Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember your first time walking, your birthday party, or other similar childhood events? It is a long-held belief that infants can’t hold memories due to a not fully developed hippocampus. However, new studies have begun to prove this untrue. Our early memories are not lost; they’re just difficult to retrieve.
Despite your first few years being an important segment of your life, we still cannot recall experiences from them. This is known as infantile amnesia. A study conducted with fMRIs (functional MRI scans) on infants from 4 – 25 provided valuable evidence supporting this theory. We now know that a baby as young as 12 months can encode specific memories. Previous trials on other animals also support this, as they showed signs of locked-away memories.
The average infant can imitate actions, recognize faces, and respond to repeated stimuli from a young age. However, we now know that these repeated actions are a result of the hippocampus at work – and that they are signs of infants being able to hold onto information. Our brain has been actively storing info even though we cannot recall that info today.
In the future, studies involving infantile amnesia and the inability to recover early memories may provide insights into adult forms of memory loss, such as amnesia. If we harness the knowledge we have gained from this, we could discover cues or external stimulation to recover both memories locked away as a child and as an adult.
RELATED STORIES
- https://interestingengineering.com/health/we-dont-lose-our-childhood-memories-scientists-say-theyre-just-out-of-reach?group=test_a
- https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-reveal-why-we-cant-remember-our-earliest-years/
- https://news.yale.edu/2025/03/20/why-dont-we-remember-being-baby-new-study-provides-clues
- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade
- https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/16/why-cant-we-remember-our-lives-as-babies-or-toddlers
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