Why Do Childhood Memories Vanish?

If you can’t remember your life as a toddler, don’t worry, that’s normal. New experiments are elucidating the process of childhood amnesia

Think back. Way back to your earliest memories. To the ones that you know are purely yours: uncontaminated by photo evidence or retelling by friends or family. If you can’t remember back to being an infant, or even a toddler, that’s actually very normal.

This doesn’t mean that children forget skills they learned, such as how to read or how to walk, but they may forget exactly how they learned those skills.

Our awareness of childhood amnesia, or the rapid loss of childhood memories, is nothing new. However, we are only now beginning to understand the neurological basis behind it.

The hippocampus, a curved structure deep in the brain, is central to storing experiences as memories. Brain cells called neurons are responsible for making these connections, and new neurons are made in a process called neurogenesis.

Through mild electric shocks in a particular place, groups of mice learned to fear that location, freezing in place when they were near it. Those same mice were then split into two groups, and half were given running wheels to get more exercise, which is known to boost neurogenesis. When tested later, the running wheel group was more likely to forget about the shock location.

Similarly, infant mice were tested in the same way, except that one group was given a drug known to slow down neurogenesis. The infant mice who were not given the drug, and therefore had the higher normal rate of neurogenesis, were also more prone to losing their memory of the shock location.

This all suggests that as new memories form, older memories are lost.

Also, the naturally high rates of neurogenesis in childhood, especially as the brain restructures into a more adult configuration, destabilize memories faster than in adults.

In the immediate interviews, children recalled the events leading to their injuries at an accuracy of 97% when compared to the versions given by the adults, dropping to only 91% five years later. Even ten years later, the memories were still retained at an accuracy of 85%.

Surprisingly, over time, the children interviewed were also sometimes able to recall the events in even greater detail, for instance including a more specific location than they had previously given.

When an event is important, an adult can help a young child make a more lasting impression by fleshing out a good story. Peterson suggests starting with details like a time and place to give the event context, and then talking through a cohesive series of events. The more the story makes sense as a sequence, the easier it will be to recall.

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