At what age we are able to remember ourselves, and why exactly from him - this question was probably of interest to everyone. It is not surprising that many scientists have been looking for the answer. Among them are the neurologist Sigmund Freud and the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Physicist Robert Wood had his own theory of memory. But it was Freud who coined the term "infantile / infant amnesia."
Usually, individual childhood memories begin at about three years old, and more detailed ones at six or seven. True, there are exceptions: sometimes children talk about events that happened to them when they were not even one and a half years old. But in this case it is difficult to understand whether the child remembers it himself or whether the stories of adults "helped" him.
So, Leo Tolstoy wrote in his story “My Life” that he remembers himself from the age of 10, from the christening: “These are my first memories. I am bound, I want to free my hands, and I cannot do it. I scream and cry, and I myself hate my cry, but I cannot stop."
Robert Wood believed that a child's memory of an event could be reinforced with complementary associations. To exclude the influence of adult stories on the child's memories, he set up the following experiment. For a week, every day I put a statuette of a dog in the fireplace and put a piece of cannon powder on its head. Holding his one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth on his knees, Wood set fire to gunpowder, and it flashed brightly. At the same time, the physicist said: "This is fazi-wazi." When the granddaughter was about five, she once said, "Fazi-wazi." When Wood asked what it meant, she replied: "You put the dog in the fireplace and put a fire on its head."
However, childhood memories are unreliable. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftes confirmed this with an experiment: she wrote a plausible story about an experience that volunteers attracted to the experience allegedly experienced as a child when they were lost in a supermarket. And for persuasiveness she referred to the stories of her parents. Of course, the parents did not say anything like that. As a result, 30% of the participants in the experiment recognized the story as true, and some even "remembered" it in detail.
L. N. Tolstoy in childhood and adulthood.
It turns out that if a person accepts a fiction, then he simply supplements someone else's story with personal inner images and ceases to distinguish from real memories. Therefore, studying the memory of children is much more difficult than that of adults.
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Freud believed that memories are “erased” in order to supplant the child's first experiences. Trauma can be both early moments associated with knowing your body, and accidentally spied on parental sex.
Scientists put forward other versions as well. The second explanation is more materialistic: the child does not have a sufficiently developed part of the brain responsible for recording memories - the hippocampus. It is fully formed by the age of seven and continues to develop in adolescence, which is why childhood and adolescence is an ideal period for learning. And babies, alas, do not have a sensible instrument for recording events - there is no recording itself.
The third explanation: the growing nerve cells are to blame for everything. We used to say that “nerve cells do not recover”. But early childhood is just the time of intensive development of brain cells and the formation of new structures from them. True, in the course of this development, some of the former structures become unnecessary. Fresh memories are actively accumulating - and old ones are just as actively "erased" so as not to overload the child's still fragile brain with information. Everything is logical: why store something that, from the point of view of a growing organism, will never be needed again? However, there is a hypothesis that early memories are stored somewhere, but we do not have access to them.
Sergey Gorin, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, political strategist