Why You Can't Remember Being a Baby

[00:00:00]Look at a photo of yourself as a  one-year-old. You probably think you're looking at a younger version of you, and  that you've simply forgotten those early years.

[00:00:08]But biologically… that’s not true.

[00:00:10]Your brain didn't just misplace those  memories. It actively formatted the hard drive. The baby in that picture? It isn't you.  It’s a completely different entity whose mind was physically disassembled and overwritten so  that your current consciousness could exist.

[00:00:25]This is why you can’t remember being a baby.

[00:00:28]Chapter One - The Stranger in the Album You’ve probably heard the myth that the human  body physically replaces itself every seven years. But like a lot of the internet’s  favorite and oft-repeated pop science, it’s only half the real truth. While cells  like your skin and gut cells - incidentally, the ones most exposed to harsh sunlight and  powerful acid - will replenish every few weeks. So, you’ll keep plenty of your baby cells  until you drop dead. For example, only about 40% of the cells in your heart will cycle throughout  your life, the rest are here for the long haul.

[00:00:59]But your memories?

[00:01:00]They aren’t nearly as durable.

[00:01:02]You can’t remember being the baby in a photo,  but the scary thing is seeing that photo will make you think you remember it. In a process that  scientists call Infantile or childhood amnesia, a series of complex - but not mysterious -  processes wipe that mental state clean. In their place is a big, murky void that’s vulnerable  to modern day information impressing upon it.

[00:01:24]The fact is, the baby you in the album is  completely alien to the modern day you. So alien, that someone could show you a photo of a different  baby and you’d start to believe that it was you.

[00:01:35]Little by little, the old memories are shoved  into the paper shredder and replaced by a new one.

[00:01:41]When does it stop being the old you?

[00:01:43]It’s such a disturbing question that philosophers have two different models for this: The  Ship of Theseus and The Sorites Paradox.

[00:01:51]In the first, if, over a number of decades,  you slowly replace each part of a ship in repairs until none of the original  parts remain, you’re left to wonder: Is it the same ship? In the second,  you need to consider a pile of sand: How many grains of sand do you have to remove  before it stops being a pile? Or in our case, how many memories inside that baby brain  need to fade before the baby fades, too?

[00:02:15]Are you real? Have you always  been you? Or, scientifically, were you the second tenant waiting in the wings  during infant brain development, ready to move in?

[00:02:24]Chapter Two - The Hardware Illusion The first thing you need to understand is  that it’s not because babies are working with weak hardware. In fact,  the exact opposite is true.

[00:02:34]A baby’s brain is actually a  high-performance Ferrari compared to the busted down Honda Civic of a brain  most of us are working with by middle-age.

[00:02:42]As an adult, your brain makes up only 2% of  your overall body mass. Before you’re born, it’s over 10 times that, 25% just before birth.  And even after birth, the brain still accounts for an impressive 10% of the baby’s body mass.  And for the first 3 months of your life, your brain will continue to grow by 1% per  day in a period of incomparably rapid brain development. The infant brain is a powerful data  sponge, with an astonishing 50% more synaptic connections than an adult brain. If you had the  kind of brain that you had as a baby as an adult, imagine how quickly you could pick up new skills,  learn new languages, and develop your personality.

[00:03:22]The neuroplasticity is unparalleled.

[00:03:24]More than a million neural connections are  created every second in the infant brain, and this process exacts an insane metabolic  cost. 60% of a baby’s energy goes directly to the development of their brain. Even at 3 years old,  your brain will be twice as active as the brain of an adult. When you look at it through this  lens, the average baby or toddler is a crawling, babbling supercomputer before they can even  recite their ABCs. Clearly, you don’t lose all your baby memories just because your baby  brain is an inherently weak piece of hardware.

[00:03:55]But the wholesale deletion of your infant self  isn’t a bug in the system, it’s a feature.

[00:04:00]The infant brain has no problem encoding short  term memories. But when it comes to long term memories, there’s a structural bottleneck  built into a vital part of your brain: The Hippocampus. It’s a small part of your  limbic system that organizes your memories by picking which short term memories to  encode deeply as long term memories. As the authoritative study on the matter puts it,  “during infancy, when hippocampal neurogenesis levels are high and freshly generated  memories tend to be rapidly forgotten.”

[00:04:28]Basically, out with the old, and in with the new.

[00:04:31]And when that old is out, it’s out forever.  But that’s not the only process that seems deadset on annihilating your  childhood self. It turns out, the very growth of your brain might  just be the ultimate nail in the coffin… Chapter Three - The Hard Drive Format The 2014 research of Paul W Frankland  and Sheena A Josselyn into the nature of neurogenesis - that’s the creation of new  neural tissue - has completely altered our view on how the brain assassinates itself in order to  be reborn. They call it a “Clearance Mechanism”.

[00:05:00]It’s a way to prevent the brain from clogging  itself up with junk data, like passwords for accounts you no longer use, old lottery numbers,  and what you had for breakfast 3 years ago to the day. Keeping all that stuff in your brain would  likely feel more like a curse than a superpower.

[00:05:15]The particular Clearance Mechanism that Frankland  and Josselyn identified has everything to do with how new cells are generated in the subgranular  zone of the dentate gyrus. That’s where they first multiply before later joining up to the  circuitry of the hippocampus. This is what happens when you’re having new experiences  and, in the process, creating new memories.

[00:05:35]Imagine you had a box full of plastic balls,  kind of like the ones you’d find in a ballpit.

[00:05:40]Then we give you a new ball, and tell you  that we want you to move it to the bottom of the box… Without moving any of the other  balls in the process. Impossible, right?

[00:05:49]That’s exactly how the new cells  created in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus interfere with  the structure of the hippocampus.

[00:05:56]You can’t add something new  to a closed system without fundamentally altering what’s already  in there. To quote the study’s results, “as new cells integrate into the hippocampus  they necessarily remodel existing circuitry.

[00:06:08]This remodeling may degrade memories  already stored in those circuits.”

[00:06:12]It’s not just adding to the  circuits, it’s scrambling them.

[00:06:16]The more you learn, the less you know.

[00:06:18]The process of growing up, when viewed in light  of these findings, is almost like upgrading a system’s RAM while the computer is still  running. It’s a violent incursion that upsets the established order and rips through the mental  architecture that’s already there. This research is an insane paradigm shift for a huge number of  reasons, like analyzing the way that established and new memories interact. It also shows that by  targeting specific parts of the brain, we may find new avenues of treatment for memory-eroding  disorders like amnesia and dementia.

[00:06:47]It also continues carrying a disturbing  pattern: The “You” that exists as a baby seems utterly doomed by fate due to processes inherent  in your body and brain as you grow up. And the insane thing is, we’re still only scratching  the surface of just how many natural processes in the body seem to be pitching in on  this conspiracy against your own mind.

[00:07:08]Chapter Four - The Synaptic Massacre The human brain is like real  estate: Space is always a factor.

[00:07:15]The size of your skull will always  limit the physical size of your brain.

[00:07:18]The physical size of your brain will in  turn always limit the number of synaptic connections possible within it. Like  I said earlier, when you're an infant, your brain is an absolute sponge for all of life’s  data around you. In that time you’ll pick up a lot of valuable information, from language  to knowing you shouldn’t touch a hot stove.

[00:07:36]Inevitably, like someone who clicks the download  link on every file they see on the internet, your brain is also going to vacuum up a  lot of junk, which can range from useless to actively dangerous. That is why,  when a person begins to hit puberty, their mind and memories undergo a violent period  of culling known as “Synaptic Pruning”, which, in practice, means an insane massacre  of countless memories. And if you’re watching this and aged between 12 and 30, it’s  happening to you right now. You’re right there in the liminal space between the death of who  you were and the becoming of who you’ll be.

[00:08:09]And what synapses will be pruned depends entirely  on each individual person, too. Think of it as the principle of “use it or lose it”, where the  synaptic connections that you use most over this period - the memories of people and places  you see most often, the skills you use most and so on. - will strengthen. The connections  that are underused wither away and die.

[00:08:30]You’ll receive plenty of benefits  from the synaptic pruning process, from increased focus to clearer memory  to better sensory processing. But for the “previous tenant” of your body, this  is basically the fulfilment of armageddon.

[00:08:42]You hit your absolute peak level of synapses at  around age 3, and between then and 10 years old, you’ll see an absolutely insane 50% of  your extra synapses completely wiped out.

[00:08:54]It’s like a city wiping out half its roads and  bridges to reduce congestion on the others. The fascinating but tragic part of all this is that  you’ll never actually truly know what you lost.

[00:09:05]But even if you could get over the  neurological hurdle to understand all this, there’s another locked door behind this  one, and this is purely a psychological one… Chapter Five - The Mirror and the Ghost When do you actually start  thinking of yourself as You?

[00:09:21]It sounds like the kind of question that  people at a party would start asking each other at around 2 AM, after a few too  many. But it’s actually a question that psychologists have pondered in depth for  decades. They’ve even devised a brilliant test to investigate: The MSR, or  “Mirror Self-Recognition”, test.

[00:09:37]In 1970, psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. had a  bright idea that a human or any other animal’s degree of self-awareness could be measured by  their ability to recognize their reflection as themself, and not as another animal. The  specific variant for human babies is mostly known as “The Rouge Test”, where rouge makeup is  used to draw a dot somewhere on the child’s skin that they couldn’t see. Usually in places like  their forehead. If the baby saw the red dot in their reflection and immediately reached for their  own forehead rather than for the mirror itself, it was a reasonably strong sign that  they had a degree of self-conception.

[00:10:12]But here’s the interesting part.

[00:10:14]In the first 12 months of their life, for the  most part, babies almost uniformly fail the mirror test. They do not see the strange little  bald drooling creature in the mirror and think, “That’s me”, because their sense of “Me” has  not, in any real way, solidified. They instead, in the earliest iterations of human studies,  saw their reflection in the mirror as a “social playmate.” It’s only between 20 and 24  months that recognition rose above 65%, so before that, almost half of infants  were simply seeing strangers in the mirror.

[00:10:46]How can you store memories of the self  without even knowing what the self really is? It leaves babies with the need to find  a different way to contextualise memory, but our main way of doing that doesn’t  exactly become pre-coded, either.

[00:10:59]Chapter Six - The Language Lock One of the many items in the human toolkit  that have given us dominance over planet Earth is our ability to communicate with  verbal and written language. Our vocabulary, in many ways, is our way of drawing  the borders of our imagination.

[00:11:14]So, what does this mean for the  brain before we develop language?

[00:11:18]If feeling and sensation are the gooey organs of  memory, then language is the skeleton that holds it all together. Before language, this so-called  “pre-verbal” or “somatic” memory is encoded in pure sensation. But as children gain language  skills in their first 2 to 3 years of age, their way of encoding memory radically changes to  use language as a kind of mental storage medium.

[00:11:39]And when the medium changes, the message is  lost. A 2002 study by Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hayne tried to discover whether children  acquiring new vocabulary gave them the power to describe pre-verbal memories. The results of  their test still feel incredibly shocking today: “By the time of the test, children of all ages  had acquired most of the vocabulary necessary to describe the target event. Despite this,  they did not translate preverbal aspects of their memory into language during the test. In no  instance did a child verbally report information about the event that was not part of his or her  productive vocabulary at the time of encoding.

[00:12:17]We conclude that language development  plays a pivotal role in childhood amnesia.”

[00:12:22]In other words, as soon as you’re able to say,  “Bye bye, baby”, that’s exactly what you should be saying to all your memories before that  time. But whenever you learn strange and distressing information like this, you might  find yourself looking for exceptions. Like, what happens to the memories of people  who can remember pretty much everything?

[00:12:40]Chapter Seven - The HSAM Paradox Sometimes, memory can be a curse.

[00:12:45]Picture the most embarrassing moment of  your life. Imagine being able to recall that moment with absolute vivid clarity for  the rest of your life. Such is the struggle of people with Highly Superior Autobiographical  Memory, or HSAM. This means that a person with this condition can flawlessly remember  everything that happened to them specifically.

[00:13:06]This condition is exceedingly rare,  with only around 60 people ever being successfully diagnosed. Research is still  ongoing, but currently the best guess as to why it affects people is a larger  temporal lobe, for memory processing, and a bigger caudate nucleus, which plays a role  in learning. And the existence of a condition like this raises a fascinating question: Even  among people who supposedly have perfect recall, why can so many of them still not  remember their earliest years as a baby?

[00:13:33]For the most part, these hyper-realistic  memories begin in late childhood. This means that even when you have hyper memory  ability, you still can’t escape the infant memory guillotine that is childhood amnesia. It’s  simply a natural and inevitable part of life.

[00:13:49]But it feels impossible to accept this as  an absolute without asking another question: What’s the evolutionary benefit of  throwing our earliest years in the garbage?

[00:13:58]Chapter Eight - The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma It’s clear the brain as an organ  is always changing, evolving, adapting to the era of life it’s serving.  And as your life progresses, simply put, you need a different type of brain. In your  earliest years, nothing is more important than neuroplasticity. Your mind is like  a soft, wet ball of clay, and every day, the information it takes in begins to shape  it. As you grow up, you get a better sense of your path in life, and your experiences mold  that clay into something specific. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the ball of  clay that is your brain gets molded into a cup.

[00:14:34]But even in the shape of a cup, you  shouldn’t pour hot coffee into wet clay. So, what do you do? You put that cup into a kiln  and bake it into its shape. In this moment, the cup loses plasticity - the ability to  be anything - and instead gains stability.

[00:14:49]It’s just one thing now, but it’s a lot better  at being that one thing than it was before.

[00:14:54]Much the same process happens to your brain.

[00:14:57]It loses the chance to exist in the  world of potential, but in exchange, it gets to be something, which is valuable  in a global community of social creatures.

[00:15:06]When you’ve thoroughly learned to walk and talk,  your brain needs to throw out the walking and talking manuals to make room for the more complex  demands of existence. But just because all of this is erased doesn’t mean that there’s no lingering  traces in the foggy world of your adult mind.

[00:15:21]Chapter Nine - The Ghost in the Machine Of the many processes working  in the brain at any one time, only a few of them are actually conscious.  Most are running on a kind of background tab, even things that aren’t physical reflexes but  learned skills like walking and talking. These are called “procedural memories”, and they’re part  of the larger subcategory of “implicit memories.”

[00:15:41]This is the living legacy of your brain’s  previous occupant, actions and reactions rooted in your own deep history, things  you do without really understanding why.

[00:15:50]You’re nervous around dogs for no reason, but it  was probably because a German Shepherd barked in your face before you were 1 year old. You grow  up having vaguely positive feelings about your mother before you even really knew her, because of  the bond you built before you were yourself. The smoke is there, but the fire has long gone out.  And all you can do is ask: Where did it all go?

[00:16:12]Chapter Ten - The New Tenant All of this ultimately proves the frightening  truth we were hinting at at the start of the video: You - which is to say, the blob  of ever-changing memories and flaring synapses that decides by committee that it’s  “You” - has always, in a sense, been you… You just need to knock a few years off  your age to get a truly accurate picture.

[00:16:34]The first tenant of the fixer-upper you call your  body, the one who learned to walk, who said this body’s first words, who saw its first sunrise  and sunset, is little more than a data ghost now.

[00:16:45]A faint impression that appears in the back  of your mind when you look at old photos, or get told cute stories of your early years  by your parents. They gave you everything, and you killed them all just  by coming into existence.

[00:16:58]So the next time you’re looking  at your reflection in a mirror, take a moment to remember that this reflection  has never just been yours. Maybe whisper a little “thank you” to the person who kept it warm  for you for those first few years. Perhaps, if there’s something after this,  you’ll someday get to meet them.

[00:17:14]Want to know more about the terrifying  fragility of the human memory? Now check out “A Man Went in for a Root Canal and Lost  His Memory Forever”, or watch this instead!