Why don't we remember how we were born? Why do we remember childhood so badly? There is a question: why do we not remember ourselves in early childhood

We are sure that you have thought about this more than once. We remember our childhood and youth, but we are not able to remember the moment when we came into the world - our birth. Why? We will explain in our article.

1. Neurogenesis in the first years of life

With the development of civilization and medical care, the moment of our birth no longer dangerous. We come into this world with the help of other people's hands that take us out of the mother's womb - so cozy, calm and safe. We will never again be able to find places where we would be so welcome and so sure of our safety.

But we are forced to go outside - into a world filled with light, shadows and sounds, not knowing exactly why we do this. Most likely, we are experiencing.

This is the first time we burst into the world in tears with our first cry (after that there will be many more such times that we will not be able to forget).

But what, besides pain, do we experience? Fear, joy, curiosity? We don't know, no one can answer these questions, because no one, or almost no one, can remember this moment.

It all happens this way through a process called neuronal neurogenesis. It sounds incomprehensible, but this is actually a fascinating process of forming new nerve cells.

Until the moment of birth, our brain continues to grow neurons. Some of them overlap. You may ask - why then do we not remember anything? Aren't memory and cognition related to neurons? Is large quantity neurons does not improve our memory?

For babies who have just entered the world, everything happens differently. By at least, not in the first months of their lives. Memories don't last because neutron neurogenesis becomes too intense, structures overlap and memories don't last very long because new neurons are constantly being created.

The memory is unstable during this time due to their continued growth. It takes at least five or six months for the process to stabilize. After that, new neurons continue to appear, but this process is not so intensive.

But it can already stabilize and memories can persist for some time. After a child is six or seven years old, the process changes and some neurons begin to disappear.

Consequently, the most intense evolutionary period for a child lasts between the age of one and five years. At this time, the child absorbs everything like a sponge and strives for knowledge, so it is very easy for him to learn several languages ​​​​at once. However, almost all children will never be able to remember the first days of their lives.

2. Significance of speech and memory

According to doctors and psychologists, we can only remember what we can explain in words. To test if this is true, try thinking about your first memory. Perhaps this is some kind of feeling, or a picture from the past: you are in your mother’s arms, you are walking in the park.

Precisely at this time you have already begun to speak. There are many experiments that have proven that it is much easier for us to remember what we can put into words. The brain is better at structuring and storing in the hippocampus what it can associate with words. It is important to remember that language and the ability to speak are closely related to memory.

It is very difficult to remember the moments before and after our birth, when we still do not know how to speak. However, there are cases where people could save little memories about his birth, some feelings. Do you consider yourself one of these people? Tell us about your experience.

We have all heard about such a phenomenon as Reincarnation. Someone read about it in books, someone saw films about it, heard from friends, but for the most part, acquaintance and analysis often end there. this concept. But the understanding of this phenomenon and process plays important role for each of us.

Someone may ask, why do you need to know this and what is the use of it? The benefits are really huge. We seem to have repulsed the craving and desire for knowledge, interest in knowing ourselves and the world around us. After all, each person must ask himself the question: Who am I, why do I live, and what will happen next? People must see a deeper meaning of life than the satisfaction of their physical needs at the level of existence. Human life is not just a vegetative life, as they try to instill in us. A person has this natural interest and questions to which he seeks answers in the depths of his soul, but social environment does everything possible to prevent this from being realized.

So the question "What will happen next?" answers, including such a phenomenon as reincarnation. More precisely, it reflects the answer in itself, but there are other sources of the answer. In fact, every religion has this answer. The phenomenon of the reincarnation of souls is considered in most Indian religions, but I would like to pay attention to where the Hindus got their knowledge about this, and what quality it was. The Hindus themselves know that knowledge - the Vedas, including about reincarnation, was passed on to them by white people from the north. Hindus do not shout about it at every turn, but try to pass it off as their own. What country is north of India and what kind of white people, I think it is not difficult to guess. It turns out that this knowledge of reincarnation is not alien to us.

What do other religions say about what will happen to a person after death? Take, for example, Christianity. The answer to this question in this religion is as follows - a person ends up after death either in hell or in paradise, i.e. on this, life in the physical body, according to the concepts of Christianity, ends, and the soul goes where it deserves. But few people know that the idea of ​​reincarnation was previously in Christianity and was excluded from its doctrine only in 1082 at the next Ecumenical Council.

Here is an example from the Gospel of John chapter 9 verse 2:

“Once, seeing a blind man on the threshold of the temple, the disciples approached Jesus and asked: “Teacher! Who sinned, he or his parents, that he was born blind?

It follows that the disciples of Jesus knew that the future incarnation would be affected by the quality of a person's life, and that the reincarnation of souls was a natural process. It turns out that in the past the idea of ​​​​reincarnation was adhered to most of the world, if not the whole. So why suddenly in the same Christianity excluded this concept? Has the phenomenon of reincarnation become so untenable that everyone has forgotten about it? Is there really no evidence to support this? There are many. Take, for example, Ian Stevenson's book Evidence for the Survival of Consciousness from the Memories of Previous Incarnations. The author, dealing with this issue for almost thirty years, has collected a huge amount of facts. It turns out that in the past, the peoples of the world had reason to believe in reincarnation, just as the present is full of evidence of this "phenomenon". So why are we being told the obviously opposite - that a person lives only once, and then, at best, to heaven or hell?

Let's see what famous people say, who were engaged in varying degrees of knowledge of the world, looking for answers to such important questions. Here is what the writer Voltaire says on the subject:

“The concept of reincarnation is neither absurd nor useless. There is nothing strange about being born twice instead of once.”
Here are the words of Arthur Schopenhauer:

“Ask me an Asiatic to define Europe, I will have to answer like this: “This is a part of the world that is in the grip of an incredible delusion that man was created from nothing, and his present birth is the first entry into life.”
The words of these people make us think about understanding reincarnation or denying it. Knowing that reincarnation exists, a person will consciously acquire and accumulate in himself best qualities, strive to get positive experience, new knowledge and understanding to next life move even further. And vice versa, by rejecting, a person in ignorance can break firewood, for which he will then have to pay in the next incarnation or even fall out of the circle of incarnations, which often happens with suicide and other violations of the laws of nature. As the saying goes, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

And here it is worth asking the question: “Who benefits from this?” Who benefits from the fact that people exist as an empty flower in their lives, without realizing themselves and their destiny, and often also have accumulated problems for themselves, which then will have to be disentangled? Remember that ideology is powerful weapon in dark hands. With each change of power in the states, the ideology changed, one was established that was beneficial to one or another ruler. The people often only had to accept that what someone decided for them was often imposed by force, and gradually people forgot everything old and believed in the complete opposite as if by command. magic wand. So everything important that a person knew and realized was gradually forgotten, including the idea of ​​reincarnation.

I would also like to pay attention to what reincarnation exists for, what some of its mechanisms are based on. Apparently the soul, or to put it another way, the essence, needs a physical body to accumulate experience at a certain stage of development, otherwise the essence would not be embodied again and again. And here the moment is interesting, why a person, being born in a new body, does not remember his previous incarnations. Someone allegedly closed our memory so that we would not go along the beaten path, but go a new path, since the previous path apparently turned out to be not so true. It turns out that even nature itself disposes us in this moment to development.

Consider a fragment from the book by Nikolai Levashov "Essence and Mind" Volume 2:

“It should be noted that in most cases information about previous incarnations is not available to a person during his life. This is due to the fact that the recording of information occurs on the qualitative structures of the entity. And in order to “read” this information, a person in a new incarnation must reach the same level evolutionary development that was in the previous or previous lives. And only when a person during his life has evolved further than in any of his previous lives, it is possible to open and read all the information accumulated by the entity in the entire history of its existence.

But how can a person move further if he does not know that he needs it, or rather, he was inspired to do so. The illusion that we live once is detrimental to the development process. Thus, fertile ground is created for various manipulations and traps. Especially for young people, when a substitution of the concept of freedom is slipped, exposing it as licentiousness and permissiveness. Such slogans as: "Life must be lived in such a way that later it would be a shame to remember" - are the result of a social disease that arose as a result of a stolen worldview and understanding of the laws of nature. Following the logic: "we live once - we have to do everything," and a person without understanding and proper education embarks on all serious pursuits in pursuit of pleasures, entertainment and imaginary happiness. But happiness does not come and does not come.

All this negatively affects not only the individual, but society as a whole. People were deliberately deprived of a core that would help them resist many temptations. People have been taught to be passive. Under the ideology single life the fear of death, the fear of getting into trouble, the loss of a job, money, or home dominates a person, but if a person knows about reincarnation and the laws of karma, then the situation will change radically. It is more terrible not to die, but to step over such concepts as conscience and honor. A person would once again think before committing a crime, because then he will have to work out in the next incarnation. After all, repentance will not improve the situation and there is no one who would atone for all the sins of mankind for us. Imagine what society could be like if the correct worldview prevailed in it.

Then the person becomes responsible for his own life. Injustice in society is no longer perceived as someone's punishment or test, but as something that a person has the right to cope with. At the same time, not putting your vices aside, but starting to work with them, while changing yourself and your future, the future of your people and society as a whole. A person has responsibility for each of his actions and thoughts. At the same time, he deliberately positive traits not only for himself, but also for his future descendants, wishing them to leave good, not problems. But once all this was, we just need to remember and figure it out. In conclusion, I will quote the words of Eduard Asadov:

It's not enough to be born, they still have to become.

Our childhood. Looking at the children from the neighboring yard, you understand that this is the most carefree time in the life of every person. However, we do not have access to memories of our childhood or birth. What is this secret about? Why we should not remember ourselves in childhood. What lies behind this gap in our memory. And at some point, a thought suddenly flashed, why we do not remember ourselves from birth, makes us delve into the mysteries of the unknown.

Why don't we remember our birth

It would seem like this important point, like a birth, was to be imprinted in our brain forever. But no, some bright events from past life sometimes pop up in the subconscious, and most importantly - forever erased from memory. It is not surprising that the best minds of psychology, physiology and the religious sphere are trying to figure out such an interesting fact.

Erasure of memory from the point of view of mysticism

Researchers involved in the study of the unexplored mystical side of the existence of our universe and the Higher Mind give their answers to the questions why human memory areas erase the ability to reproduce the birth process.

The main emphasis is on the Soul. It contains information about:

• lived periods of life,
• emotional experiences,
• achievements and failures.

Why don't we remember how we were born

From a physical point of view, it is not given to a person to understand the soul and decipher the facts stored in it.

It is assumed that this substance visits the formed embryo on the tenth day of its existence. But she does not settle there forever, but leaves him for a while to return a month and a half before birth.

Scientific justification

But we do not have the opportunity to remember a very important moment in our lives. This is due to the fact that the soul does not want to "share" with the body the information that it owns. A clot of energy protects our brain from unnecessary data. Most likely, the process of creating a human embryo is too mysterious and cannot be solved. The outer universe uses the body only as an outer shell, while the soul is immortal.

Man is born in pain

Why do we not remember how we came into this world? Accurate evidence for this phenomenon has not been obtained. There are only assumptions that the strongest stress experienced at birth is to blame. A child from a warm mother's womb is selected along the birth canal to an unknown world. In the process, he experiences pain due to the changing structure of his body parts.

Growth human body directly related to the formation of memory. An adult remembers the most outstanding moments in his life and places them in the "storage" compartment of his brain.

For kids, things are a little different.

• Positive and negative moments and events are deposited in the "subcortex" of their consciousness, but, at the same time, they destroy the memories that are there.
• The brain of a child is not yet developed enough to store abundant amounts of information.
• That is why we do not remember ourselves from birth and do not store childhood memorable impressions.

What do we remember from childhood?

Children's memory develops in the period from 6 months to 1.5 years. But even then it is divided into long-term and short-term. The child recognizes the people around him, can switch to one or another object, knows how to navigate the apartment.

Another scientific assumption about why we completely forgot the process of appearing in this world is connected with ignorance of words.

The baby does not speak, cannot compare the events and facts that are taking place, and correctly describe what he saw. Infantile amnesia - this is the name given to the absence of childhood memories from psychologists.

Scientists express their guesses about this problem. They believe that children choose short-term memory as a niche for storing important experiences. And it has nothing to do with the lack of the ability to create memories. Any person not only cannot tell how his birth took place, but the passage of time makes him forget other bright moments of life important in a certain period.

There are two main scientific theories that try to understand this difficult issue.

Why do some people remember themselves as children?

At what age do we begin to remember the events that happen to us? Among your acquaintances, most likely there are people who claim that they remember their baby years. If you are one of them, then stop fooling yourself. And don't believe others who prove it is.

The brain erases events from childhood

An adult can remember moments that happened to him after the age of five, but not before.

What scientists have proven:

• Infantile amnesia completely erases the first years of life from memories.
• New brain cells, being formed, destroy all early memorable events.
• This action in science is called neurogenesis. It is constant at any age, but in infancy it is especially violent.
• Existing "cells" that store certain information are overwritten with new neurons.
• As a result, new events completely erase the old ones.

Amazing Facts of Human Consciousness

Our memory is diverse and has not been fully studied so far. Many scientists have tried to get to the bottom of the truth and determine how to influence it, forcing us to create the “storage chambers” we need. But even the rapid development of information progress does not make it possible to make such a castling.

However, some points have already been proven and may surprise you. Check out some of them.

What can you remember from childhood

What are your most vivid childhood memories? The child's brain is designed in such a way that it is not receptive to sound associations. Most often, he is able to remember the events he saw or those that the children tried by touch.

The fear and pain experienced in infancy are forced out of the “storage chambers” and replaced by positive and good impressions. But some people are able to remember only negative moments from life, and they completely erase the happy and joyful moments from memory.

Why our hands remember more than our brains

A person is able to reproduce bodily sensations in more detail than conscious ones. An experiment with ten-year-old children proved this fact. They were shown pictures of their friends from the nursery group. Consciousness did not recognize what they saw, only the galvanic skin reaction showed that the children still remembered their grown comrades. It is possible to determine this by the electrical resistance experienced by the skin. It changes with arousal.

Why memory remembers experiences

Emotional memory becomes scarred as a result of our most negative experiences. Thus consciousness warns us for the future.

But sometimes the psyche simply does not have the ability to cope with the mental trauma suffered.

• Terrible moments simply don't want to fit into a puzzle, but are represented in our imagination in the form of disparate passages.
• Such a sad experience is stored in implicit memory in torn pieces. A small detail - a sound, a look, a word, the date of an event - is capable of resurrecting the past that we are trying to erase from the depths of our brain.
• So that obsessive terrible facts are not resurrected, each victim uses the principle of the so-called dissociation.
• Experiences after trauma are divided into separate, incoherent fragments. Then they are not so associated with real life nightmares.

If you have been offended:

Are there really options for answering the question why we do not remember ourselves from birth? Maybe this information can still be pulled from the depths of our capacious storage?

When certain problems arise, we most often turn to psychologists. To help cope with her decision, specialists in some cases resort to hypnosis sessions.

It is often assumed that all of our painful present experiences come from deep childhood.

In the moment of trance, the patient can list all his hidden memories, without even knowing it.
Sometimes, individual non-susceptibility to hypnosis does not make it possible to immerse yourself in the early periods of the life path.

Some people subconsciously put up a blank wall and protect their emotional experiences from strangers. And this method has not received scientific confirmation. Therefore, if some will tell you that they perfectly remember the moment of their birth, do not take this information seriously. Most often, these are simple inventions or a clever professional publicity stunt.

Why do we remember the moments that happen to us after reaching 5 years

Can you answer:

• What do you remember from your childhood?
• What were your first impressions after visiting the nursery?

Most often, people cannot give at least some answer to these questions. But, nevertheless, there are still at least seven explanations for this phenomenon.

Do we remember or not?

It cannot be assumed that all of the above hypotheses are 100% correct. Since the moment of remembering is a very serious and not fully understood process, it is hard to believe that only one of the listed facts influenced it. Of course, it turns out to be curious that we keep a lot of different things, but we don’t imagine our birth. This is the most the greatest secret that humanity cannot figure out. And, most likely, the question of why we do not remember ourselves from birth will excite great minds for more than a dozen years.

Your comments are very interesting - do you remember yourself as a child.

It will be interesting to know.

Imagine that you are having lunch with someone you have known for several years. You celebrated holidays, birthdays together, had fun, walked through the parks and ate ice cream. You even lived together. In general, this someone has spent quite a lot of money on you - thousands. Only you can't remember any of it. The most dramatic moments in life are your birthday, your first steps, your first spoken words, your first meal, and even your first years of life. kindergarten- most of us do not remember anything about the first years of life. Even after our first precious memory, the rest seem far apart and scattered. How so?

This gaping hole in the record of our lives has been frustrating to parents and baffling psychologists, neurologists, and linguists for decades. Even Sigmund Freud carefully studied this issue, in connection with which he coined the term "infantile amnesia" more than 100 years ago.

The study of this tabula of rasa led to interesting questions. Do the first memories really tell what happened to us, or were they made up? Can we remember events without words and describe them? Can we one day bring back the missing memories?

Part of this puzzle stems from the fact that babies, like sponges for new information, form 700 new neural connections every second and have such language learning skills that the most accomplished polyglots would turn green with envy. The latest research has shown that they begin to train their minds already in the womb.

But even in adults, information is lost over time if no effort is made to preserve it. So one explanation is that childhood amnesia is simply the result of a natural process of forgetting things that we encounter during our lives.

The 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus performed unusual experiments on himself to test the limits of human memory. To provide your mind with perfect Blank sheet Where to start, he invented "nonsense syllables" - made-up words from random letters, like "kag" or "slans" - and began to memorize thousands of them.

His forgetting curve showed a disconcertingly rapid decline in our ability to recall what we've learned: Left alone, our brains clear out half of what we've learned in an hour. By day 30, we leave only 2-3%.

Ebbinghaus found that the way he forgot all this was quite predictable. To see if the infants' memories are any different, we need to compare these curves. After doing the calculations in the 1980s, scientists found that we remember much less from birth to six or seven years of age, which one would expect from these curves. Obviously something very different is going on.

Remarkably, for some the veil is lifted earlier than for others. Some people can remember events from the age of two, while others do not remember anything that happened to them until they were seven or even eight years old. On average, blurry footage starts at age three and a half. Even more remarkable, the discrepancies vary from country to country, with discrepancies in recall ranging up to two years on average.

To understand why, psychologist Qi Wang of Cornell University collected hundreds of testimonials from Chinese and American students. As national stereotypes predict, American stories have been longer, defiantly self-absorbed, and more complex. Chinese stories, on the other hand, were shorter and to the point; on average, they also started six months late.

This state of affairs is supported by numerous other studies. More detailed and self-focused memories are easier to remember. It is believed that narcissism helps in this, since gaining one's own point of view gives meaning to events.

"There's a difference between thinking 'There are tigers at the zoo' and 'I saw tigers at the zoo, it was both scary and fun,'" says Robin Fivush, a psychologist at Emory University.

When Wang ran the experiment again, this time by interviewing the mothers of the children, she found the same patterns. So if your memories are hazy, blame it on your parents.

Wang's first memory is of hiking in the mountains near her family's home in Chongqing, China, with her mother and sister. She was about six. But she wasn't asked about it until she moved to the US. “In Eastern cultures, childhood memories are not very important. People are surprised that someone can ask such a thing,” she says.

“If society tells you that these memories are important to you, you will keep them,” Wang says. The record for earliest memory is held by the Maori in New Zealand, whose culture includes a strong emphasis on the past. Many can remember the events that took place at the age of two and a half years.

"Our culture may also determine how we talk about our memories, and some psychologists believe that memories only appear when we learn to speak."

Language helps us provide the structure of our memories, the narrative. In the process of creating a story, the experience becomes more organized and therefore easier to remember for a long time, says Fivush. Some psychologists doubt that this plays a big role. They say there is no difference between the age at which deaf children growing up without sign language report their very first memories, for example.

All of which leads us to the following theory: We can't remember the early years simply because our brains haven't acquired necessary equipment. This explanation stems from famous person in the history of neuroscience, known as patient HM. After a failed operation to treat his epilepsy that damaged his hippocampus, HM could not recall any new events. “It is the center of our ability to learn and remember. If I didn't have a hippocampus, I wouldn't be able to remember this conversation," says Jeffrey Fagen, who studies memory and learning at Saint John's University.

Remarkably, however, he was still able to learn other kinds of information - just like babies. When scientists asked him to copy a drawing of a five-pointed star by looking at it in a mirror (not as easy as it sounds), he got better with each round of practice, despite the fact that the experience itself was completely new to him.

Perhaps when we are very young, the hippocampus is simply not developed enough to create a rich memory of the event. Baby rats, monkeys, and humans continue to get new neurons in the hippocampus for the first few years of life, and none of us can create lasting memories in infancy—and all indications are that the moment we stop making new neurons, we suddenly start form long-term memory. "During infancy, the hippocampus remains extremely underdeveloped," Fagen says.

But does the underformed hippocampus lose our long-term memories, or do they not form at all? Because events experienced in childhood can influence our behavior later long time after we erase them from memory, psychologists believe that they must remain somewhere. “Perhaps the memories are stored in a place that is no longer accessible to us, but it is very difficult to demonstrate this empirically,” Fagen says.

However, our childhood is probably full of false memories of events that never happened.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has devoted her career to studying this phenomenon. "People pick up thoughts and visualize them - they become like memories," she says.

imaginary events

Loftus knows firsthand how this happens. Her mother drowned in a swimming pool when she was only 16 years old. Several years later, a relative convinced her that she had seen her floating body. Memories flooded his mind until a week later, the same relative called and explained that Loftus had misunderstood everything.

Of course, who likes to know that his memories are not real? To convince skeptics, Loftus needs hard evidence. Back in the 1980s, she invited volunteers for research and planted the memories herself.

Loftus unfolded a complex lie about a sad trip to the mall where they got lost and then were rescued by a gentle old woman and reunited with the family. To make events even more like the truth, she even dragged in their families. “We usually tell study participants that we talked to your mom, your mom told something that happened to you.” Almost a third of the subjects recalled this event in vivid detail. In fact, we are more confident in our imaginary memories than in those that actually happened.

Even if your memories are based on real events, they have probably been cobbled together and reworked in hindsight - these memories are planted with conversations, not specific first-person memories.

Perhaps the most big mystery not why we can't remember childhood, but whether we can trust our memories.

Memory is the ability to store information and the most complex set of biological processes. It is inherent in all living things, but is most developed in humans. Human memory is very individual, witnesses of the same event remember it differently.

What exactly do we not remember?

Memories take on a unique imprint of the psyche, which is able to partially change, replace, distort them. The memory of babies, for example, is capable of storing and reproducing absolutely invented events as real.

And this is not the only feature of children's memory. It is absolutely surprising that we do not remember how we were born. In addition, almost no one can recall the first years of his life. What can we say about the fact that we are not able to remember at least something about the time spent in the womb.

This phenomenon is called "childhood amnesia". This the only kind amnesia, which has universal human proportions.

According to scientists, most people start counting childhood memories from about 3.5 years. Up to this point, only a few can remember separate, very vivid life situations or snapshots. For most, even the most impressive moments are erased from memory.

Early childhood is the most information-rich period. This is the time of active and dynamic learning of a person, familiarizing him with the outside world. Of course, people learn almost throughout their lives, but with age, this process slows down its intensity.

But during the first years of life, the baby has to process literally gigabytes of information in a short time. That is why they say that Small child“absorbs everything like a sponge.” Why do we not remember such an important period of our lives? These questions have been asked by psychologists and neuroscientists, but there is still no unambiguous, universally recognized solution to this puzzle of nature.

Research into the Causes of the Phenomenon of "Children's Amnesia"

And again Freud

The world famous guru of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud is considered to be the discoverer of the phenomenon. He gave it the name "infantile amnesia". In the course of his work, he noticed that patients do not recall events related to the first three, and sometimes five years of life.

The Austrian psychologist began to explore the problem more deeply. His final conclusion turned out to be within the framework of the postulates traditional for his teaching.

Freud considered the cause of childhood amnesia to be the early sexual attachment of an infant to a parent of the opposite sex, and, accordingly, aggression towards another parent of the same sex with the baby. Such an emotional overload is beyond the power of the child's psyche, therefore it is forced into the unconscious area, where it remains forever.

The version raised many questions. In particular, she did not explain the absolute non-selectivity of the psyche in this case. Not all infantile experiences have a sexual connotation, and the memory refuses to store all the events of this period. Thus, the theory was not supported by almost anyone and so remained the opinion of one scientist.

First there was a word

For a certain time, the popular explanation for childhood amnesia was the following version: a person does not remember the period in which he still did not know how to fully speak. Its supporters believed that memory, when recreating events, puts them into words. Speech is fully mastered by the child by about three years.

Before this period, he simply cannot correlate phenomena and emotions with certain words, does not determine the connection between them, therefore he cannot fix it in memory. An indirect confirmation of the theory was the too literal interpretation of the biblical quote: "In the beginning was the Word."

Meanwhile, this explanation also has weak sides. There are many children who speak perfectly after the first year. This does not provide them with lasting memories of this period of life. In addition, a competent interpretation of the Gospel indicates that in the first line, the “word” does not mean speech at all, but a certain thought form, an energy message, something intangible.

Inability to form early memories

A number of scientists believe that the phenomenon is explained by the lack of abstract-logical thinking, the inability to build individual events into a whole picture. The child also cannot associate memories with a specific time and place. Young children do not yet have a sense of time. It turns out that we do not forget our childhood, but simply are not able to form memories.

"Insufficient" memory

Another group of researchers put forward an interesting hypothesis: in the first years of childhood, a person absorbs and processes such an incredible amount of information that there is no place to add new “files” and they are written over the old ones, erasing all memories.

Underdevelopment of the hippocampus

There are several classifications of memory. For example, according to the duration of information storage, it is divided into short-term and long-term. So, some experts believe that we do not remember our childhood, because only short-term memory works during this period.

According to the method of memorization, semantic and episodic memory are distinguished. The first leaves the imprints of the first acquaintance with the phenomenon, the second - the results personal contact with him. Scientists believe that they are stored in different parts brain and are able to unite only after reaching the age of three through the hippocampus.

Paul Frankland, a Canadian scientist, drew attention to the functions of a special part of the brain - the hippocampus, which is responsible for the birth of emotions, as well as for the transformation, transportation and storage of human memories. It is she who ensures the transition of information from short-term memory to long-term.

Having studied this part of the brain, Frankland found that at the birth of a person it is underdeveloped, but grows and develops along with the maturation of the individual. But even after the full development of the hippocampus, it cannot organize old memories, but processes already current portions of data.

Loss or gift of nature?

Each of the theories described above tries to find out the mechanism of childhood memory loss and does not ask the question: why did the universe order it this way and deprive us of such valuable and dear memories? What is the meaning of such an irreparable loss?

In nature, everything is balanced and everything is not accidental. In all likelihood, the fact that we do not remember our birth and the first years of our development should be of some benefit to us. This point in his research concerns only Z. Freud. He raises the issue of traumatic experiences that are forced out of consciousness.

Indeed, the entire period of early childhood can hardly be called absolutely cloudless, happy and carefree. Maybe we're just used to thinking that way because we don't remember him?

It has long been known that the baby at birth experiences physical pain no less than his mother, and the emotional experience of the baby during childbirth is akin to the experience of the process of death. Then the stage of acquaintance with the world begins. And he is not always white and fluffy.

The little man is undoubtedly exposed a huge number stress. Therefore, many modern scientists believe that Freud was right, at least, that infantile amnesia has a protective function for the psyche. It protects the baby from emotional overload that is unbearable for him, gives strength to develop further. This gives us yet another reason to thank nature for its foresight.

Parents should take into account the fact that it is at this tender age that the foundation of the child's psyche is laid. Some of the most vivid fragments of memories can still be fragmented in memory little man, and it is in the power of the father and mother to make these moments of his life full of light and love.

Video: why do we not remember events from early childhood?