Scientists have finally figured out why we don't remember the events of our early childhood
Encyclopedic memory has always been considered an indispensable attribute of a great mind. Looking at how an erudite man easily operates with many numbers, facts and quotes, we partly experience an inferiority complex. Because, to be honest, most of us do not have a particularly tenacious memory. And when we cannot remember some detail, then with chagrin we state that sclerosis begins!
However, University of Toronto neurophysiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland argue that forgetfulness is not sclerosis, but a sign of high intelligence. The study, in which they studied what makes the brain get rid of certain memories, was published in the scientific journal Neuron.
The ability to memorize large amounts of information is indeed beneficial, they reasoned. But what about such a common personality type as the "absent-minded professor"? Remember though anecdotal (but true!) Stories about how Newton could get lost in his own house, going to dinner. And the famous composer and professor of chemistry Alexander Borodin constantly forgot the name of his wife (she was Ekaterina - author). This did not prevent them from being brilliant scientists, people of incredibly high intelligence.
Richards and Frankland conducted the study in the pediatric department of University Hospital Toronto. The fact is that scientists have long been struggling with the riddle: why do we completely forget the events of our earliest childhood? After all, becoming adults we remember almost nothing of what happened to us before the age of 4. The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, who was one of the first to study this phenomenon, coined the term for it - "infant amnesia". A number of hypotheses have been put forward on this score, but no clear answer has been formulated. Meanwhile, Canadian scientists believed that the key to understanding how memory works had something to do with this infant amnesia.
“We assumed that the purpose of memory is not at all to store the smallest details for centuries,” says Paul Frankland, one of the developers of the scientific program “Child and Brain Development”. - Rather, the task of memory is to optimize the decision-making process. Therefore, it is important for the brain to forget about irrelevant circumstances and instead focus on the things that are really important for making informed choices. Therefore, the ability to forget is just as important a component of our memory as the ability to remember.
Why do we forget certain things? After a series of experiments, scientists came to the conclusion: this is due to the appearance of new neurons in the hippocampus - they are generated by stem cells. The hippocampus is the area of the brain that is responsible for converting short-term memory into long-term memory. Our memories are encoded in connections between neurons. When new neurons appear, new circuits for their connections are formed and memory is rewritten to this newly formed network. But information that was not often requested in the "old" neural connections is considered outdated, not relevant, and the connection with it in the network is weakened. Why waste energy on something that is not used?
“This explains why children do not remember what happened to them in the first years of life,” says Frankland. - At this time, they learn the world around them with incredible speed and in the hippocampus they produce much more neurons than in adults. And the process of "rewriting" information on a new neural "network" is much more intensive. Accordingly, the brain feverishly generalizes new life experience, adopts optimal decisions and … forgets the information already worked out. Otherwise, the large amount of irrelevant details will make it difficult to make an informed choice.
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This means that if you forget something, you simply do not need it, scientists say.
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