The Real Reason You Can't Remember Being a Baby

You have lived every single day of your life — but the first two to three years of it have simply vanished. Not blurry. Not vague. Gone. And the reason involves three separate systems in your brain all failing to work at the same time. Sigmund Freud named infantile amnesia in 1899 and blamed psychological repression. He was wrong about the mechanism, but the gap he identified is completely real. In 2014, researchers Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children discovered that the flood of new neurons being born in the infant hippocampus actively erases memories as it builds them. Patricia Bauer at Emory University has shown that nine-month-old infants can form and retain memories — they demonstrate this through behavior — but those memories are encoded in a pre-verbal format the adult brain cannot open. The rouge test reveals that most children don't recognize themselves in a mirror until 18 to 24 months — and without a stable sense of self, there is no first-person memory to form. Dr. Kim Wade at the University of Warwick has demonstrated that what most people call their earliest memory is often a false one — implanted by a photograph, a story, or a narrative someone else constructed for them. By the end, you will understand why your first years are not missing because nothing happened — they are missing because the machinery needed to record them in a form you can open simply wasn't installed yet. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ NEUROGENESIS AND INFANTILE AMNESIA Frankland, P.W. and Josselyn, S.A., 2012. Hippocampal neurogenesis and infantile amnesia. Hippocampus. Covers the discovery that high neurogenesis rates in infancy disrupt existing memory circuits, with mouse neurogenesis suppression experiments. EARLY MEMORY ENCODING IN PRE-VERBAL INFANTS Bauer, P.J., 2007. Remembering the Times of Our Lives: Memory in Infancy and Beyond. Lawrence Erlbaum. Covers Patricia Bauer's research on pre-verbal memory formation in 9-month-old infants and its inaccessibility to the verbal adult brain. THE HIPPOCAMPUS AND MEMORY MATURATION Seress, L. and Abraham, H., 2008. Human hippocampal development. Progress in Brain Research. Covers the late maturation timeline of the hippocampus relative to other brain structures and its role in infantile amnesia. THE ROUGE SELF-RECOGNITION TEST Amsterdam, B., 1972. Mirror self-image reactions before age two. Developmental Psychobiology. The original paper documenting mirror self-recognition emerging between 18 and 24 months and its link to autobiographical memory formation. IMPLANTED FALSE MEMORIES IN ADULTS Wade, K.A., Garry, M., Read, J.D., and Lindsay, D.S., 2002. A picture is worth a thousand lies. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Covers the doctored-photograph experiments demonstrating that fabricated childhood events can be implanted as false memories in a majority of adult participants. FREUD AND INFANTILE AMNESIA Freud, S., 1899. Screen Memories. Originally published in Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. The paper in which Freud first formally described infantile amnesia and proposed repression as its mechanism. HASHTAGS #infantileamnesia #whycantrememberbaby #neuroscience #memoryscience #braindevelopment