Brain scans show we aren’t remembering being babies
How do we remember? Baby’s brain can’t remember from the first two years of life, says Yale University neuroscientist Nick Turk-Browne
Try as we might, adults can’t remember events from our earliest months or years. But whether this is because a baby’s hippocampus, a key brain region in storing such memories, is not sufficiently developed or because adults cannot recall these memories has long been an open question.
“What happens in your brain in the first two years of life is magnificent,” says Nick Turk-Browne, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale University. That’s the period of your whole life when the most changes occur. And better understanding how your brain learns and remembers in infancy lays the foundation for everything you know and do for the rest of your life.”
“Infants are the worst possible subject population in many ways,” says Turk-Browne. They don’t know what to do. It’s just like taking a picture, but with a blurry one. [so] you can’t move a millimeter. And also they have really short attention spans. So we had to adapt.”
A group of 26 young children who were four to two years old underwent functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scans to shed light on the issue.
Seeing what you see: How babies look at familiar things in their first two seconds before disappearing, and what they decide to see next-to-leading order memory traces in the brain
Then, one image appears for two seconds before disappearing. The images that they have never seen before include a canyon, dog toy and a woman’s face.
“About a minute later, we show them a different image from the same category and let them decide what they want to see”, says Yates. That could possibly be a canyon with a waterfall.
They found that when a baby looks at an image, the longer they look at it again. Because babies spend more time looking at familiar things, this result indicates that they are remembering what they saw.
The time stamp on our first memory can be put early by these results, according to a scientist who wasn’t involved in the research.
He says it is clear that infancy is an important stage of our lives, and that it is also relevant in how we raise and educate children.
“It’s an important question,” says Donato, “how these traumatic events might lead to memories or traces in the brain that might persist for a long time and might even influence the way in which this person will develop.”
The team measured the Hippocampal activity when the children viewed an image of a new face for 2 seconds, and then saw the same image again about a minute later.
“What this study shows is a proof of concept that the encoding capability exists,” says study co-author Nick Turk-Browne, a cognitive psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Yale University neuroscientist Nick TurkBrowne has said that what happens in baby’s brain in the first two years of life is’magnificent’. “What happens in baby’s brain in the first two years of life is magnificent…better understanding how your brain learns…in infancy lays the foundation for everything you know and do for the rest of your life,” he added.