Why don't we remember how we were born? Reincarnation of the Soul. Why We Don't Remember Past Lives

The buildings 12.10.2019
The buildings

In general, it is rather difficult to say why exactly 13 is considered an unlucky number, or rather, there are quite a lot of answer options, but no one knows which one is more accurate. The very first and ancient version of the origin of distrust and fear of the number 13 is considered to be ancient time when people first learned to count. The person immediately guessed that counting on the fingers is the easiest, and so the count of numbers up to 10 appeared. Why the number 13 is considered unlucky Then it turned out to add 2 more hands to the treasured ten, and the number 12 came out. And then the counting options ancient man came to an end, and a terrible and frightening unknown began. Accordingly, the number 13 is a transition to the unknown, and the unknown is often compared to the fear of death. There are later versions of the origin of superstitions in religion and numerology associated with this number. For example, in some versions of the science of numerology, the number 13 is considered the prototype of the ideal number "dozen", therefore it symbolizes completeness and even perfection. Therefore, it is sometimes believed that by adding numbers to 12, you oppose the recognition of the perfection, harmony and completeness of the ideal world, which naturally incurs failures organized by the universe and even God's disfavor. In addition, the well-known 13 lasso, long recognized as the wisest deck of Tarot cards, is also called “death”, and its numerical value is also unexpectedly 40 (you still remember how much 4 + 0 will be).

WHY can't photograph sleeping people?

There is an opinion that sleeping people cannot be photographed. But why?
Superstitious people suggest that photographing sleeping people takes away their life energy, which can lead to further death.
Earlier, in antiquity, as, indeed, now, superstitious people believed that the soul of a person leaves the body in a dream. Sleep is the "little death." It was believed that sleeping people could not be transferred or shifted to another place, because the soul might not find a way back. It was impossible to draw a portrait of a sleeping person. It was believed that this could lead to illness, separation, or induce treason. With the advent of photography, this belief was transferred to photography.
In addition, the creation of noiseless photographic equipment was not an easy task. Usually, during photographing, the camera made a noise that could wake the sleeping person. When photographing indoors, the flash usually fires. Its light can wake the sleeper.
From reasonable explanations, the only reason why it is not worth photographing a sleeping person is the incorrectness of such an act. If you get the consent of a person to photograph him in a state of sleep - please, otherwise - is it worth it? After all, in a dream a person is defenseless and does not control his body.

What happens if you eat three tablespoons of salt?

This amount of salt usually causes nausea and vomiting, followed by intense thirst. But if you drink water, then the salt will delay it, and as a result of this, severe swelling begins. In addition, with a large dosage of salt, pressure rises and the load on the liver and kidneys increases very much.
Most likely, a person will not be able to die from 3 tablespoons of salt, but the consequences will be sad.

WHY do we sometimes see colorless flies flying?

Among physicians, the flickering effect is explained by the destruction of the vitreous formation in the organ of vision. What does it represent? At its core, it is a kind of transparent substance resembling jelly. It is located inside the eye and affects the quality of human vision.

As a result of some events, thickening of the fibers inside the body can occur, which will lead to a loss of its transparency. This state is just called destruction, due to which the appearance of "flies" occurs.

What happens if you scan the mirror?

Picked up a mirror without a frame. Its dimensions: length 30 cm, width 20 cm. Carefully placed on the surface of the scanner glass and covered with a lid. We chose “new scan” with the mouse pointer and set the desired parameters. Everything! The picture is ready.

We see a dark rectangle. It clearly shows traces of small scratches and scuffs that were on the mirror. As it turned out, nothing fantastic. Almost like a painting by the famous artist Malevich. Only we do not have a square, but a black rectangle.

WHY can't we remember how we were born?

Each of us remembers many childhood events, but even with a strong desire, we cannot remember everything. None of the adults can remember the moment of their birth and the first years of life. Our memories are cut off from about 3-7 years. Psychologists have called this phenomenon childhood amnesia. The term "infantile amnesia" was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1899. According to Freud, adults are not able to remember the events of the first 3-5 years of their life, since during the first years of life the child experiences aggressive and often sexual impulses towards his parents. But this idea was one-sided and did not take root.

WHY do we get annoyed by the sound of our own voice in a recording?

Every sound we hear is vibrations propagating through the air. The inner ear “catches” these vibrations and “poureds” them into the head through the external auditory canal, where they set the eardrums in motion. These vibrations then enter the inner ear and are converted into signals that reach the auditory nerve in the brain, where they are deciphered.

However, the inner ear picks up not only those vibrations that come from the outside through the ear canal. It also perceives those vibrations that arise inside the body. Therefore, when you speak yourself, you hear a combination of these two types of vibrations. And the sound in different environments transmitted differently.

This explains the discrepancy that is so annoying when you hear your own voice in the recording.

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.

Name Description
Freud's theory The world famous Freud, who brought about important changes in the field of medicine and psychology, had his own opinion about the absence of childhood memories.
  • His theory is based on the sexual attachment of a child under the age of five.
  • Freud believed that information is blocked on a subconscious level, since one of the parents of the sex opposite to the baby is perceived by the latter more positively than the other.

In other words, a girl at an early age is strongly attached to her father and has jealous feelings for her mother, perhaps even hates her.

  • As we reach a more conscious age, we realize that our feelings are negative and unnatural.
  • Therefore, we try to erase them from memory.

But this theory has not been widely adopted. It has remained exclusively the position of one person regarding the lack of memories of the early period of life.

Hark Hawn's theory What the scientist proved: why we do not remember childhood

This doctor believed that the child does not feel like a separate person.

He does not know how to share the knowledge gained as a result of his own life experience, and those emotions and feelings that other people experience.

Everything is the same for a baby. Therefore, memory does not preserve the moment of birth and childhood.

How, then, can children distinguish between father and mother, if they have not yet learned to speak and remember? Semantic memory helps them in this. The child easily navigates the rooms, shows, without confusion, who is dad and who is mom.

It is long-term memory that stores important information necessary to survive in this world. "Storage" will tell you the room where he is fed, bathed, dressed, the place where the treat is hidden, and so on.

So why do we not remember ourselves from birth:

  • Hawn believed that the subconscious considers the moment of birth an unnecessary and negative phenomenon for our psyche.
  • Therefore, the memory of him is stored not in long-term, but in short-term memory.

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.

Fact Description
Memory works even with damage to one part of the brain hemisphere
  • The hypothalamus is present in both hemispheres. This is the name of the part of the brain that is responsible for correct work memory and knowledge.
  • If it is damaged in one part and remains unchanged in the second, the memory function will work without interruption.
Complete amnesia is almost non-existent. In reality, complete memory loss practically does not exist. You often watch films in which the hero hit his head, as a result - the previous events completely evaporated.

In reality, it is practically impossible that during the first trauma everything is forgotten, and after the second one everything is restored.

  • Complete amnesia is very rare.
  • If a person has experienced a negative mental or physical impact, then he can forget the unpleasant moment itself, nothing more.
The beginning of brain activity in an infant begins in the state of the embryo Three months after the egg is fertilized, the baby is already beginning to place certain events in the cells of its storage.
A person is able to remember a lot of information
  • If you suffer from forgetfulness, it does not mean that you have a memory problem.

It's just that you can't extract the necessary facts from your storage, the volume of which is unlimited.

Proved how many words can the human brain remember This figure is 100,000.

So many words, but why we don’t remember ourselves from birth, it’s interesting to learn about this all the same.

False memory exists If unpleasant events happen to us that traumatize our psyche, consciousness can turn off the memory of such moments, re-creating, exaggerating or distorting them.
Works during sleep short term memory That is why dreams mainly convey recent life facts that are happening to us, which we don’t remember in the morning.
TV kills the ability to remember
  • It is recommended to watch the blue screen for no more than two hours.
  • This is especially true for people between the ages of forty and sixty.
  • If you spend too much time in front of the TV, the risk of Alzheimer's disease increases.
Brain growth occurs before the age of twenty-five
  • Depending on how we load and train our brain in early youth, the head will work in the future.
  • Emptiness and failures in memorization are possible if in the early period we most often engaged in empty pastime.
Always needed new and unique experiences Memory loves nothingness

Have you ever wondered why time passes so quickly?

Why are the same impressions and emotions devoid of novelty in the future?

Think back to your first meeting with your loved one. The appearance of the firstborn. Your vacation that you have been waiting for all year.

  • The emotional state of the initial impressions is elevated, the tides of happiness remain in our brain for a long time.

But when this is repeated, it already seems not so joyful, but fleeting.

After you have just tripled your job after studying, you look forward to your first vacation, spend it usefully and slowly.

The third and the rest are already flying by in an instant.

The same applies to your relationship with a loved one. At first you count the seconds until the next meeting, they seem to you like an eternity. But, after years spent together, you do not have time to look back, as you are already celebrating your 30th anniversary.

  • Therefore, feed the brain with new, exciting events, do not let it “swim fat”, then every day in your life will be easy and memorable.

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. small detail- a sound, a look, a word, a 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.

Cause Description
Immature brain The roots of this hypothesis came to us a long time ago.
  • Previously, it was assumed that not yet sufficiently formed thinking does not allow memory to work "to its fullest".

But at present, many scientists argue with such a statement.

  • They believe that by the age of one, the child receives a fully mature part of the brain, which is responsible for remembering the facts that are happening.
  • The required level can be reached by connecting short-term and long-term types of memory in a timely manner.
Missing vocabulary Due to the fact that up to three years the child knows the minimum number of words, he is not able to clearly describe the events and moments surrounding him.
  • Incoherent bits of sensations from early childhood may flash through the mind.
  • But there is no way to clearly separate them from later perceptions.

For example, the girl remembered the smell of her grandmother's pies in the village, where she spent time for up to a year.

muscle shape
  • Children are able to realize everything with the help of bodily sensations.

You saw that they constantly copy the movements of adults, gradually bringing their actions to automatism.

But psychologists argue with this statement.

  • They believe that even in the womb, the developing embryo hears and sees, but cannot link its memories together.
Lack of sense of time To put together a picture of flashing details from childhood, you need to understand in which particular period the corresponding event occurred. And the child can't do it yet.
Memory with holes
  • The volume that the brain can remember, an adult and a child is different.
  • In order to save information for new sensations, the baby needs to make room.
  • While adult uncles and aunts keep a lot of facts in their cells.
  • Science has proven that five-year-olds remember themselves at an earlier age, but when they start going to school, their memories give way to new knowledge.
No desire to remember The position of pessimists is interesting, who argue why we do not remember ourselves from birth.

It turns out that unconscious fears are to blame:

  • won't mom leave
  • Will they feed me?

Everyone is trying to force out their helpless state from uncomfortable memories. And, when we are able to serve ourselves on our own, from that moment we begin to “record” all the information received and reproduce it, if necessary.

A very important period of life The brain is like a computer
  • Optimistic researchers tend to think that the age under five years is the most decisive.

Think about how a computer works. If we make changes to the system programs at our discretion, then this may lead to the failure of the entire system as a whole.

  • Therefore, we are not given the opportunity to invade infant memories, since it is then that our behavioral characteristics and subconsciousness are formed.

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 greatest mystery that mankind cannot unravel. 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. "AT Eastern cultures childhood memories are not particularly 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 childhood experiences can affect our behavior long after we erase them from memory, psychologists believe they must be left 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 complex lies about a sad trip to shopping center where they got lost and were later rescued by an affectionate elderly woman and reunited with their 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 bright details. 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 biggest mystery is not why we can't remember childhood, but whether we can trust our memories.

the first three or four years of life. Plus, we generally remember quite a bit about ourselves before the age of seven. “No, well, I still remember something,” you say, and you will be absolutely right. Another thing is that, upon reflection, it can be difficult to understand whether we are talking about real memories or second-order memories based on photographs and stories of parents.

The phenomenon known as "childhood amnesia" has been a mystery to psychologists for over a century. In spite of great amount information that can be used and technological developments, scientists still cannot say for sure why this is happening. Although there are a number of popular theories that seem to them the most plausible.

The first reason is the development of the hippocampus

It might seem that the reason we don't remember ourselves in infancy is because babies and toddlers don't have full . But in fact, The Conversation adds, babies as young as 6 months old can form both short-term memories that last for a few minutes, and long-term memories related to the events of recent weeks and even months.

In one study, 6-month-olds who learned how to push a lever to operate a toy train remembered how to perform the action for 2-3 weeks after they last saw the toy. And preschoolers, according to another study, are able to remember what happened several years ago. But here, experts explain, again the question remains open: are these autobiographical memories or memories obtained with the help of someone or something.

The truth is that memory capabilities in childhood are really not the same as in adulthood (in fact, memory continues to develop into adolescence). And this is one of the most popular explanations for "childhood amnesia." It is important to understand that memory is not only the formation, but also the maintenance and subsequent retrieval of memories. At the same time, the hippocampus - the region of the brain responsible for all of this - continues to develop until at least the age of seven.

It is also interesting that the typical border of "childhood amnesia" at 3-4 years, apparently, shifts with age. There is evidence that children and adolescents generally have earlier memories than adults. And this, in turn, suggests that the issue may be less about the formation of memories, but more about their preservation.

The second reason is language proficiency

The second important factor that plays a role in childhood memories is language. Between the ages of one and six, children mostly go through difficult process formation of speech to free (or even languages, if we are talking about bilinguals). Scientists believe that the assumption that the ability to speak affects the ability to remember (here we include the presence of the words “remember”, “remember” in the lexicon) is to some extent true. In other words, the level of language proficiency in a particular period partially affects how well a child will remember this or another event.

This allows us to speak, for example, a study conducted with the participation of babies delivered to the department emergency care. As a result, children over 26 months of age who could recount the event at the time remembered it five years later, while children under 26 months of age who could not speak remembered little or nothing at all. That is, preverbal memories are indeed more likely to be lost if they are not translated into language.

Reason three - cultural characteristics

Unlike the simple exchange of information, memories revolve around social function sharing experiences with others. In this way, family histories maintain the availability of memory over time, as well as increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and.

Maori, the natives of New Zealand, have the earliest childhood memories - they remember themselves as early as the age of 2.5 years. Researchers believe this is due to the logic of Maori mothers' storytelling and the tradition of telling family stories from an early age. Data analysis on the topic also shows that adults in cultures that value autonomy ( North America, Western Europe) tend to report earlier childhood memories than adults in cultures that value wholeness and connectedness (Asia, Africa).

You won't believe it, but my friends told me that their children up to 2-3 years of age remembered not only how they were born, but also how they saw their mother there in the sky.

Whether it was childhood fantasies or real memories, it's hard to say. But the human brain is designed in such a way that most we almost do not remember information until the age of 5.

And it happens that we can remember some bright event all life. Moreover, this event could occur when you were not even a year old. So, for example, I remember well how I was baptized at the age of six months.

Why do adults not remember how they were born?

According to one of the opinions of scientists, it is believed that a person has a long-term and short-term memory. So here the psychologically difficult and dangerous moment of childbirth is blocked and belongs to short-term memory.

Yes, you yourself, probably, often heard that many people forget some dangerous life-threatening moments that happened to them.

In general, the period of childhood up to 3 years, and not only the birth itself, even children aged 5-7 do not remember. This period is also called "infantile amnesia".


  • There is also an opinion that we cannot remember the moment of childbirth, since during this period of life the child does not yet speak. I.e nerve cells cannot combine memory with words.

But in general The human brain is still poorly understood. Therefore, many processes associated with memory are not yet subject to scientists. Also how, for example, to explain such a phenomenon as human sleep.

Nevertheless, some individuals try to remember their infant life and moment of birth through hypnosis. So far, however, almost no one has succeeded.

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