Why Can’t We Remember Being Babies?

So many of us try to recall our earliest memories yet can’t seem to conjure up anything beyond a certain point. Our baby lives are completely unaccounted for in our Memory Palaces. Well, for most of us anyway.

We’ve never fully understood it, and at best just assumed that babies are bad at forming long-term memories. New research seems to suggest otherwise.

Infantile amnesia, as it’s called, may not be the thing, at least according to research published in Science by cognitive neuroscientist Tristan Yates from Columbia University. Her research suggests that babies do form memories, we can’t seem to access them as we age.

She and her team figure this out by examining how babies’ brains react to new images using an fMRI machine. That in itself is a nightmare to accomplish because an fMRI requires the patient to stay extremely still.

Do Babies Have Long-term Memories?

Babies are notoriously uncooperative whenever the subject of stillness arises. The team got around this problem by giving them some pacifiers to suck on, but more ingeniously they had the babies watch videos that had images appear two seconds at a time before disappearing and being replaced with another. Behind that image was a kaleidoscopic green pattern that Yates says was “meant to have infants fixate towards the center of the screen.”

They found that a baby’s hippocampus lit up when it saw a new image. The images were all of things they’d likely never seen before like a dog toy or a canyon. Then, about a minute later, they would show them an image they had already seen next to a different image that shared similar characteristics. For instance, maybe a baby was shown a picture of a waterfall next to the familiar picture of a canyon.

Babies tend to look at familiar things more than they do new things, as they did in the study. This suggests that even in infancy the hippocampus was able to form and store a memory. Accessing these memories later on in life is a whole different matter, one that the researchers are going to try to tackle in a follow-up study.

They plan on asking the baby’s families to record videos from the babies’ point of view. They then plan on playing his video back for the babies to see how their hippocampus reacts to footage that is, ostensibly, from their first-person perspective like they were Doom Guy or Gordon Freeman.