

its now valuable enough capital that i dont technically have to work anymore
and can spend my time flying helicopters and enjoying luxury yachts.

Although life isnt exactly that simplistic. It does give me some pleasure to
know for certain the outcome was the us and uk loosing the world leadership.

And now you got Trump and May as your top representatives.

