Most time we try to remember our early childhood events, but fail to recall them. We always hear these stories from our elders but when we want to recall those earliest memories, we get nothing. In fact, the events occurred before the age of seven become vague to us.
This event is called “childhood amnesia”. It is also known as infantile amnesia. It means unable to recover old memories before the age of 2 – 4 years or 7 years. Psychologists have already spent several years to understand this phenomenon, but unable to know it completely.
We know that our organs don’t work efficiently in early days. And that’s why the brain can’t accumulate the events occurred in childhood before the age of 2 – 4 years or 7 years. But it is found that a six months baby can have two types of memories – short-term and long-term memories. Short-term memory is capable to store the data for minutes while long-term memories can be recovered even after one week it happens. A study shows that a six months baby could remember how to drive a toy train even after two to three weeks they had learnt to operate it. It is also found in a research that preschoolers showed their ability to recall the memories that occurred years ago.
In childhood state, our memories don’t function efficiently as they keep on developing until the age of seven. During these years several developments occur in different sections of the brain which forms many capabilities like forming, maintaining and recovering memories. The hippocampus, a small section of the brain that helps to form memories, carries on its progress until the age of seven.
Other than memory, there is another feature which also continues to improve from the ages of one to six. They first start to speak one word and after a lot of effort they start speaking sentences and later get fluency in their native language(s). In this way, a baby improves his or her speaking ability.
The speaking power of a child shows how long they can remember their old memories. After interviewing a young child, one lab group found that children over 26 months can store the information in their mind up to five years if they can speak about the incident, while others below 26 years couldn’t retrieve anything because of inability to express about the event. This shows that our mind can store and recall the information after long time if they can express it into native language.
Source:
https://theconversation.com/why-cant-we-remember-our-early-childhood-62325
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