Why Nobody Remembers Being a Baby

[00:00:00]Close your eyes for a moment. Try to remember being one year old. Not a birthday photo, not a story your parents told you, an actual memory. You probably can't. And neither can almost anyone else on Earth. Which is strange because your brain during infancy was absorbing more information than at any other time in your life. You learned faces, emotions, language, trust, fear, movement, even the sound of your mother's voice. So, how can the most important learning period of your entire life be almost completely missing from memory? Scientists have been trying to answer that question for decades.

[00:00:36]Psychologists call it infantile amnesia, the mysterious inability to remember the earliest years of childhood. Most adults cannot recall memories before the age of 3 or four. But here's where it gets weird. Babies actually can remember things. In the 1980s, psychologist Carolyn Roi Collier conducted a famous experiment using infants and a moving crib mobile. She tied a ribbon from a baby's leg to the mobile above them.

[00:01:05]When the baby kicked, the mobile moved.

[00:01:07]Very quickly, the babies learned the connection. Even days later, many infants still remembered that kicking made the toy move. This proves something surprising. Babies are capable of forming memories. So the real mystery is not why babies cannot remember. It is why adults cannot access those memories later.

[00:01:26]Scientists believe one major reason involves a part of the brain called the hippocampus. The region responsible for organizing long-term memories.

[00:01:35]During infancy, the hippocampus is still developing while the brain is growing at an incredible speed and that rapid growth may accidentally erase older memories. A study published in science by researchers at Hospital for Sick Children found that baby mice produced huge numbers of new brain cells, a process called neurogenesis. But as new neurons formed rapidly, older memories became harder to retrieve. In simple terms, the brain was rebuilding itself so fast that older memories were being overwritten. Humans experience intense neurogenesis during infancy, too. Your brain was essentially under construction while trying to record your life. But biology is only part of the story.

[00:02:16]Language may also explain why your early memories disappear. Before learning words, babies experience life mostly through emotions, sounds, and sensations.

[00:02:27]But adult memories are stored more like narratives, organized with language and meaning.

[00:02:33]Psychologist Katherine Nelson suggested that once children develop language, the brain changes how memories are stored.

[00:02:40]So, your earliest experiences may still exist somewhere deep inside you, but your adult mind no longer knows how to read them. Almost like your baby memories were saved in a language your current brain cannot translate anymore.

[00:02:52]And maybe forgetting is not a mistake at all. Neuroscientists believe memory was never designed to perfectly preserve the past. Human memory is selective. It filters information constantly so the brain does not become overloaded.

[00:03:06]Imagine remembering every fear, every loud sound, every confusing sensation from infancy forever. Your mind would drown in detail. So forgetting may actually help humans survive. And yet, even without conscious memories, your earliest years still shape you. Studies in attachment psychology show that experiences during infancy can influence personality, emotional security, stress responses, and relationships later in life. Even when those moments are impossible to consciously recall, which means the first version of you never truly disappeared. You simply lost access to it. And somewhere deep inside your mind, your forgotten beginning may still be there.

[00:03:46]>> That is all for now, folks. Thanks for watching and subscribe for more mindbending content.