“… if you have memories that ‘survived’ that early childhood forgetting zone, then you are more likely to be able to continue to remember them later in life.”
Our brains are endlessly fascinating and our memory is especially interesting. I sometimes think of it like my own on-board movie theatre – a warm comfortable place to spend some pleasurable time. But memories can be terribly unreliable, especially memories from our childhood. Only recently, researchers have pinpointed why.
For me, my earliest memory is from when I was around two years old. It’s not a fully developed memory – more of a fragment. I remember waking up in my cot in my bedroom, hearing voices out in the living room and standing up and calling out to my parents. It is daylight but I don’t know if it was first thing in the morning. It might have been an afternoon nap. The thing I remember most is what I was wearing.
It was the mid-sixties and I was wearing a very fetching set of ‘shortie pyjamas’. Remember those? I used to have a clear memory of what those PJs were like – the colour and detail. Now I can no longer picture that detail (for reason I think yellow but maybe that was my swimming costume…) but the abiding memory is how much I liked those pyjamas. Proof that kids can have a sense of ‘fashion aesthetics’ before they’re even out of nappies!
This memory of mine – and I have many others in fact from this same period – would apparently make me quite unusual. The average ‘first memory’ age for most adults is around three and a half years but for many, it is later. And what memories there are, tend to be vague – not clear.
The traditional explanation for this limited recall has been that young children did not form and retain ‘autobiographical’ memories. In effect, we didn’t remember early events because as young children, lacking language and experience, we simply weren’t able to process and store information as memories.
But a study published last year [in the journal Memory]finds that when you talk to very young children – aged three or four – about their memories, most can recall a lot of what happened to them over a year earlier and as young as 20 months.
But something happens to those memories later on. By the time they get to eight or nine those memories usually have faded.
As Professor Julius Sumner-Miller used to say, why is it so?
The curious memory thing
Yes, most adults struggle to recall events from their first few years of life. But it isn’t because our brains can’t remember things from that very early period of our childhood. We know now that children aged three to five years old demonstrate quite good recall of events prior to the age of three.
The researchers, led by Professor Patricia Bauer, a psychologist and associate dean for research at Emory college of Arts and Science in the US, found that, while these early memories can persist through to aged five and six, by the time the children reach the age of seven, these memories decline rapidly.
By aged eight or nine, the study found, most children can recall only about 35 per cent of their experiences from under the age of three.
So how can we have such good early memories when we are very young and then have them fade or be lost forever within five or six years? When exactly does it happen and why?
The authors say it is because, at around this age, the way that we form memories begins to change.
The context revolution
It turns out that before the age of seven, our form of recall is immature. It has little or no sense of time or place. While we move beyond the infancy stage of ‘recognition memory’ and begin to understand concepts and gain knowledge of the world, our ability to form and retain memories improves.
To remember events that happened to us, we need more sophisticated mental development – specifically the ability to understand the context of the event and the concepts that give that event meaning.
So for someone born in 1960, the assassination of President John F Kennedy in November 1963 might register as a big event at the time because perhaps there were neighbours or family friends huddling around the television and discussing it and maybe there were other children and they were all allowed to stay up a bit later that evening.
But without any understanding of the meaning of ‘president’ or ‘the United States’, or the concept of ‘assassination’ or even of date and time, the memory is destined to merge with other general memories of social events or possibly fade altogether.
You might have observed yourself that children can have quite vivid memories of an event at one age and then only a couple of years on, have almost no memory of it. They forget memories faster than adults do and the higher turnover of memories means that early memories tend to be less likely to survive.
Eventually the rapid forgetting slows down to adult forgetting levels and, as children get older, they start to recall early events in a more adult way, both in the content they remember but also the concepts and context.
The bottom line is that, if you have memories that ‘survived’ that early childhood forgetting zone, then you are more likely to be able to continue to remember them later in life.
What’s your earliest memory?
Do you have clear memories from a time when you were very young? Or even fragments of memories, like the one I described above? Photos can be confused with memories and it is well proven that suggestion can ‘create’ memories that never existed. But nevertheless, most of us have at least one or two fairly reliable memories from our early childhood. Memories that stand alone; that may not be documented in photographs. Perhaps you know they are reliably from a particular period because you know that you were a certain age when you lived in particular place or a certain age when you moved or when something memorable happened.
I lived in a small country town from birth to just before I turned four so I know that my memories of this part of my childhood are definitely from before I was four years old. When I was 30, I went on a driving trip with my parents and my newborn first child and we drove to that town. I drove all around, pointing out particular places like the swimming baths, the corner shop, the house where we lived, the big pub opposite the railway station.
It was the first time I had been back there and yet the features and layout of the town was indelibly printed on my infant brain – as were many memories which came rushing back. “This is where I saw a dog run over by a car,” I told them. “Up that hill…that’s where those friends of yours lived… the family whose name was ‘Duck’. And we called their kids the ducklings.”
It was such a thrill and it amazed my parents. Do you have any similar stories?
