Why does the brain delete memories from before the age of 2?
2023-12-08
During holidays and festivals, when relatives gather together, the most common thing they say is, "Do you remember when you were first born, I even hugged you?" Faced with the hopeful little gazes from relatives, most people can only laugh and their minds are empty.
Parents often talk about childhood anecdotes at the dinner table, discussing how naughty and courageous their babies are, and how they often fall to the ground with bruises and bruises.
No matter how elated the elders were, looking down at the scars on their knees that were still alive, the person involved had no impression of these things.
My classmates in elementary school may still remember a few, but my classmates and teachers in kindergarten are all blurry. All I can think of are the mobile vendors selling cones at the entrance of the kindergarten and the cartoons that start at six o'clock.
Most people have no memory, even a vague impression, of anything that happened before they were two years old.
What is the cause of this childhood amnesia? Can the first beautiful memories of this world be recovered?
It’s not that people have no memory at all before the age of two, but they simply don’t know where to place these memories.
Many people may remember the name of the first cup of milk tea they bought after queuing for two hours, but most likely they cannot remember the brand of milk powder they drank when they were two years old.
Autobiographical memory is a unique human memory system that develops across childhood and adolescence and is responsible for organizing past memories into a person's overall life memories. Episodic memories of unique times and places are critical to defining who we are. But before the age of two, children are unable to form or store episodic memories for later recall, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia.
Psychologists believe that everyone who cannot clearly recall the details of their childhood memories suffers from Childhood Amnesia. Those memories of infancy and early childhood seem to have disappeared completely. What is the problem?
The emergence of self-awareness is crucial to the formation of memory in infants and young children. The way babies pay attention to the world is systematically different from adults, and the way their brains work is also different. Children seem to be letting the world decide what they see, rather than their autonomous consciousness deciding what they see.
Having the ability to recognize yourself in the mirror is an important point in the development of self-awareness. In the mirrored red dot experiment, researchers placed a red dot on the infant's forehead. If the baby can realize that it is itself in the mirror, it will touch its forehead with its hands. Babies before one and a half years old cannot realize that the person in the mirror is themselves.
The first time I knew who I was, I started crying when I knocked over the water glass on the table.
When the little baby still has difficulty walking and is frowning and frustrated because he cannot get the toys outside the cradle, he has independent self-awareness for the first time. Jerome Kagan believed that the roots of self-awareness emerge in the second half of the second year of life.
For example, when an 18-month-old baby tries to imitate his parents in dressing independently, he is already frowning hard before he picks up his socks. This feeling of distress is also a life experience that a person will have only after he has self-awareness.
An experiment on amnesia in children shows that as we age, fewer memories from early childhood are retained.
Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Emory University in the United States collected the memories of different groups of children from the ages of five to nine, and compared them with the same events described by the subjects' mothers.
For the same event that happened when they were three years old, five-, six- and seven-year-old children can remember about 60% or more of the details of the event, but these children can only remember less than 40% when they are eight or nine years old. details of the incident. This conclusion is also of great significance for studying the memory distribution of adults.
Children do not develop the ability to clearly describe something in their memory and retain these memories long-term until they are six to seven years old. Kagan believes that the main cause of amnesia in children is biological rather than sociocultural.
Psychologists believe that everyone who cannot clearly recall the details of their childhood memories suffers from Childhood Amnesia. Those memories of infancy and early childhood seem to have disappeared completely. What is the problem?
The emergence of self-awareness is crucial to the formation of memory in infants and young children. The way babies pay attention to the world is systematically different from adults, and the way their brains work is also different. Children seem to be letting the world decide what they see, rather than their autonomous consciousness deciding what they see.
Having the ability to recognize yourself in the mirror is an important point in the development of self-awareness. In the mirrored red dot experiment, researchers placed a red dot on the infant's forehead. If the baby can realize that it is itself in the mirror, it will touch its forehead with its hands. Babies before one and a half years old cannot realize that the person in the mirror is themselves.
The first time I knew who I was, I started crying when I knocked over the water glass on the table.
When the little baby still has difficulty walking and is frowning and frustrated because he cannot get the toys outside the cradle, he has independent self-awareness for the first time. Jerome Kagan believed that the roots of self-awareness emerge in the second half of the second year of life.
For example, when an 18-month-old baby tries to imitate his parents in dressing independently, he is already frowning hard before he picks up his socks. This feeling of distress is also a life experience that a person will have only after he has self-awareness.
An experiment on amnesia in children shows that as we age, fewer memories from early childhood are retained.
Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Emory University in the United States collected the memories of different groups of children from the ages of five to nine, and compared them with the same events described by the subjects' mothers.
For the same event that happened when they were three years old, five-, six- and seven-year-old children can remember about 60% or more of the details of the event, but these children can only remember less than 40% when they are eight or nine years old. details of the incident. This conclusion is also of great significance for studying the memory distribution of adults.
Children do not develop the ability to clearly describe something in their memory and retain these memories long-term until they are six to seven years old. Kagan believes that the main cause of amnesia in children is biological rather than sociocultural.
