Submission #11: Why can't we remember our lives as babies?

            

It will always upset me that I don’t have memories before the age of 4, and probably because I was living in India until I was four and my mom always told me so many stories of me during that time, but I just can’t remember. Even if I do, I don’t know if it’s my actual memory or a fabrication I made up from one of my mother’s stories. So I always wondered, why can’t we remember our lives as infants or toddlers? Is it because we are so young that we cannot comprehend that we need to remember these things? Is it because we are too focused on remembering other things like talking and walking that we don’t remember other things? While I was doing research trying to find an answer, or something that would help me understand better, I found this very helpful article; (http://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5695500/why-cant-you-remember-being-a-baby-science-explains).

            To summarize, the article says that the reason we cannot remember our lives as babies is because we constantly make new cells throughout our life, this is a process called neurogenesis. In babies however, the rate of neurogenesis is much higher; this produces new neurons at a much higher rate. And this process is active particularly in the hippocampus, also known as the memory center. While most of the time neurogenesis leads to better learning and memory, extremely high rates of neurogenesis (as seen in babies) can increase forgetfulness. So basically, these new neurons are coming in by the boat load and pushing out old neurons that hold our baby memories. One person points out that this could be a good thing because if we have too many memories, we can lessen our ability to learn more things and gain new knowledge. Scientists did an experiment on young mice which showed that heightened rates of neurogenesis led to forgetfulness. They also did this with young guinea pigs and degu and found the data to be consistent with the mice. Of course there is no way of knowing what exactly happens in human brains because these experiments were done on rodents, but considering the similarity of mammal brains; this is a very good basis to build on top on. I guess when we are young, we need to learn so many new things that we need so many new neurons and we don’t have enough space in our tiny brains that we need to compromise somewhere. Memory is so fragile and losely constructed, you constantly add and take out memories, all this change can lead to mis consolidation of memories. We may even lose memories that were not 'put back' in our memory.