Why You Can't Remember Being A Baby.

You spent your first few years learning the most important skills you'd ever acquire — how to walk, how to talk, who your parents were, what love felt like, how the whole world works. It was, by a wide margin, the most intense period of learning in your entire existence. And you remember none of it. Not one moment before about age three, and little before five or six. An entire chapter of your life — the most formative one — has simply been erased. Scientists call this universal blank spot infantile amnesia, and the obvious explanation — that babies just don't form memories — turns out to be completely wrong. Babies absolutely do form memories; that's how they learn anything at all. So the recordings existed... and then they were lost. This video unpacks why: a brain rebuilding itself so fast it may overwrite its own memories, memories made before you had language to encode them, and the fact that there may not have been a stable "you" yet for those experiences to belong to. The unsettling conclusion? That little person who learned to walk and talk and love was, in a very real sense, overwritten — and you were built on top of them, using their learning as your foundation while discarding their memories. You are the sum of experiences you'll never recall, authored by a child you'll never meet, who happened to be you. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 The most important years you can't remember 0:52 Infantile amnesia 1:14 Babies really do form memories 2:00 Reason 1: a brain rebuilding itself 2:43 Reason 2: memories need language 3:45 Reason 3: there was no "you" yet 4:22 Where did that little person go? 5:08 The thought that lingers 5:41 Next: memories that never happened 📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING Bauer, P. J., & Larkina, M. (2014). The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood: A prospective investigation of the course and determinants of forgetting of early-life events. Memory, 22(8), 907-924. Akers, K. G., et al. (2014). Hippocampal neurogenesis regulates forgetting during adulthood and infancy. Science, 344(6184), 598-602. Josselyn, S. A., & Frankland, P. W. (2012). Infantile amnesia: A neurogenic hypothesis. Learning & Memory, 19(9), 423-433. Simcock, G., & Hayne, H. (2002). Breaking the barrier? Children fail to translate their preverbal memories into language. Psychological Science, 13(3), 225-231. Howe, M. L., & Courage, M. L. (1993). On resolving the enigma of infantile amnesia. Psychological Bulletin, 113(2), 305-326. Rovee-Collier, C. (1999). The development of infant memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(3), 80-85. 👍 If the idea that your memories aren't the reliable recordings you think they are fascinates you, subscribe — the next video is about how easily scientists can plant completely false memories into a person's mind: memories of things that never happened at all. #psychology #memory #infantileamnesia #brain #neuroscience #childhood