In Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Funes the Memorious, the protagonist is blessed – or cursed – with the seemingly uncanny ability to remember everything.
For most people, however, memories rarely go back much earlier in life than perhaps to three or four years old.
Before that, most people draw a blank.
But those missing early years are not because people block out being gurgled and cooed at like some sort of pet incapable of much beyond helplessly filling a nappy.
An elusive phenomenon known as “infantile amnesia” appears to be responsible for babies forgetting specific events, according to a team of psychology researchers at Yale University in the United States.
“The hallmark of these types of memories, which we call episodic memories, is that you can describe them to others, but that’s off the table when you’re dealing with pre-verbal infants,” said Yale professor of psychology Dr Nick Turk-Browne.
The team’s findings, which were based in part on showing photos to babies and published in the journal Science, could overturn the long-held view that people do not remember infancy because the hippocampus – the bit of the brain where memories are encoded – does not develop until adolescence.
“Greater activity in the hippocampus during the viewing of previously-unseen photographs was related to later memory- based looking behaviour beginning around one year of age, suggesting that the capacity to encode individual memories comes online during infancy,” the team said.
Babies form “fleeting” memories, according to Neurosciences and Mental Health programme senior scientist Dr Paul Frankland and PhD candidate Adam Ramsaran of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, whose commentary on the matter was also published in the journal Science. – dpa
