Can a Person Remember Being Born?
Think back to your earliest memory. Perhaps images of a birthday party or scenes from a family vacation come to mind. Now think about your age when that event occurred. Chances are that earliest recollection extends no further back than your third birthday. In fact, you can probably come up with only a handful of memories from between the ages of 3 and 7, although family photo albums or other cues may trigger more.
Psychologists refer to this inability of most adults to remember events from early life, including their birth, as childhood amnesia. Sigmund Freud first coined the term infantile amnesia, now more broadly referred to as childhood amnesia, as early as 1899 to explain his adult patients’ scarcity of childhood memories. Freud proposed that people use it as a means of repressing traumatic, and often sexual, urgings during that time [source: Insel]. To block those unconscious drives of the id, Freud claimed that humans create screen memories, or revised versions of events, to protect the conscious ego.
More than a century later, researchers have yet to pin down a precise explanation for why childhood amnesia occurs. Only since the 1980s have people investigated children’s, rather than adults’, memory capabilities in search of the answer [source: Bauer]. This research has brought with it a new batch of questions about the nuances of young children’s memory.
For a long time, the rationale behind childhood amnesia rested on the assumption that the memory-making parts of babies’ brains were undeveloped. Then, around age 3, children’s memory capabilities rapidly accelerate to adult levels.
However, researchers have discovered that children as young as 3 months old can form long-term memories [sources: Horváth, Liston]. The difference comes in which memories stick around. For instance, it appears that babies are born with more intact implicit, or unconscious, memories. At the same time the explicit, or episodic, memory that records specific events does not carry information over that three-year gap, explaining why people do not remember their births.
But why does this happen, and what changes take place in those first years? And if we can form memories as babies, why don’t we retain them into adulthood?
Although evidence suggests otherwise, a few people have claimed they remember being born. They recall crying loudly or the pain of being pulled out of the birth canal [source: Haynes]. But most scientists dispute they are really recalling the event, arguing that these people could be repeating stories they have heard from others.
So why don’t we remember birth? Scientists postulate that later brain maturation may interfere with early infant memories [source: Castro]. Or else, our earliest memories remain blocked from our consciousness because we had no language skills at that time. A 2004 study traced the verbal development in 27- and 39-month-old boys and girls as a measure of how well they could recall a past event. The researchers found that if the children didn’t know the words to describe the event when it happened, they couldn’t describe it later after learning the appropriate words [source: Simcock and Hayne].
Verbalizing our personal memories of events contributes to our autobiographical memories. These types of memories help to define our sense of self and relationship to people around us. Closely linked to this is the ability to recognize yourself. Some researchers have proposed that children do not develop self-recognition skills and a personal identity until 16 or 24 months [source: Fivush and Nelson].
In addition, we develop knowledge of our personal past when we begin to organize memories into a context. Many preschool-age children can explain the different parts of an event in sequential order, such as what happened when they went to a circus. But it isn’t until their fifth year that they can understand the ideas of time and the past and are able to place that trip to the circus on a mental time line [source: Fivush and Nelson].
Parents play a pivotal role in developing children’s autobiographical memory as well. Research has shown that the way parents verbally recall memories with their small children correlates to those children’s narrative style for retelling memories later in life [source: Bauer]. For example, children whose parents tell them about past events, such as birthday parties or trips to the zoo, in detail will be more likely to vividly describe their own memories. Interestingly, autobiographical memory also has a cultural component, with Westerners’ personal memories focusing more on themselves and Easterners remembering themselves more in group contexts [source: Cohen].
More detailed explanations exist regarding childhood amnesia. But brain structure, language and sense of self are its foundation.
via howstuffworks
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