What is childhood amnesia?
Child or infantile amnesia refers to the general inability of people to remember specific events from the early years of their lives. Typically from before the first three and sometimes four years of life. In studies, the average age of the earliest memory reported is about three-and-a-half years-old. Women tend to have better memories for this than men and on average could go back further than men. In general when people respond to surveys, there are far fewer memories before the age of eight than for other periods.
Why might childhood amnesia be happening?
There a number of ideas. The most controversial belonged to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who believed childhood amnesia was a response to sexual repression. Another theory points to our lack of language skills before the age of three. It may be that our memories need to be stored conceptually and associated with the kinds of words and meanings that we don't really get to grips with until we're about three years-old. Perhaps all of your childhood memories are still intact but in a form you can't access anymore.
Yet another view is that young childrens' brains simply don't have the tools to store memory properly. Babies are born with billions of brain cells but relatively few connections between them and so the areas of the brain responsible for processing memories are immature. In our brains, connections are everything and brain imaging studies on babies and toddlers suggest that between 8-24 months is when their brains are most active at growing more connections.
So do we remember nothing at all?
Recent research has challenged the belief that young babies have little or no capacity for long-term memory.
New born babies are much cleverer than previously thought. They show accomplished learning skills from early on and studies have shown that they can even remember sounds they were exposed to whilst still in the womb. One American researcher, Andrew Meltzoff, has totally overturned our view of babies and intelligence over the last twenty years. His work demonstrated sophisticated memory abilities in children as young as nine months.
One experiment involved letting children of 9, 14 and 24 months watch how an adult moved a toy in a very specific manner for just 20 seconds only. The next day, all the children repeated the same action - they had remembered it, recalled it and repeated it after many hours delay. Meltzoff's work showed that babies do have long-term memory processing. Other studies have since suggested that babies as young as three months may have similar abilities.
If you have a young child, around 3-4 years-old, then you'll know they have the ability to store long-term memories of events that took place up to two years ago, even though they have virtually no understanding of time, they'll still remember vivid experiences. So what's happening to this mechanism that means all of this will soon be forgotten? It's a paradox still waiting to be solved.