>Failure of any of these steps [encoding, long-term etching, and recall of memory] causes amnesia. So, which steps are responsible for the erosion of baby memories?
>Who knows! Kids squirm around too much in MRI machines! But they start encoding things around a year, or maybe before, or maybe after!
I've been clickbaited
That is not an accurate summary. The article clearly discusses how they limited squirming enough to gather actual data.
A Very long time average, by the way. 8 minutes is a long time for a baby to stay at once: not squirming, not upset, not touching mother and awake.
i'll let you go ahead and explain how they controlled for squirming, I'm interested
You can find the answer in this link:
https://singularityhub.com/2025/03/20/new-baby-brain-scans-r...
They presumably don’t have any extra information except what’s in the article which said they “often squirmed” rather than always, which means simply repeating the process enough gives times when they didn’t.
If you want technique: “infants were _ to reduce movement.”
If you missed what was in the blank you might want to reread to see what else you missed.
Haha, fair... there's definitely a bit of "science marches forward... sort of!" energy here
"The early years are chaotic. The brain undergoes extensive rewiring. This makes it a difficult to form lasting memories."
That is reduced too much from the actual state of research, presumably for the sake of accessibility. We obviously already learn before the hippocampus starts to really develop (18-24 months). But what episodic memory means is that the learned things have no episodic context, i.e. they are learned and applied more broadly, not just in the situation where they were learned in the first place. Learning in the early years isn't "chaotic", it is just very generalized.
I didn't read the article, but when I got kids I was surprised they can actually remember for a very long time. Both of my kids could at e.g. 3 remember things that happened a year earlier, which still surprised me with the younger one. There was however a point when the older one could no longer remember some things from the past, as if there was a cutoff line to a previous life and he had transitioned into a new phase of his life.
I don't know what the state-of-the-art is, but there was some work done that suggested that memories are formed encoded in the language you know at the time of formation.
I dug up some of this a while back[1].
My dad, who taught our language to immigrants, mentioned that it was known in that field that immigrants who lost their native language would also lose a lot of the knowledge they had from their home country, like stuff taught at schools.
Thus the memories might be there, one just can't make sense of them anymore and so they become forgotten.
I'm currently finishing the related work of my PhD thesis which deals with memory, so I want to chime in to say that some studies [2] have tested this, i.e. that memory recall is tied to the linguistic environment in which the learning took place.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242
[1] https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361
[2] Nevertheless, I am usually dubious about multiple experiments confirming related things from the same author(s).
I think I read here on HN a theory that memories are like encoded and as we grow the encoding changes and we forget how to access certain memories, this was a theory of course. Probably explains people with Dementia (I think?) where they randomly remember something and a ton of joy rushes them, but they also get very confused as well, probably trying to decode memories but they cannot, they instead seem to ramble and get angry.
I dont remember the thread but the context I think was regarding reading memories digitally somehow.
I am slowly becoming convinced of this the more I hear about it. We encode and store memories, we decode them, but as we grow and adapt our thinking, we forget. I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?
> I dont remember the thread but the context I think was regarding reading memories digitally somehow.
Funnily enough, apparently the language in the different parts of memory process (i.e. encoding+storage+retrieval) stems exactly from "digital computer memory" :), psychologists in the 40s/50s looked at the development of computers and started making analogies with the brain.
> I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?
Well, you have Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve, which shows how (in this case, semantic) memory decays with time but, with rehearsal, the memory trace (i.e. the neural substrate) gets "stronger" ("neurons that wire together fire together") and lasts longer in memory.
There are multiple types of "forgetting" (Schacter's "The Seven Sins of Memory"), what we usually mean by it is the "transience sin", i.e. forgetting because of elapsed time. There are several views why it happens, mainly storage failure, i.e. that memory trace getting weaker, or retrieval failure, being unable to get the right "memory cue" to retrieve that memory.
So, probably, if you start associating one particular [0] cue with the memory, and training that over time, yes, it should be possible to not-lose the memory (I don't think it will help with Alzheimer's, though).
The funny thing is that every time you retrieve a memory from long-term storage, it gets re-encoded before it goes back to storage so, basically, every time you remember you are modifying the memory a bit with your current biases (another sin!), thus also forgetting :).
[0] And choosing the best cue is already a hard topic, as it should be different enough as to not trigger many different memories ("cue overload principle" from Surprenant and Neath's "principles of memory"), and the memory should be not so different enough that you may get the risk of other singular memories interfering with it.
> every time you retrieve a memory from long-term storage, it gets re-encoded before it goes back to storage
I don't know how literal you're being (e.g. read once, fully overwrite previous), but it's a good model for "reinterpreting past events, with a new perspective".
This may be a tool/strategy for therapists -- I've spent zero hours in clinical psychology classes.
But anecdotally, very few people are open to reflecting on past events with greater charity for the remembered villain of the story. :)
Well, another one of the "sins of memory" (categorised along the sins of <i>comission</i>, instead of <i>omission</i>) is <i>bias</i>, which means modifying the actual transpired event with our beliefs and previous knowledge, either at encoding or during retrieval.
So, if at retrieval time, your beliefs (e.g. now you support legalisation of marijuana) and knowledge are different than what they were during the memory encoding (e.g. you didn't support legalisation of marijuana), because you see yourself as "consistent" you may actually remember the memory tinted with your actual beliefs (e.g. you were a supporter all along).
Furthermore, as we lose the complete experience details from our episodic memories, we start filling the gaps with our current knowledge and beliefs, too, to achieve some consistency of the event...
Quite interesting, but obviously, lots of variables and different things come into play in this topic.
> I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?
There's work that suggests our memories are kinda like magnetic core memory[1] in that a read operation is destructive and requires a rewrite.
I heard about it in the context of phobia therapy, where participants would get some drug that for a short term prevented new memories from forming, and then exposing them to their phobia. That would trigger a recall but not the rewrite thanks to the drug, and after just a couple of such sessions their phobia would be gone as there was nothing to recall.
I have a couple of distinct but mundane memories from early childhood, when I was 1-2 years old. I'm nearing my 50s and they're not nearly as vivid now as when I was a teenager say, but I've long suspected that the reason I can still relive them is because I kept recalling those moments.
I've heard of beta blockers, specifically propranolol, being used in this way in an experimental PTSD therapy protocol, I think back in the 80s or 90s. It didn't seem to go anywhere, or at least I stopped hearing about it.
This 2016 metareview suggests the reason is insufficient evidence of efficacy, for that and a couple of other anxiety indications: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724794/
The explanation can't be that neat. You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories. Maybe there's a subtle effect but that's very different.
> The explanation can't be that neat.
It's not an absolute, I was telling OP that, in fact, there was some research on what he mentioned. Basically, that memory is linguistic-context dependent, but as a subset of cognitive-context dependent (as well as physiological-, affective-, and several types of context). This doesn't mean that memories are ONLY linked to language, they have lots of different associations, things that work as a cue of the memory, this (language) is only one of them.
> You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories.
What does it mean to "lose language"? Are you unable to speak, to express yourself, to comprehend others, all together? What memories do you retain and form? Are you talking about semantic memories, or episodic memories? How do you measure that those memories are retained and formed, if you cannot test the subject due to the impossibility of communication?
It's a lot more difficult than absolutist statements.
Edit: typo (thinks->things)
I suspect it goes deeper than language even. We have associative memories, right? Given our learning, modelling, pigeonholing of the world along with our changing bodies, our older selves are unlikely to experience anything close enough to what our younger selves experienced to trigger that association and recall the memory.
I'm approaching 70, and my mental model is that the graph is getting so big that it's getting harder to navigate through it to the memories I'm looking for.
Interesting. I wonder how this relates with my anecdotal observation that my aging immigrant parents and their similarly aged friends increasingly rely and use the language of their youth found in the home vs what they learned in school and used in their adopted country and while raising us. Are old encodings being rediscovered and decoded? Or is there a degradation in the power of their decoder and so it is slowly going back to a foundational level? Fascinating stuff.
Huh. I know very little on this topic, and am pattern-matching that to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
That’s been my observation too. My completely amateur theory is that a young child’s perception of the world - their ability to contextualise what they’re looking at - changes so much that even if those old memories are still hanging around, they don’t really make sense any more. It’s more like a sliding window than a hard cutoff.
I read a similar discussion here on HN before and the explanation that its how our brain decodes memories shifting over time really hit me. I have a theory that if that in fact is the case, then things like journaling would help to retain memories in a superior way, since we can review such things as our encoding changes and retain it while we can still decode. Even if we dont remember it as richly though we will still be able to go back to a journal to remember something at a bare minimum.
I experienced this with my older child. Ever since he could begin to talk he seemed to have exceptional memory, seemingly recalling things from even before he had words to describe them. But somewhere between 3 and 4 it's like there's been some culling of memories where a lot of things he would have known if you asked him on this third birthday he's seemingly forgotten by his 4th.
Not enough to be concerned of any cognitive things, and he still otherwise seems to have an excellent memory.
My child, at 8 or 9, remembered a game I used to play that scared her when she was 2 or 3. At 10 she could no longer remember the game.
I might be misremembering, but talking with a friend years ago he was talking about a "New Scientist" article that described how the brain is flushed/cleaned of most memories at age 4 and again at age 7. Or something like that.
I was also surprised with my kids at 4-5 remembering when they were 3 or so, but now those memories seem to be completely, or near completely gone (at age 10). Perhaps they are just remembering the remembrance.
It's like there's a window where early memories seem pretty solid, and then suddenly parts of that window just vanish
I'd go so far as to liken it to a series of memory wipes between age 3 to 4. Memory otherwise appears to function quite fine, from day to day and year to year, but then large blocks all vanish in rapid succession.
Also interesting, as the article alludes to, is that infantile amnesia seems specifically related to episodic memory. Motor skills, language, and other learning obviously survives.
yeah i think enough rewiring and adaptation happens in the brain that the older memories are still around but are no longer stored in the way the brain needs them to be stored in to be accessible at an older age, or something like that. they become inaccessible as the brain matures its ability to remember effectively.
anyone with kids knows that children remember all kinds of things, very, very early. habits, games, routines, schedules, things like that. these things are almost never able to be recalled later in life but they become part of your psyche somehow. for example you will often feel comforted when they are repeated later and you feel a bit "off" when they are done differently, even as an adult. I think a lot of parenting instinct is actually rooted in this kind of memory. The inclination to raise your children as you yourself were raised.
Something must be slightly unusual about me.. because I have retained some very early memories..
I have confirmed with my parents the placement and orientation of my crib. I can tell you the exact process that my parents performed to change my diaper. I remember being bathed in my tub with my toys.. list goes on. These are visual memories, I can see them right now. I'm nearly certain they are real.. it's possible my brain has made some up, but I've confirmed enough with my parents that I feel confident that they are real.
I swear I remember waking up in the middle of the night once in my crib.. heart beating out of my chest.. I was really scared of something.. and I just remember this pure consciousness .. staring up into the darkness. Same consciousness I have now.
A lot of early memories are induced, e.g. parents told you a story, and your brain "fills it up", so you think it's your own memory, but it's actually more of imagination. Or you imagined where the crib were, and parents confirmed, so you think you remembered.
Watching crime witness testimonies reveals how much we actually imagine, not remember.
My earliest memory is 2ish, being gurneyed from a hallway with my mom (clearlyu upset) into the surgical area before my first open heart surgery. The memory faded over time, until it became a memory of a memory around age 45...I can tell there was a change from remembering detail, like anything about the wheeled bed, to the base characteristics of the memory.
My Mom didn't tell me the story, nor could she have described the moment, as she doesn't remember. I remember. On the other hand, I do remember that my primary cardiac surgeon, Dr. Rosengart, was not part of the entourage of staff wheeling me in. I met Rosengart again when I had my last open heart surgery at age 31.
It's uncommon for people to have memories from age 2, but I've met quite a few people with early memories, as it can be a fun topic to discuss. Parents try to anchor kids first memories as happy, but my anecdata doesn't seem to fit a pattern of trauma or banal or happy. Early fixed memories seem utterly random.
I've wondered whether one can train a child to remember things by recalling things that happened to them repeatedly, but I guess it will create such an induction. And they don't even have language to understand "Remember Monday, 2 days ago, grandma visited.".
And perhaps under a certain age, the brain really has no programming to store anything as memories...
It’s actually remarkably easy to induce false memories in people. There’s substantial research on this.
There’s nuance here. I think I experienced the same thing maybe not quite as young but I distinctly recall the crib I was in as well as the day I got upgraded to a regular bed. Along with that I remember specific objects that I had around me which were later confirmed by my parents’ photos.
There a potential selection bias in the criminal witness example which is capturing adult memories that may be less sticky than those from an early age. That could explain some differences there.
>>I have confirmed with my parents the placement and orientation of my crib
Is there any way you have seen those things in some of the old family pictures? Because I know I am definitely guilty of that, I can swear I remember bits from my family's trip to Pompeii when I Was 2 years old, not much but little bits here and there, and only when I was older I noticed that what I remember is suspiciously similar to what my mum has in the family album from that trip(which I most likely would have seen as a child too).
In fact I worry about it with my own son now, I don't think he'll be able to tell the difference between his own memories and things he has seen in 1000s of pictures and videos I have been taking since he was born.
> Because I know I am definitely guilty of that, I can swear I remember bits from my family's trip to Pompeii when I Was 2 years old, not much but little bits here and there, and only when I was older I noticed that what I remember is suspiciously similar to what my mum has in the family album from that trip(which I most likely would have seen as a child too).
Maybe in a sense, both are true? When you saw the photos as a child, you did remember them then, but that's what reinforced those memories enough that you now remember them?
Similar to 'remembering that you remembered X', even though you don't directly remember X now.
I'm the opposite. I started making memories very late - I have only the vaguest memories of primary school. I think I formed long-term memories at around 10 years old.
Other commenters are trying to gaslight you into believing this isn't possible, but I also have a memory from before I could walk.
I was lying on the floor, contemplating a toy that had been hung above my head, when someone who was not one of my parents came to pick me up.
Years later, I told my mother about this. She then searched through the family film archive, and found the moment in question. The person who picked me up was my uncle.
This was not a film we had watched before, it came about because I was discussing with my mother our earliest memories.
You have one memory of all the time before you could walk, and it just so happens to have been caught on film? You don't find that suspicious?
No I do not. Years of my early life are on film. My parents were enamored with their camera, it was frequently set up to film the entire room, passively.
When I say my mother searched for the moment, I mean she searched through tapes that had never been viewed from her archives.
I normally try to live my life in the spirit of XKCD 386, but I leave this response for the sake of clarification, to not discourage any future readers.
Seems farfetched to believe that you happened to have the exact moment you discuss on video
Haha yeah, I am used to the skepticism.. I've thought about this a lot. There are so many things I've confirmed that aren't in photographs or stories I've been told that it seems to be real.
I also have aphantasia, I have wondered if my lack of visualization has somehow empowered my long-term memory. I rely on memory for "visualizing" things.
I have two early childhood memories.
I remember a brief moment standing in my crib during the morning. And a dream I had in Pre-K where my pre -k teacher was the moon above me at night. Pretty early memory?
People might call BS on this, but I can recall the full layout of the home I lived in until I was 2 (to the shock of my family when I laid it all out). I have a memory from my first birthday as well. There are many people who have legitimate memories from very early on.
This supports the observations made by Dr. Piotr Wozniak, inventor of spaced-repetition algorithms, from anonymous data gathered from users of all ages: children up to around age 7 have poorer-memory than adults because their brains are focused on rewiring.
I can remember very vividly experiences that cannot have happened after I turned 2.
It is nice to have something I can show people when this infrequently comes up, because I have had people insist that these must be false memories, as children cannot form memories before 3. Or before 5. Or in one case, before 10? Like what?
I've had people full on state as fact children can't recall anything before age [4-7]. 10? Wow haha.
My earliest memory is at around 18mo. When I was nearly a father myself, I told my mom of my early memory and she remembered it too and told me how old I was.
My kids, especially the first, would routinely recall things when she was 3 that happened when she was 2 or slightly younger. I can recall thinking, "I barely remember that, how the heck do you remember that!?" However, she had forgotten most of those early early memories a few years later.
> 18mo
I wonder if it's something to do with the memory being reinforced (maybe in surprising ways). E.g one of the memories I have from around a similar time is me receiving a toy gift (video memory) . It makes for a decent display item and has been kept out in one bedroom or the other in every house my family lived in since. So I would have seen it every now and then throughout my childhood. Perhaps, this reinforcement can occur in other, more non-obvious ways in a child's brain, offering a similar explanation for your experience.
It's surely true that a memory fragment can be kept alive or reinforced by stories or physical tokens (objects, photographs). This can be true of a high-fidelity "correct" memory as well as of a sketchy incorrect one!
It's also well-established that "memories" can be purposefully created by the application of the same tools.
My daughter remembered the names of all her daycare friends not long after turning one. They always took their shoes off, and she would tell the adults whose shoe it was immediately. At 2 she would say things like “I fell I got booboo” referring to having fallen at Daycare during playtime. Its really funny because she can recollect some things but others like what you just told her are completely alien. I wonder if it has to do moreso with physical events being easier for her to describe vs trying to summarize my grown up words so she can relay them back. As she gets older repeating more complex sentences and fully understanding them will be easier for her to store.
I wonder if this is why smell helps to reactivate memories, your ability to recollect smells is probably the more consistent way to retain memories.
But it becomes all so elusive when you grow older. I remember remembering moments before I could speak or walk, but I think those memories were clearer when I was a little kid (I'm 40 now). Too bad I didn't write them down back then. Things like trying to utter a word but parents giving up before I could produce the sound, or using a baby walker (those were a thing in the late 80s). I think I have a picture in my mind of a scene where my little brother was just born and I was 1 year old, but my mother says it couldn't have happened like that, so it might be my memory or hers that's playing tricks. But for some memories it's also hard for me to determine whether they are confabulations from stories I've heard and pictures I've seen, or happened later than I think, eg. at age 5-6 instead of 2-3.
My parents moved when I was 3 and an half. I remember distinctly our previous house. I described (much later) to my parents the layout and the colors of different rooms and they were shocked that I could remember.
My 3.5 years old son, still remembers things that happened when he was 2 (visit to disney land for example). But I think it's maybe a bit different nowadays because we have a lot more photos that might help him form and recall his memories compared to when I was a child in the 80s.
Nearly all my memories I have from when I was 2-3 years old were reinforced by having photos from around the time that I looked at as I grew up. Like I remember painting cabinets with my dad as a toddler as they prepared the house to move, and I have photos of the kitchen before the cabinets were painted. I have memories of the move, and I have photos related to the move as well.
I remember being frustrated in a 4th of July bike parade as a small child, as I had lots of long ribbons off the handlebars which I kept getting tangled up in on the bike with training wheels. We had a photo of me on the bike in that parade. I probably couldn't tell you anything else about that parade, but I do remember how annoying those ribbons getting wrapped around me and the sweat and heat of the day.
There's research that has shown that stress in the early years of life delays development of the hippocampus - and without sufficiently developed hippocampus you can't have these kinds of memories.
So the generalization ("all kids") is wrong, but some people, being exposed to toxins or stress sources (fetal alcohol syndrome, cigarettes, lead, premature birth, asthma, ...), can really only develop memories later. 10 years is a bit much, though...
Likewise. I have a handful of memories from between 18 and 24 months.
I know they're from that period, as they relate to a place where my parents lived at that time.
Yeah I don't have a lot of early childhood memories that probably aren't just re-creation of things I see in old photos, but one memory stands out - my late uncle leaning over stroller I was in, me getting properly scared of his mustache and starting crying.
I mean stroller where infants lie flat down and have this canopy above head, sorry don't know exact english term. Can't be more than 1 year in any normal case, I was a tall child.
But then again who knows, maybe its a memory of a dream experienced later. Our mind is a weird place, and subconsciousness is making various cleaning activities and modifications to make us feel better about ourselves (something I try to fight consciously to remember things as they truly were with all the warts and all, but it ain't easy).
>But then again who knows, maybe its a memory of a dream experienced late
Or that sounds like the kind of event your uncle would tell you about when you were a few years older. Probably every time he saw you. I know I have several childhood stories I've heard so many times they feel like memories.
Curious to see if future studies tie this in with memory consolidation during sleep
the truth is the scans "offer some intriguing clues" but future studies "might shed light on the minimal brain architecture needed to support vivid autobiographical memories."
Brain scans are like those scientists putting together the iguanodon skeleton… we may eventually get to a likely story but we’re gonna spend a lot of time on to be discredited
oh boy! another brain imaging story. I wonder if they can also identify the moment trout start making memories?