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Rethink your oldest memory. How old were you? If it's less than two, you're not alone. In a recent survey, 40% of people say they remember events older than two years old. But here's the problem: Most researchers in memory argue that it's essentially impossible to remember anything before these two terrible ones. So what gives? Understanding how and why our brains form memories in the first place might convince you that if you are in this 40 percent, maybe your memory is a fiction after all.
This number comes courtesy of a recent study this week in the journal Psychological Science that sought to understand when most people have their first memories and what they are talking about. . The researchers asked 6,641 residents of the United Kingdom to describe in writing their first memory and the age that they had in this memory. They then used this data to determine how many of these first impressions were real. In addition to interviewing friends and family (who might also have false memories), it is difficult to determine if a memory is real or not. Instead, psychologists have opted for the hypothesis – although this is a hypothesis supported by many researches – that people do not remember anything until they are two years old. On the basis of this threshold, 38.6% of the first memories of this data set were fictitious. Most of them were dated between 1 and 2 years old, but 893 people claimed to remember to be less than a year old.
Why are researchers so quick to reject these first two years of life's thoughts? There is a lot of research that suggests that everything is invented.
It may seem disdainful to badume that these memories are false, but the researchers in memory have good reason to conclude that people do not really remember being a baby. Research on childhood amnesia, the official term of the phenomenon in which we forget things that have happened to us as babies and young children, has shown that it is almost impossible to retain declarative memories to this young person age. Babies can obviously remember other non-declarative things because they learn to walk and talk – both depend on the retention of certain information – but a declarative memory occurs in a separate part of the brain.
We stock non-declarative or implicit memories all over our brains. The cerebellum and basal ganglia, which are areas of the brain in the direction of the base, usually in voluntary movement, help you learn motor skills, for example. Declarative or explicit memories also involve multiple brain areas, but there is one that plays a more crucial role: the hippocampus. Damage to the hippocampus will destroy explicit memories like those you have written autobiographically – everything that is a memory of you – but not implicit memories. People with hippocampus can not say much about their own lives (sometimes they can not create new memories either), but they can still ride a bike.
During childhood and infancy, the hippocampus is the site of much new neuronal growth. This is crucial for brain development – you must essentially learn to learn, and this involves the growth of new cells to store new memories. But in the process of generating new neurons, the old ones are put aside. Sometimes, the set of cells where a specific memory has been stored is cut off, or the cell block is separated, which destroys it. So, it's not so much that we can not form memories when we are young because they get lost quickly in the reshuffle.
In studies of human babies, psychologists found that 18-month-old babies could remember an event. until 13 weeks. Babies as young as two months old can keep memories for 24 hours. But you have to wait 20-24 months for the hippocampus to be mature enough to store memories for much longer, even if it can technically hide them – children simply forget faster.
Because of this hippocampal maturation, we can not really remember a memory from before about two years old, and indeed this most recent study is in agreement with much of the literature that I have. average age for a first memory is just above three years. There is some variation there – women, for example, tend to have early memories earlier than men. Firstborns also have older memories, as do some cultures (Maori, for example, have older memories than those of European origin). Researchers believe that these variations may have to do with how many people are invited to examine and discuss their own memories, which helps to consolidate memory for long-term storage.
Memories before the age of two are probably not true memories. Fictional memories that we have stored as a result of other people telling us stories about ourselves. If your dad spoke at length of one time when he was pushing your stroller into a park and that a dog came to lick your face, you could start to "remember" that event as well. it was your own memory. The first time you heard it, it was really new. The second time, it seems familiar. The third time, it sounds so familiar to you that you may wonder if you make remember it. So you think yeah, you probably remember that. And so on, until you end up thinking of it as a true memory. Half of the memories before the age of two years of this survey concerned a landau, and 30% of them involved some kind of family relationship, which means that they could have easily be implanted by the story of a family member. People with early memories of the middle ages have more of a mix.
These false or fictitious memories can still have a huge impact on us the way real memories do. They are part of the story we tell ourselves about our lives. Being wrong does not take away their meaning. Psychologists have written in this study that recent research has found that false memories can help us. "For example, in adulthood, preserving a positive and consistent image
Self-narrative helps a person maintain a positive self-image that can foster positive social interactions with others, which may improve the quality of life of the memory, "they write. "Fictitious memories are then part of the story of life and can play a central and positive role in defining the periods of life or life."
So, if your first memory is a dog that licks your face. Being one, know that you are probably rebuilding that memory from stories about yourself. But if this is part of your life story of loving dogs? It does not really matter.
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