The memories of when we are babies are almost always invented



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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

What is your first memory? Sleep peacefully in your mother's arms? Maybe your first steps or the first time you tasted the spicy and had a terrible time? If you have memories at such a young age, chances are they are not entirely real. Your brain invented them.

There are many people who claim to have fuzzy memories of their first years of life. 38% say they can remember, even nebulously, an event when they were only two years old. Some even claim to be able to remember something when they were only a year old.

That's fine, but there is a problem. Most people are simply unable to keep almost any memories before the age of four. The phenomenon is called infantile amnesia and, to this day, there is no explanation. The only thing that could be confirmed is that the memories before half-past three or four disappear at a much higher rate than those we later acquired.

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Among the hypotheses that attempt to explain infantile amnesia, there are neurological theories based on the fact that at this age the hippocampus is still in the midst of nervous development and no is able to retain long-term memories. There are also theories that point to language. Our intelligence and our memory are based on a structured language, and at such a young age we have not yet developed this ability completely. Finally, there are many hypotheses that make use of psychology. The theory of being explains that we can not record complete memories until we are fully aware of ourselves, and Freud explained that amnesia explained everything else, with traumas of badual nature

. Few people have memories before the age of four. However, many people claim to have them. The statistics do not match what we know about the brain, and a team of researchers from the University of Bradford, UK, interviewed 6,641 people to try to reveal why so many people claim to have memories at an impossible age to be trained or retained.

The answer is interesting. Basically, they invent them. It is not pure imagination, but to collect pieces and complete a sensation with elements that at this age, it was impossible for us to keep. Dr. Shazia Akhtar explains:

We believe that what a person has in mind when remembering improbably precocious fictitious memories is a mental representation similar to episodic memory consisting of memorized pieces of memory. early experiences attached to certain facts or knowledge on their own In other words, we mix any memory of this period with what our parents and grandparents tell us or what we see in family photographs up to # That we were building a memory more invented than real. As Dr. Martin Conway explains, the bottom line is that people convince themselves that memory is real and even deny the possibility that it is a fiction created by ourselves. Why are we doing this? The authors of the study are not sure, but explain that this probably has to do with the need to have a complete narrative about our own life to make sense of our existence. There is only one thing that scares the human being more than an explanation, and that is the absence of it. [Eurekalert vía Science Alert]

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