Why don't I remember being a baby?

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0:00What’s the earliest memory you have?

0:02I've got bad news: It’s probably fake…

0:05According to neuroscientists, anyone who says they

0:07remember being a baby is probably lying (but they don’t even know it)

0:10So what’s going on? Psychologists did an

0:12experiment where they interviewed 3-year-olds about real stuff:

0:15Zoo trips, the first day of preschool, that kind of thing.

0:17Then they came back years later and asked those kids to recall those memories.

0:22Age 5, 6, or 7… remembered 60% or more of those early-life events.

0:26But by age 8 or 9? They only remembered like 40%.

0:30Most of that early memory was gone, and it declines quickly from there

0:34So you didn't forget being a baby when you were a baby.

0:37You forgot it in like second grade.

0:40Researchers from Yale put infant babies in an MRI, which is probably easier said than done,

0:46and they showed that a key memory area of the brain called the hippocampus

0:49lights up when a baby locks in a photo it's never seen before.

0:53So our memory is definitely running by about age one. The memories get made.

0:58Something is happening to them after.

1:01Here’s what we think is going on:

1:02During the first few years of life, that memory region of the brain is being flooded

1:06by new growing neurons. This shuffles around the cells that were already there,

1:12rewiring the chain of neurons and breaking the old memory.

1:16Research in mice suggests maybe those memories could still be hiding in there,

1:21but just can’t be accessed. When scientists zapped the original neurons with light in mice,

1:27some early memories came back. But we’ve never tested the same thing in humans.

1:31Because it turns out to be hard to recruit people to get fiber optic cables shoved in their brains.

1:37Why would a brain do this? When you’re like one, you don’t need to remember specific events as

1:41much as you need to figure out the rules for things like language and how the physical

1:45world works. So your brain focuses its energy on that. Still, nearly forty percent of people

1:50say their first memory is from age two or younger.

1:54And, somebody's probably gonna be in the comments telling me that they definitely remember being born.

1:58But you probably don't.

2:00All this research suggests those are almost certainly reconstructions pieced

2:04together from family stories and photos and later memories.

2:08So, some version of you learned language, discovered what gravity was, and all those other things.

2:14But sadly, you can never meet that version of yourself.

2:17Follow me for more cool science videos.