People generally remember nothing from before age 3, and children’s memory abilities don’t fully mature until about age 7. “It’s a paradox in a sense,” says neuroscientist Flavio Donato of the University of Basel. “In the moment that the brain is learning at a rate it will never show again during the whole lifetime, those memories seem not to stick in the brain.”
For many years, researchers assumed babies’ brains are simply not mature enough to form lasting memories.
Sigmund Freud, however, believed infants do form memories, but the brain suppresses them so we forget the psychosexual experience of birth. He called the process “infantile amnesia.”
New research is beginning to suggest Freud was right about the forgetting, if not about its purpose. It appears the brain actually can create memories before age 3—although perhaps in a different way from adult memories—and those memories may persist into adulthood. But we can’t consciously access them.
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No one is sure why infantile amnesia exists, but studies have shown that many other mammals also experience it, suggesting it’s not linked to language or self-awareness. Instead, this forgetting probably serves some evolutionary purpose, whether that’s helping young brains learn how to attach the proper importance to events or developing a framework for the memory systems they will use throughout life.
