Miriam, my wife, always asks me questions about my childhood, about things I did or stopped doing and I always answer the same thing: "No idea, aunt." I do not know if it is because he was the fourth child and nobody paid me much attention, if he was also an introverted child and I do not have many experiences or simply that I am one of those who have little retention, but I am unable to explain anecdotes of when I was less than 4 or 5 years. Maybe some loose memory, but come on, little thing.
Most people have more memory than me, since it has been established that the three years of age is the moment from which memories begin to be more or less recorded. Obviously, everything that happened to us from that moment cannot be remembered, but some of the most significant events can be related. This curious phenomenon is called child amnesia and then we will try to explain why it happens: why our memory does not start until we are three years old.
"Well, I have memories from before three years"
Many people agree with me that he barely remembers his childhood. Many people, on the other hand, explain that yes, they remember many things and that their memories reach even earlier ages, like a year or two. The average age for the first memory in the US It is three and a half years. But that is the average, that is, there will be people who will have memories before the age of three and they will have them from the age of four. In fact, it has been documented that one in 30 adults is able to explain a memory one year old. Similarly, one in 30 adults does not remember anything that happened before 6, 7 or even 8 years.
If you are a woman, you have it better
If we gathered a group of adults to try to concentrate and do a mental regression exercise trying to find the oldest memory we have, women would have better. They tend to have earlier memories than we men. The plausible explanation is that girls mature before boys. They learn to speak before, develop their brain abilities first and, consequently, are able to store memories before us, children.
As one teacher once told me, girls also learn the picaresque of interpersonal relationships before. A child who wants ice cream will tell his father "Dad, I want ice cream." A girl who wants ice cream will say "Dad, don't you feel like ice cream?"
Tell me what your parents are like and I'll tell you how much you remember
Much of the memories we have of our childhood we keep alive thanks to our parents. There are studies that have come to show that children of some cultures have more difficulty evoking their earliest memories, such as Asian ones, probably because of the difference in the relationship between children and their parents.
Apparently, Asian mothers are not in the habit of talking about the past with the same frequency as Western mothers, and when they do they don't focus so much on what their children did or stopped doing. Here in Spain, for example, we are more than looking at the past. There are people who do nothing more than post on Facebook photos and experiences of past times, as if they preferred to look back than forward, Christmas dinners and birthdays are sometimes repetitions of past celebrations, in which the affected (if it is his birthday ) must hear anecdotes in which he was the protagonist over and over again, as if they had never been explained before. Even our mothers tend to take out photo albums to remember moments and make us relive memories that had been dormant, sometimes for obvious reasons.
Of course, if we differentiate Asian children from ours, sure we remember more things than them, basically because of how our parents behave when talking about the past.
Are you the first child or when you arrived you already had brothers?
Another factor that determines the difference seems to be the position that has touched you at birth, within the sibling group. The first born, the older brothers, they have previous memories than the following brothers. The explanation could be the fact of having domestic experiences always with a smaller number of people (mom and dad) than the brothers, who share them with mom, dad and brother, the fact of spending more time with parents, than having a second is distributed more and children tend to be more alone in their games and routines and the fact that the child may become less spontaneous and more imitating: young children tend to imitate their siblings and their decisions are often less their own.
Tell me how exciting your childhood was
Most of the old memories we have we remember because at that time something exciting or important happened. Children who have had a rather monotonous, boring childhood and with few events to highlight have, obviously, fewer events to remember. Children who have also had a childhood with events that made them feel bad, hurt to see injustices and problems that were not resolved at the time, also tend to try not to evoke those memories. Consciously and unconsciously create a wall that prevents you from remembering those times and as a consequence they have earlier later memories (the less you remember something and talk about it, the easier it is to forget it).
Upside down, impactful experiences (for good or for bad) punctual, which come to mark a before and after, which impressed the children very much, are easier to remember simply by remembering them as the years go by. If at 2 years something horrible happened to me, it is possible that at five I remember it and it comes to mind again. Maybe one day at seven I remember him again, because at five I made him aware. It could be that at ten I come again because at seven I recovered it again, and so on until I reached adulthood, reinforced by the simple fact of having remembered it several times in time.
But why doesn't our memory start until those 3-4 years?
Sigmund Freud said that the child amnesia It was due to the unconscious repression of memories. Something like a defense mechanism that stores them in an inaccessible place to avoid being affected. That place, those repressed memories, could come to light again with the help of psychotherapy.
Later theories come to say that it is a more biological matter. Until that age the brain has not developed yet until reaching a minimum in which memories can be stored. Come on, that without the ability to start remembering things well, it is impossible to happen.
Other research suggests that children yes they are able to remember and store their memories, even when they are little, but that they lose them faster than adults. Within these theories would enter the neurogenesis, which we talked about last year commenting on a study. The researchers saw in adult rats that when they accelerated the creation of neuronal cells they had more difficulty storing memories. At the same time, they saw that when they slowed the creation of neuronal cells in young rats they had a better memory.
Children have a very high neurogenesis. Your brain is constantly growing and proof of this is that from birth to three years the brain doubles in size. It is possible that from that moment the growth will be more progressive, slower, and that is why they are better able to start storing memories forever.
