No matter how hard we try, remembering anything that happened to us before the age of, say, 3 or 4 years old feels impossible. Even memories before 7 years old feel hazy and fragmented.
Our brains just aren’t built to store specific memories from our first few years, something known as “infantile amnesia.”
And chances are, even the earliest memories we think we have might just be amalgamations of stories we’ve been told, images cribbed from old family snapshots and home videos, or scenes we’ve borrowed from movies or TV shows.
So does it really matter if it happened, if we can’t really remember it?
Yes, science says. Even if we don’t have a specific memory of what happened when we were babies, those experiences leave lasting impressions on us of being safe and being loved, which shapes how we form relationships later in life. But whether babies are able to encode and store permanent memories is still an open question.
Columbia University cognitive psychologist Tristan Yates put babies in MRI machines and showed them a series of images, and found that the babies tended to stare longer at an image they’d been shown before, suggesting that they remembered seeing the image the first time.
“We are showing that they’re able to form some memories,” Yates said. “The hippocampus is capable of forming specific memories over a few minutes, but now we need to start doing the research that can get us at longer durations, that can get at more complex memories.”
One theory for infantile amnesia is that an infant’s brain is prioritizing learning general skills, like how to walk or talk or eat, or learning to detect patterns like a bedtime routine, rather than storing specific memories that aren’t necessary for survival.
Noam Hassenfeld spoke with Yates and Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Suskind studies early childhood development and the important role that parents and caregivers play, and she told Noam about how our early childhood experiences can shape us.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
You started out as a cochlear implant surgeon and now you’re working on childhood development. How did that happen? What’s the connection there?
It actually makes a whole lot of sense. When I first started our pediatric cochlear implant program at the University of Chicago, I started implanting cute little kids who all look like they had the same potential to thrive after implant surgery, and found very quickly that I could implant two children who looked very much the same, who had parents who loved them equally, with the same technology, but they would have very different outcomes, with one of them really thriving after surgery in terms of language learning and trajectories, and others barely able to communicate.
It was that experience and seeing these huge differences in outcomes after the same surgery that led me into this incredible world of childhood development and the importance of the early years and the importance of parents.
Humans come out with brains that are literally only one-third the size of adult brains. That’s very different than any other species. It’s why the puppy can start feeding itself pretty quickly and start walking, whereas the human infant is helpless. In those first three years of life, 85 percent of the physical brain is built during those periods of time.
A million new neural connections happen every second. The environmental input, the input from parents and caregivers — every serve and return, every touch, every gaze — literally is helping shape and strengthen the neural connections that happen in our brain.
The brain isn’t being just built for your child’s vocabulary development or their literacy ability. It’s building their social brain, their ability to relate to and connect to the rest of the world. The relationships and the expectations for relationships are built in those early years.
Tell me if this is maybe an oversimplification, but I’m a parent of a young son; he’s a little over 7 months old. And I feel like what I’m doing when I’m raising him is building the structure of his brain, or building the architecture, and all the other stuff, all the specific things, are going to fill in all the rooms of the big building that we’re constructing together. But he’s not going to start filling those in with specific ideas or specific memories until later on in his development.
The analogy you make is exactly right. I think of building the physical brain — if you were thinking about it through a computer lens — as building the hardware, the firmware, the memory, the RAM. I think of K-12 as really important, but I think of those as software updates. But these early years are building that infrastructure.
“I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence.”
At the end of the day, it’s your attachment with him, being the perfectly imperfect parent. I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence. So feel okay every time you misstep, misunderstand and repair, because that is, for him, building the understanding of, “I can be loved by another human who missteps but is able to repair.” He is starting to understand how to expect to be treated.
That’s why it’s almost like you’re building the relationship map for him that’s going to allow him in the future to have expectations of how he’s going to be treated and loved by an imperfect human: building that strong bond, showering him with rich language, that back and forth, looking at him as a conversational partner from day one.
It’s interesting you brought up AI and friction. What do you think this idea of a more frictionless existence is going to start meaning for kids?
I had a book that just came out on this called Human Raised, and that’s a lot of the argument of the book. Children learn from imperfect parenting through friction, through the productive struggle. And we’re seeing that friction that we’ve always looked at as a bug in the system — like, “Oh my gosh, I wish this was a more frictionless existence with the other humans in our world” — what we’re finding is that it is key for relationships development, learning to have relationships, and actually even learning.
That’s why, writing an essay with an LLM — you don’t remember it at the end of the day. There’s something about what happens in the brain that we’ve discounted on the friction side of things. So I actually think in some ways friction should be the word of the year, and we need to embrace it a little bit more. We don’t need to friction-max, but we do need to see the power of the friction.
It sounds like even if my son is going to forget all of this, maybe on a deep level it’ll stick with him. But should I still have a nice big 1-year-old birthday party?
Heck yes. Because you’re doing it partially for you — and the grandparents, let’s be clear. Those are wonderful moments that they do remember at some level. My son, who’s now 20-something in medical school, was obsessed with Thomas the choo-choo train. I still have the box of the Thomas the choo-choo train.
He may not remember exactly that birthday party and the cake that I worked very hard on, but it’s even fun to talk about it now in his twenties. So yes, do enjoy every moment. Don’t get obsessed, like everything has to be perfect, but those are memories for everyone.
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