Before You Could Remember, Part 3

past couple of episodes here. So the term childhood amnesia refers to a couple of different facts, which are, first of all, the fact that most adults cannot conjure any genuine, first hand episodic memories from before roughly the age of three. And there are some minor variations in that age horizon that have been observed to correlate with variables like gender.

Girls tend to have slightly earlier memories culture. Different cultures have on average different memory horizons, but on average we can say most people's earliest memories tend to be somewhere in the range of three years old or between three or four. And then the other fact is that once we do start having memories, for the next four to five years after that, we have fewer memories than would be predicted by the normal rate of forgetting. That holds

true throughout the rest of your life. So first you've got no memories usually, and then you've got fewer memories, and then finally the regular rate of forgetting kicks in, maybe somewhere around seven or eight or so. Now, some people do claim to have much earlier memories, and we've heard from some of them in email. Even some people claim to have memories even up to and before birth, and you know, it's impossible.

a parent. And it's clear that these false memories implanted later in life in many cases feel completely genuine to us, even if they are fabricated purely for the purpose of an experiment.

We use the example of jar and so forth. Now, some research we discussed in previous episodes made a pretty convincing case, at least to me, that the explanation is not that the brain is incapable of forming memories before

the average age of three or four. One of the other studies we talked about included a scenario in which three year olds could produce details about recent events in their lives when interviewed along with their mothers, showing that they did have memories of recent things that had happened, and these memories could be elicited with cues from parents.

Though it seems in a lot of cases children this young will not offer details from memory spontaneously, but if you kind of coax it out of them, they can produce details on their own that show they do remember things.

So the big question is why is it that many of these earliest memories, or what memories exist of earliest events, cannot be produced later in life, either later in childhood or especially in adulthood. There have been a lot of attempts to answer this question. There, of course, is still a lot of controversy about it. It is not a settled debate. But many of the proposed answers are based

in the developing structure of the brain. And while I think there is absolutely something to these arguments, the neurodevelopmental structural arguments, they don't exactly mean that the immature brain cannot make memories yet, because again we as we've seen, sometimes you can get younger children to provide details about recent events, and also young children can show examples of learning, say learning how to manipulate a simple mechanism in a toy,

in experiments that show that they do have memories that in some cases last for weeks months, even before the

age of three, so there is some remembering going on. Instead, it seems to me more likely that what's happening here is the memories that the brain makes at age one or two are prone to more rapid forgetting than the kinds of memories we would make at age eleven or twelve or Also, those memories might be different than the memories made in later life in a way that makes them more difficult to retrieve after we age passed that

memory horizon. So for the neurodevelopmental structural arguments, we looked at one paper in Part two arguing that the hippocampal memory system is actually very active in the first few years of life. That's the normal memory system. A lot is going on there when you're two years old or so. But this paper argued that instead of making memories of the kind that will be stored for the rest of your life, what it's primarily doing with the processing of

information from experiences is learning how to learn. And complementary to this, I think one structural developmental explanation's been offered is that a lot of early autobiographical memories may be lost due to the rapid rate of neurogenesis during childhood. So as new brain cells are formed, especially in the hippocampus, this may erode the stability of the structural basis of existing memories. So, you know, the hippo campus is developing rapidly.

You're sort of like you know, rebuilding the house constantly in real time, in which case the rooms that existed, you know, a year ago, might not really exist anymore as rooms down the road.

she thought this was funny? Will she be able to explain why she thought it was funny when she's older, And unfortunately it breaks my heart. I think the answer is probably not.

Of course, it also seems plausible that it's a phenomenon with multiple contributing causes, and maybe some are based not just in the physical development of the brain, but possibly in some more externally visible developmental milestones, maybe based in the environment and things we learn. And so I thought, before we move away from this topic, we should explore a few of those ideas as well. So another factor I've read about linked to childhood amnesia, possibly explaining elements

of it is language. This seems like an obvious place to go. The language and the linguistic environment in which a child grows up. What if the extent to which we record experiences as memories in the form in which they're stored, and our later ability to retrieve and make sense of those memories is in some way dependent on language. The typical childhood memory horizon tends to come pretty much right in the middle of a period of rapid development

of language skills and the acquisition of vocabulary. So could it be that the adult capacity for memory greatly depends on the use of words and concepts that we gain during this language acquisition period. Could be coincidence, but developing skills and manipulating different types of subjects and predicates I think could play a role in the onset of autobiographical memories that persist over time, because language obviously plays a major role in how we as adults remember and tell

autobiographical memories. Like you ever, notice how when you tell a story from memory you often end up using the same or similar words to do so. Why is that? I mean? Even if so, you can understand how if you are, like reporting speech in a memory, you would want to use the same words to do so because you're reporting what somebody said. But so you're reporting a non verbal event, just like a walk you went on

and things you saw. Very often you use the same or similar words to do so, or at least I think I do, and most people I notice seem to do. Would this be your experience?

come up again in just a minute. But yeah, so I think I would acknowledge that certain types of vocabulary might actually make the difference between the ability to coherently remember an event and recall it years later versus that, you know, the characteristics that often come up when people are describing their very earliest memories, even the ones we've heard of from listeners in the email we got after the first couple of parts, like the kind of rare, fragmented,

decontextualized sensory memories that people often produce as their very earliest those have a very different character than a lot of later memories, and that may it seems to me like those differences could correlate with not really having the language to organize them as memories at the time they're formed. But if language does play an important role in establishing the capacity for long term memories about your life, what

if it's not just conceptual vocabulary. Another way language could have some thing to do with memory in early childhood

is narrative. So when you are asked to explain a memory from childhood, for example, you know, what's the first time you can remember swimming in the ocean, you could say I was in Florida, I was about three, Or you could say, well, I was with my mom and dad and we were in Florida and the sand was white, and I remember I saw a crab and it scared me, but my dad told me it was safe and the crab wouldn't chase me. And then the water was cold.

It was colder than the bath, and then saltwater got in my nose and I didn't like that at first, but then I did. And then later we went to dinner at a restaurant and my dad got steamed crabs, and he remembered the crab on the beach and he kept teasing me. He made the crab creep up on me on the table.

when they tell stories to each other. And you could call this distinction sort of reporting versus reminiscing, you know, with the storytelling being more social in nature and more entertainment focused. Honestly, So that comes back to your thing about having a certain format of the memory that is based around the language you've found is best to express it for entertainment value or for communicating what you're trying to get across.

slipping slide. Tensions were running high, I think, and an adult went down the slipping slide, and then the birthday boy exclaimed, this is a disaster, and see'd rather perturbed by the whole scenario. I don't know how that experience matured or state or it sticks stuck around as a memory, but like that kind of exaggeration I can imagine could make it if it was truly viewed as a disaster as a catastrophe of a non child going down the slip and slide.

sense within some broader story. You might call this having the facts contexted. That's how it was expressed in the abstract of a paper I was looking at. But you also make evaluative statements and implications about those facts. So not just why happened, but I felt X about why.

And I've read numerous sources alleging that there could be a link between the narrative reminiscing style of say the family or the environment in which a child grows up and the age at which those children form lasting memories. I was reading about this in one article in the Berkeley Greater Good magazine by Gene Shinsky and another article

in the BBC from twenty sixteen by Zaria Gorvitt. These were essentially making the link that some researchers think more elaborate, coherent narratives could cause children to have memories that last longer.

In one example was cited in that BBC article. It was a paper done by the Cornell University psychology professor Chi Wang, who was the author of a paper called culture Effects on Adult's Earliest childhood Recollection and Self Description Implications for the Relation between Memory and the Self published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in two thousand and one, and this found that by comparing childhood stories told by Chinese and American college students, American students

stories tended to be longer, more elaborate, with more self focused evaluations, whereas the Chinese stories were more restrained and factual. And also the average earliest memories of the American students

were a little bit earlier. And this personally squared with Wong's experience of growing up in China, where she said that the cultural norm was that there was less emphasis on stories of early childhood memories and she gives a quote to the BBC saying, if society is telling you those memories are important to you, you'll hold on to them.

And this also relates to cross cultural studies saying that some of the examples of the people on average the earliest childhood memories tend to be people of the Maori culture, and these same studies find that Maori families tend to place a lot of emphasis on elaborate narrative storytelling in

the past. So I thought this was interesting that this could connect to some of the differences we've already read about and I think talked about in the first episode about cross culture differences in the age of the earliest memories, and also gender differences, because there have been some studies showing that girls tend to have slightly earlier memories on average than boys, and that girls in childhood tend to

relate stories in a more contexted and evaluative manner. But whatever the particulars of how it works, it's certainly not hard for me to imagine that the storytelling environment in which you grow up plays a large role on what and how you remember things from your earliest childhood.

Of course, the interesting thing being that again this is all coming back to autobiographical memories, the kind of memories for events in your life that, like you can later retell as stories. And this doesn't necessarily correspond to other types of memory, like say, memory of how to do something, you know, memories that we often think of not as

quote memory but as learning. All right, So, the language based memory development idea has been around for a long time and it has its proponents, though I think also it has its critics, and I don't think we should place too much emphasis on things like the role of language, because one big reason here is that some analogs to

infantile amnesia have been discovered in animals like rats. You know, so there are rat experiments showing kind of similar patterns of forgetting of the earliest experiences as rats age into adulthood. Rats of course never acquire language, but show some similar patterns. So it's clear that language is not the deciding factor, but may play a role in, say, the timing of

different stages of memory acquisition. Another older idea that might still have something to do with childhood amnesia what about the role of what researchers have called the cognitive self.

I was reading about this in a paper called on Resolving the Enigma of Infantile Amnesia by Mark Howe and Mary Courage published in Psychological Bulletin in nineteen ninety three, and they discussed the idea of what if the crucial factor in the establishment of lasting autobiographical memories is the development of the concept of I and me, related in a way to the concept of theory of mind, understanding that your mind is different from the minds of others,

that you know things other people don't know, and have thoughts and feelings other people don't have, and that they likewise know things and have thoughts and feelings that you cannot share in unless they tell you. Under this proposal, it's not until we have mastered the concept of a self different from others that we're able to organize our memories into a sensical form that can be retrieved across time.

How encourage right in their conclusion quote. A series of significant developmental events take place when infants are between eighteen and thirty months of age that prepare them to talk about personally experienced events. First, at about eighteen months of age, infants learned to recognize their features in the mirror. The next acquisition is a more advanced representation of the self, reflected in the pronomial reference to the self as I

and me. In the early months of the second year, Finally, the child learns to talk about immediate and then more distant past events in narrative the language of autobiographical memory. Both narrative and autobiographical memory continue to develop in structure, organization, and content over the preschool years, but by that time

infantile amnesia is indeed a phenomenon of the past. And so this one's a little bit different because this one does not depend while it's related to language, their idea of the concept of the cognitive self does not rely entirely on language, and they think there are ways that the cognitive self can be demonstrated before a child acquires

the words in which to express it. But they they think that the child needs a concept of self and I separate from the world and the events in the world in order to put the memories into a form that can later be accessed and expressed.

I don't know. Of course, I'm you know, I'm not a neuros scientist or a developmental psychologist, so I don't pretend to be expressing expertise on this, but I just say, personally, I feel pretty convinced by the neurodevelopmental arguments, the ones about the development of the hippocampal memory system, that there's clearly some kind of like structural change going on in the brain in the early years of life, and this this plays a major role in why we don't retain

all these memories until later life. As far as these explanations based in language and the cognitive self and stuff, I don't know. It seems like the evidence for them is a little bit softer, but I'm very interested in them,

and they seem plausible to me at least. M yeah, yeah, But basically, all the papers I read on this subject, or you know the old cliche, they're calling for more research, like you know, widely acknowledging this is not a settled question, and so you know that we have some interesting ideas, but ultimately we don't know for sure. Childhood amnesia happens, and maybe more research could help settle it.

this it all be adaptive? Is there an upside to this mental ability? Or is this just kind of junk? Is this just kind of a byproduct of the way that our brains have developed.

I remember too, I think our Scott Baker commenting that science fiction and fantasy kind of both fulfill the same purpose, but going either into the past or into the future, sort of constructing an unrealistic but far fetched version of the future based on where we are now, and then the other is a version of the past that is equally fantastic and illogical and obviously not true, but telling

about where we are in the present. So you know, we're these strange creatures that see ourselves as occupying this space, this now, and remembering what came before, predicting what is about to come. And then it's kind of open to discussion if there is actually a now point, like are we actually there? Or is that also a construction of the past. But any rate, I wanted to see what experts were saying about this, so I was reading a paper titled false Memories, What the Hell Are They For?

By Aaron J. Newman and D. Stephen Lindsay published in Applied Cognitive Psychology Back in two thousand and nine, and I thought the author's made some good points here, and a number of these are going to be things that you know, we've discussed on the show before, or I guess generally understood about memory in the brain. But first of all, this is all part of mental our mental time travel abilities that enable us to experience our memories of the past with a feeling of subjective clarity, while

also enabling us to produce mental models of potential futures. Quote. Recalling an autobiographical experience involves piecing together activated memorial information while at the same time making inferences based on other information available to us. Biases, stereotypes, and expectations that act on our current thinking also act on inferences that we make about mental events arising from the past. So obviously,

given this system, failures are inevitable. Memory failures are inevitable false memories, along with inaccurate or unlikely ruminated scenarios of the future. This is all just part of living with our human understanding of reality, and so various methods can be used and have been studied to produce false memories of events. The authors point out these include suggestion via imagination, exercises, the use of photographs, dream interpretation, guided imagery, and paraphrasing.

I mean, even this kind of joking example that we busted out earlier, of you bringing up a hypo ethical, entirely made up memory of childhood about crabs, and it was so loaded with crabs. It's a relatively easy exercise for one to then turn that back on the person who created and saying, well, is that completely made up? What does that say about you? Why did you bring up the crabs so many times? You know? And you can begin to build on that.

a memory is falsified. For example, in many of these experiments, you'll find examples where they'll find out about an actual childhood memory, like they would in this case, say talk to one of your parents and ask about your earliest speech encounter and then use that in the construction of a false memory. And then you also have to take into account the weight of the memory that is being

built up or augmented. So it's one thing, for example, for me to suggest, yeah, maybe you were really fascinated by crabs like you like you were in this false story of childhood. It's another to say, you know, maybe that they had a you know, just you were profoundly frightened by the crabs and this like totally shaped to you. You know, it's like how how much weight are you putting on the memory? For instance, one study referenced in this paper had high results of memory inception when you

were trying to get them to remember a childhood prank. Now, you know, nothing too severe, but you know something that where it's not going to like shake the core of their being or really mess around too many understandings of stuff. Is just like, let's generate this memory of this prank that probably didn't actually occur.

easy to grab onto it now. The authors also point out that social factors such as group membership in the media as well can seemingly influence memories like this as well quote socially driven distortions in memory these and they have several benefits for the individuals, such as improving social relationships within a group, or they may improve social group coherence. So false memories can be self enhancing in many ways,

but they can also be group enhancing. And in this we're getting we're speaking broadly beyond merely like childhood memories, but even getting into things where say you were a part of a group, you join a group where memories of say even paranormal experiences have value. They bring you closer to the people in a group, or they enhance the overall connectivity of the group.

beliefs about the external world. These can easily be induced through a concept known as identity protective cognition. You know, people will reason in ways that are not strictly logical and will come to conclusions that they would find to be false if they were disinterested in the issue, but there is some social identity reason for coming to that belief.

You know, in order to fit in with my social group, I need to be the kind of person that believes X. So Actually I do believe X, and it is right, And I think the same could easily be true of memories. It probably matters more for your survival that you're getting along good with your group than that, like, you actually

remembered what happened last Tuesday a year ago correctly. So if there's a way to remember that event incorrectly, but that would be sort of like fun to share as a group together, to tell that story and all bond and all feel good about each other, well then maybe you'll go that way.

have like the group is survival. Being able to bond with the group has has a real adaptive advantage and may and being able to fit in even if you're distorting the actual occurrence of events in the past. This may frequently outweigh the value of objective reality.

So I do have just a little bit more on this, getting into the idea of the child hero and the child saint.

in Ancient Greece by Kareem and Dina Pash. And when it comes to the child hero proper and not merely the infant form of adult heroes, so not just merely baby hercules, but like a child hero that is a hero in and of itself. They are defined not by their actions and exploits, as with adult heroes, but by their untimely deaths, which immortalize them as in hero cults. And these include such examples as the children of Medea and the children of Heracles. To quote Pash here quote

from parental fears and sense of guilt arise. The stories, songs and sanctuaries honoring child heroes, both myth and ritual, articulate these very basic human anxieties. Yet the emphasis is ultimately on the beauty that transcends the gruesomeness of these

narratives and transforms dread into poetry. I think this is also interesting to consider when you look at the long list of child saints in the Christian tradition, and these include both martyred children and adults, as well as children who died at a young age, but were said to have been very mature, very holy in their young life in a way that it's almost like they were too holy for this world and therefore could not remain here. So just a couple of examples to illustrate both of

these categories. There's Saint Rumwald of Buckingham from the year six sixty two, said to have lived only for three days, but the child was said to be able to speak and profess his faith right away. In fact, it's, according to the legend, requested his own baptism and even delivered a sermon.

You got the baptism and then got to deliver a sermon, which you know is a comical image in some in some ways, but also you understand where the like the creative energy of this comes from, like the idea of like a child and the and the attachment we feel to a child, the perfection and yet imperfection of a child, and then if there is, and then when you factor in these various faith models of how salvation is supposed to work, if you you factor in just the trauma

of losing a young child, you can see where stories like this could be created. And then, of course you also have examples of martyrs. Uh. There is a secarius of Bethlehem said to have been killed in King Herod's massacre of the innocent somewhere between seven and two BCE. The alleged remains of the child are still held as holy relics today. So in these cases, you know, the child is not my understanding, at least in this case.

And this may vary from telling to telling. A case where the child itself is not said to have been holy or done anything holy, but was victim of some or allegedly the victim of some sort of heinous act.

communities that were blamed with that to death. So obviously kind of a depressing place, I know, to wind up in this tangent, and I didn't really again, didn't really want to discuss dead children again, but I guess it's unavoidable. You know, why does a child stand out in a mythic narrative. It may be about who that child will become, but there's also a weight to the child that does

not pass on into mythic adulthood, you know. And it can be clearly be leveraged in different ways as a rallying cry of martyrdom, as an inspiration of innocence, as an inspiration for violence and horror. You know, it can be the kind of narrative that can circumvent the cruelty of the world or inspire more cruelty there's you know you can you can go in various directions with it. Now, one final thing I wanted to discuss you a little bit, and I think we alluded to it a little bit

earlier in this episode, is that you know. As we've discussed already, there are numerous examples of suggested falsified memories to turn to, including memories of various pair normal encounters, different forms of abuse, and indeed we can also throw supposed memories of past lives into the mix. You know

you can, You'll have you. You can certainly find people who claim to remember very early childhood, people who claim to remember their birth, but also people who claim to remember a time before their birth, before they were born, either in the womb or before the womb, in another life before the womb. And you know, so you know it's uh. This again speaks to the power of our

ability to create and falsify meaningful memories. And it's not too big of a leap, right, If you can already create a memory of a thing that didn't occur, it's not too much of a leap to remember supposed lives before this one as well, right, And there's a lot of individuals have written on this and theorized on this

sort of thing. Check. Psychiatrist Stanislav Groff theorized that some near death experiences are actually a kind of channeling of birth memories, with the so called model of light representing the birth canal. This is skeptical about that, Yes, yeah, this is you know, very everyone has a right to

be very skeptical of this. I've seen it refuted by skeptics on a number of grounds, including that the experience of being born would not look like this even if your infant head were in the right position and your eyes were actually open, and again you were capable of forming memories like this. So I think there's very strong reasons to be skeptical of this being an actual memory. But like we've said, you get in there and you

start tinkering with your memories, start recalling them. You start bringing in content you know from different communities and learned individuals. You can start augmenting things, you can start falsifying things, and what you end up with can still be highly meaningful. It can still you know, to you. It can also have an impact on the creation of art and literature.

If the name Stanislovgrov sounds familiar longtime listeners might remember it coming up in an episode that Christian and I did on the art of hr Giger, because these very metaphors, you know, the tunnel of light, near death, and pre birth, these were explored in some of Giger's art work, and Groff actually authored a twenty eighteen book of Giger's work

titled hr Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century. Groff, by the way, was also a technical advisor on Douglas Trumbull's nineteen eighty three film Brainstorm that had Christopher Walkin in it. I believe so again not to say that these can't be potent ideas, but they do seem to stand outside of science there. You know, these are more We're getting more into the area of religion and myth

and even the paranormal. But I think it all speaks to just how invested we can become in the story of us and those vast blank spaces in our recollection, as you know, as well as any glimmers that we might sense in the dark that we could then augment and sentuate into something else, something that is meaningful to us or makes us feel part of a group. Et cetera. And you know, there are examples of this line of thinking from outside of science, concepts of pre existence in

various cultures. There's the concept of reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul, and we see this in various traditions, Greek traditions, early Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, medieval Jewish mysticism, new religious movements, and so many more examples.

in a physical form. And then there is also a fair amount of thought about the idea of the pre existence of Jesus, of Jesus Christ, the idea that yes, God is going to take on this sort of mortal incarnation because he has to go to earth and die for everyone sins and so forth. But then there are there are these some lines of thought that are like, okay, well what was he doing before then? And I guess on one hand, you could say, well, he just had God had not incarnated yet, so it's like he hadn't

butted off into a physical form. But then there are these other lines of thought it's like, oh, yeah, no, he's there, he's just setting around waiting, but he just hasn't gone to earth yet. For example, I was reading that there was one early Christian theologian I believe this is origin of I'll think of Alexandria, I lived at one through two fifty three, taught that human souls existed for before creation, and this was something that he would

later be accused of heresy for. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think the big take home from all of this is that we have an impressive ability to create meaningful memories out of various sources that are not pure recollection to the limited extent that there is purely

recollection of anything. And you know, I guess I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with fostering memories of infancy, birth or life before birth, so long as it improves one's quality of life, and it doesn't take anything away from you or others. You know. If that's the case, then what's the harm in it?

isn't that great? I you know, this this is my you know, brain expanding cosmost appreciating moment. But what if your pronounced belief in these experiences enable someone else to

further engage in a harmful variation on it? Or on the other hand, what if here's another scenario, what if your harmless accounts of a past life embolden someone else to and then wind up in a situation where they're being manipulated or conned by someone who is taking advantage of this you know, longing for or recollection of a past.

as well. So I don't know, food for thought.

going to get more complicated on that. On those grounds, all right, we're going to go and close out this trilogy of episodes here, but we'd continue to love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on early childhood memories, you want to share early childhood memories, you know, memories of past live is it, any of anything that falls under the under the heading of the topic here, you know, write in We would love to listen to you and discuss any of this potentially on

future episodes of Listener Mail. Listener Mails published on Mondays. On Wednesdays, we do short form artifact or monster fact episodes. Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.