In support of the idea, they've found that they could make infant mice's memories last longer by experimentally throttling down neurogenesis.įollow Joseph Castro on Twitter. Last month in the journal Science, scientists proposed a related hypothesis: The genesis of new brain cells essentially erases memories, because the new neurons disrupt brain circuits established by the older cells. This amnesia usually affects the memories that occurred before. That is, we conserve, for example, the skills acquired in this stage (for example, walking or talking), but not how we did it. However, other researchers have argued that language can't be the whole story, because other animals also show infantile amnesia.Īnother theory holds that memory formation is more or less normal in infants, but continual brain maturation interferes with the storage of memories. Infantile amnesia is defined as the inability to remember the phenomena and situations that occurred in our early childhood, at an autobiographical level. Language was thought to be vital for encoding autobiographical memories, and children's long-term memories appear to form around the time that they start speaking. Some scientists have proposed that our earliest memories remained blocked from us, because we had no language when they formed. But 2- and-3-year-olds can remember and talk about events that happened months, or even more than a year, before, according to a 2000 study published in the journal Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. But theories abound.įor a time, scientists believed that infants simply didn't have the mental capacity for declarative memories (their brains are "immature"). Though scientists have discounted Freud's 100-year-old idea on the matter, there is still no consensus about the origin of childhood amnesia.
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