My own childhood recollections are essentially of
iconic memories with plenty of sunlight catching a time and place but scant
else. I recall the inside of a movie
theater in company with my father well before my second birthday and the
curious lightshow on the wall that I did not comprehend but attracted me. Throughout I generally recall snapshots of my
childhood and little else. They are
mostly luminous and well colored although fine detail is rarely noted. Thus I have an album of my life and if some
errant fact is needed, it arises often with a coincident image as well.
Thus my mind makes much use of forgetfulness while
retaining significance. For me it
appears to work well although it still refuses to quote text of anything
whatsoever.
What is clear is that memory is been continuously
edited on the merit of value determined by rational and emotional choices. Thus scholarship success has a huge component
of intent. Dislike will promote
failure. Children need to know this.
Birth Of Memory: Why
Kids Forget What Happened Before Age 7
Posted 01.31.2014 at
2:00 pm
Recently, my
nearly-4-year-old niece suffered the kind of childhood accident every parent
dreads: she fell off her bike and broke a front tooth high above the gum line.
The resulting pain and eventual extraction were a harrowing experience for her
parents, but fortunately the little girl emerged with a cheery attitude: “Now I
can slurp noodles through the gap,” she told me over the holidays.
Fortunately, she
probably won’t remember any of this when she’s an adult. By the time she’s in
second grade, the entire experience will be a dim memory captured in pictures.
And that’s because of a
strange phenomenon known as childhood amnesia. Kids can remember events before
the age of 3 when they’re small, but by the time they’re a bit older, those
early autobiographical memories are lost. New research has put the starting point for
amnesia at age 7.
Scientists have long
wondered about the cause of this baffling memory-loss, and thought that
language development might have something to do with it. But even rats and
another animals show a similar amnesia without language abilities. Last
June, Canadian
researchers floated a possible cause: the precipitous
growth of new cells in the hippocampus during infancy, known as neurogenesis.
When brains are busy growing lots of new cells, they don’t store memories that
would otherwise be long-term.
Forget
me not
In research published in
the journal Memory, Patricia Bauer and her colleague Marina Larkina brought in
groups of 3-year olds with a parent (typically a mother, as in most child
development studies). The parent interviewed the child about events that had
happened over the prior three months like a visit to a zoo or preschool,
while the researchers videotaped.
Over the next 6 years,
different groups of children came back at age 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 to the lab and
were questioned by the scientists on the events that happened when they were 3.
Since the researchers knew the details of the events, they were able to probe
exactly how much the kids remembered -- and how they spoke about the memories.
The result? If the
kids were between 5 and 7 at time of second interview, they remembered over 60%
of events, Bauer tells KinderLab. But the children who were 8 and
9 remembered 40% or fewer of the events, and they had begun to talk about their
memories in a different way.
“We think that it has to
do with basic biological processes, as neural structures undergo a lot of
postnatal development,” says Bauer. “Early in development those structures are
working, but not very efficiently -- children are forming memories, but through
natural processes those are fading and becoming inaccessible. By the time you
reach adulthood, those memories are working very effectively.”
Parents also have an
effect on kids’ memories of events. Those who use an elaborative strategy with
their little ones, asking lots of questions like "Tell me more" and
"What happened?" and allowing the kids to guide the description, end
up with kids that have earlier early and more robust memories, says Bauer.
Bauer is continuing her
studies with a group of kids to be followed for 4 years, interviewed about
memories at different points in their development. She says that the
earliest memories tend to be ones filled with emotion, either positive or
negative. So it’s possible that my niece will carry with her the memory of
an early brush with the dental drill, but she might also leave it behind as she
creates new memories.
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