(Newswire.net— November 5, 2020) — Although according to experts, our personality is formed in the earliest childhood, very few people have any memories from that period of life.
As we grow up, we forget the people we met, events we participated in and places we visited in childhood, and the reason for that is a phenomenon called “children’s amnesia“.
If preschoolers and even infants remember unique events over long periods of time, the question is why then as adults are we unable to recall early childhood? The answer lies in a critical component of the definition of childhood amnesia – forgetting.
It is about the inability of adults to remember details or readable events that happened to them before the age of four, and one of the theories says that childhood amnesia occurs due to the inability to speak in the first years of life, writes Bright Side.
We describe the memories with nice words in our heads and remember them through the words we repeat to ourselves. Since a small child does not talk meaningfully until the second year of life, it is not able to create a lasting memory, scientists say.
Other research claims that part of the reason for amnesia lies in the development of our brain, which, while busy creating new cells, does not store long-term memories, so there is no so-called “episodic memory” yet.
That is why we often have general memories of early childhood, for example, of a park we often went to, but we do not remember many details.
Some researchers went even further and found that children before the age of 7 are able to remember “60% or more of their early-life events,” while 8 and 9-year-olds could only recall up to 40%” This allowed them to realize that, as we go through different stages of our development, the less we remember from what preceded it.
Our parents also influence the way we remember certain events, according to researchers.
Recent research on this topic has shown that children remember the same event differently after talking about it with their parents, so they should be helped to keep as many memories as possible and to interpret them correctly for themselves.