What is childhood amnesia?

Thanks to the photographs, videos and stories of our parents, many of us have images of our early childhood in mind, but the truth is that practically no one can remember the events of the first years of their lives.This responds to a phenomenon called Childhood Amnesia from which almost no one escapes.Find out what it is and why we all pass by.

Childhood Amnesia, the reason we all forget our first years

The phenomenon for which we are unable to remember what happened during the first three years of our lives has been called Childhood Amnesia by the scientific community and psychologists.

Dr.Catherine Loveday, from the University of Westminster (England), says without a doubt that most people cannot remember nothing before los 2 or 3 years .And that is early: in general, practically no one remembers anything he lived before reaching 4 or 5 years of age.

From there on, with age variations according to the person significant memories begin to appear , things like falling off the bike, moments that were important to them.

At two years of age, children are able to answer questions about recent events, although they often need careful guidance to retrieve memories.Over the next four or five years, children become better at remembering and describing important events in their lives.At the age of seven or eight years, most Children have well-developed autobiographical memories with the same normal rate of forgetfulness that is observed in adults.

But when it comes to previous memories, children can rarely remember events that occurred before three or four years and These first memories become even more difficult to access as they grow up .Despite decades of research, why this childhood amnesia happens is still a mystery.

What is childhood amnesia?

Although children can be motivated and encouraged to recover Early memories, these are often plagued with problems with false memory, caused by major questions and involuntary indication by adults.For this reason, the American Psychiatric Association has issued a warning regarding adult cases remembering events of abuse that apparently occurred at a very early age without physical evidence, because somehow not real, but induced, memories could be implanted.For adults, it is possible to recover memories from before the age of three or four is practically impossible, indepe ndientemente of the method used to recover those memories.

The method most used to test childhood amnesia is the signal technique .The technique is to give participants certain words ( for example, dog, cat or chair) and then ask them to "think of a specific memory" associated with that word, and then calculate their age at the time they experienced it.Signal word methods are used to often to test autobiographical memory throughout life.

By comparing memories at different ages, memory researchers have identified the normal rate of forgetfulness that affects all memories developed from eight years old.

So why does childhood amnesia occur? Several explanations have been offered, including Freud's theory that childhood amnesia is caused by the repression of traumatic memories that occur in the child's early psychosexual development.The most modern theorists, however, argue that the key to forgetting lies in early brain development itself. While young children and even babies seem able to remember information for weeks or months, linking those memories with verbal cues is more difficult.

What is your earliest memory?

If you were interested in this article, discover:

-Could you lose your memory from a blow to the head?

-Why do you sometimes have memory gaps after drinking alcohol?

Images: jarmoluk

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