Do you also wonder why you don't remember a lot of memories in your childhood? Like the most significant and dramatic moments in your life that are most precious to your parents like all of your firsts, your first baby steps, first words, first favorite lullaby and all those stuff. And if you think about it, you rarely can recall vivid memories not until you were already running around, studying in school, making friends. There seems to be a gap in that part of your life and this actually became the focus of study of Sigmund Freud 100 years ago, which he called "infant amnesia".
A lot of questions can branch out of this and you might have also wondered if there's a way to recall those memories back, or if they were real or just made up and so on and so forth.
According to the latest research, babies are like sponges that are able to absorb new information every second and have begun training their minds before they were even born. However, just like adults, the memories still get lost over time, which explains that infant amnesia happens naturally because it is natural for people to forget experiences throughout their lives.
Qi Wang, a psychologist at Cornell University performed experiments which led him to conclude that the reason why we can hardly remember our experiences when we were babies because our brains have not yet fully developed the necessary part of the brain that is in charge of a person's memory - the hippocampus. During infancy, the hippocampus isn't fully develop yet which is why it cannot build a rich memory yet of a specific event and it is during the childhood years that neurons are still being added to hippocampus and that's not yet enough to create long lasting memories.
"For young babies and infants the hippocampus is very undeveloped," says Jeffrey Fagen, who studies memory and learning at St John's University.
