Pourquoi nous oublions certains souvenirs de l'enfance
Why Childhood Memories Disappear
My first memory is of the day my brother was born: November 14, 1991. I can remember my father driving my grandparents and me over to the hospital in Highland Park, Illinois, that night to see my newborn brother. I can remember being taken to my mother's hospital room, and going to gaze upon my only sibling in his bedside cot. But mostly, I remember what was on the television. It was the final two minutes of a Thomas the Tank Engine episode. I can even remember the precise story: "Percy Takes the Plunge," which feels appropriate, given that I too was about to recklessly throw myself into the adventure of being a big brother.
In sentimental moments, I'm tempted to say my brother's birth is my first memory because it was the first thing in my life worth remembering. There could be a sliver of truth to that: Research into the formation and retention of our earliest memories suggests that people's memories often begin with significant personal events, and the birth of a sibling is a textbook example. But it was also good timing. Most people's first memories date to when they were about 3.5 years old, and that was my age, almost to the day, when my brother was born.
"People used to think that the reason that we didn't have early memories was because children didn't have a memory system or they were unable to remember things, but it turns out that's not the case," Peterson said. "Children have a very good memory system. But whether or not something hangs around long-term depends on on several other factors." Two of the most important factors, Peterson explained, are whether the memory "has emotion infused in it," and whether the memory is coherent: Does the story our memory tells us actually hang together and make sense when we recall it later?
But then, this event- or story-based memory isn't the only kind, although it's the one people typically focus on when discussing "first" memories. Indeed, when I asked the developmental psychologist Steven Reznick about why childhood amnesia exists, he disputed the very use of that term: "I would say right now that is a rather archaic statement." A professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Reznick explained that shortly after birth, infants can start forming impressions of faces and react when they see those faces again; this is recognition memory. The ability to understand words and learn language relies on working memory, which kicks in at around six months old. More sophisticated forms of memory develop in the child's second year, as semantic memory allows children to retain understanding of concepts and general knowledge about the world.
"When people were accusing infants of having amnesia, what they were talking about is what we refer to as episodic memory," Reznick explained. Our ability to remember events that happened to us relies on more complicated mental infrastructure than other kinds of memory. Context is all-important. We need to understand the concepts that give meaning to an event: For the memory of my brother's birth, I have to understand the meanings of concepts like "hospital," "brother," "cot," and even Thomas the Tank Engine. More than that, for the memory to remain accessible, my younger self had to remember those concepts in the same language-based way that my adult self remembers information. I formed earlier memories using more rudimentary, pre-verbal means, and that made those memories unreachable as the acquisition of language reshaped how my mind works, as it does for everyone.
