Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?

The Guardian

15-02-2025

Life must be great as a baby: to be fed and clothed and carried places in soft pouches, to be waved and smiled at by adoring strangers, to have the temerity to scream because food hasn't arrived quickly enough, and then to throw it on the ground when it is displeasing. It's a shame none of us recalls exactly how good we once had it.
At Christmas, I watched my daughter, somehow already a toddler, being passed between her grandfathers and thought, wistfully: she won't remember any of this. In parks, I push her endlessly on swings, making small talk with fellow parents who have been yoked into Sisyphean servitude, and think, ruefully: why won't she remember any of this?
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In 1905, Sigmund Freud coined the term 'infantile amnesia', referring to 'the peculiar amnesia which, in the case of most people, though by no means all, hides the earliest beginnings of their childhood'. More than a century later, psychologists are still intrigued by why we can't remember our earliest experiences.
'Most adults do not have memories before two to three years of age,' says Prof Qi Wang at Cornell University. Up until about age seven, memories of childhood are typically patchy.
Until relatively recently, researchers thought that young brains weren't developed enough to form lasting memories. But studies in the 1980s showed that toddlers as young as two can form memories and recall events from months earlier in great detail. Exposure to early childhood trauma is also well documented to increase the risk of later anxiety and depression. The paradox of infantile amnesia, says Cristina Alberini, a professor of neural science at New York University, is 'how is it that those experiences affect our life forever if they are forgotten?'
Alberini's research in animals has found that memories formed during the infantile amnesia period are, in fact, stored in the brain until adulthood, even though they aren't consciously remembered. In both animal and human adults, forming and storing long-term memories about one's life experiences isn't possible without a region of the brain known as the hippocampus. Alberini's work has shown that the region is also important in early memories and suggests that infantile amnesia occurs because of a critical period where the hippocampus develops due to new experiences. 'It makes a lot of sense with all the literature of trauma,' she says. 'If the children are learning difficult situations in early childhood, maybe they don't remember the specifics, but their brains are going to be shaped according to that experience.'
Differing experiences may also explain why the age at which people recall their first memories varies significantly. Wang, an expert in how culture affects autobiographical memory, has shown that the earliest memories in Americans date from an age of about 3.5 years, almost six months younger than in Chinese people. The American memories tended to be more self-focused and emotionally elaborate, while the Chinese recollections tended to centre on collective activities and general routines, she found.
'In the Asian context, identity and sense of self is less defined by being unique, but [more] about your roles and your relationship with others,' Wang says. To that end, memories may be less important for defining identity than for informing behaviour and imparting lessons. 'If you want to use memory to construct a unique sense of identity, you probably remember a lot of idiosyncratic details,' Wang says.
Another explanation for the discrepancy seems to be how parents discuss past experiences with their children. In New Zealand Māori, first memories emerge earlier than in those of a European background, at about 2.5 years old. Prof Elaine Reese at the University of Otago, who studies autobiographical memory in children and adolescents, points to a strong emphasis on oral traditions in Māori culture but also elaborative conversations when reminiscing about past events.
Reese has tracked groups of children from toddlerhood to adolescence, finding that individuals who had richer narrative environments in childhood could recall earlier and more detailed first memories as teenagers. This was the case for children whose mothers asked open-ended questions and were more detailed when talking about shared past experiences, as well as children who grew up in extended family households.
'We know that from the time [children] are, say, six-month-old babies, they're capable of some kind of mental imagery of something that happened from the previous day or week,' Reese says. 'It's taking that mental image and describing it in words that I think is so important for helping them to hold on to that memory over a lifetime.'
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Ironically, for parenting influencers who post about elaborate holidays in the name of creating 'core memories', the early events that children retain can be surprisingly mundane – 'things that most parents would never reminisce elaboratively about', Reese says. 'The classic example from my own research is a child who remembers seeing a worm on the footpath one time.'
There is debate between memory experts as to the role of language in infantile amnesia. Human researchers suggest memories may be limited by an inability to give language to early experiences. 'But there must be something more fundamental that also plays a role because we see this same [infantile amnesia] effect in non-linguistic animals like rats,' says Prof Rick Richardson of the University of New South Wales.
The brain lays down memories not as discrete files as on a computer but as networks of neurons across the brain. Recalling a memory activates those networks and strengthens the links between neurons. This is not to say memory is stable: 'Every time you revisit a memory and think about it, you're changing it,' Reese says.
Repeated suggestions can lead people to create images and form false memories, Wang says, citing a famous case in Jean Piaget, the influential child development psychologist. Piaget had a clear memory of his nanny fighting off a would-be kidnapper when he was two – but years later, she confessed that she had fabricated the story.
In a 2018 survey, 39% of respondents reported their first memories occurred at age two or younger. The researchers suggested that 'improbably early' memories, such as recollections of being pushed in a pram or walking for the first time, were likely fictional and based on photographs or family stories. But though memory is malleable and young children are more suggestible, 'confabulation is not that common', Wang says. 'Under normal conditions, even children do not just take for granted whatever you tell them and incorporate those memories.'
So if experiences of our early milestones – first birthday, first steps, first trip to the beach – seem to be cached somewhere in the brain, why can't we consciously access them? While psychologists say it can be adaptive to forget, that doesn't explain why the memories formed before age seven seem to decay faster than when we're adults. Alberini hypothesises that early unrecalled memories may function as schemas upon which adult memories are built. Like the foundations of a home, they remain concealed but crucial.