Starting here, what do you want to remember ?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor ?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from the outside fills the air ? – William Stafford
I am four years old (or is it three ?), walking with my parents down a street in Coimbatore, a city in Southern India, where we lived at the time. All of a sudden, my parents start pointing to things on the opposite side of the street, hoping they can distract me. But, it’s too late. I’ve spotted the red bus in the display window of the toy store we’re passing and start demanding that they buy it for me. I kick up a ruckus in the street. My parents tell me that if I don’t stop, they’ll just abandon me in the street and go away. “Go ahead”, I said, like some miniature Clint Eastwood, “Leave me. I’ll just hop into an auto and tell them to take me to Tatabad and come home”.
This is among my first vivid memories of my life. Is it a real memory or one planted much later, made up after the countless repetitions of the event over the years ? I can recall playing with the maids who worked in the house at that time, a mother and daughter pair, a house on the second floor (first storey for the British versions) with a big balcony overlooking the street. I don’t recall any friends from that time nor any other details such as the school that I went to. I cannot recall anything earlier in my life.
As I played with Maya the other day, it struck me that she will not be able to recall the memory of that day and of all the days before that. The care, the love, the sleepless, exhausting nights and days will all be folklore, hand-me-downs from her parents. Yes, there will be the photos and the videos, but it’ll never be the same as remembering it herself. It seems like one of life’s ironies that we cannot recall those days, when we were so cared for, nursed to life when we were most vulnerable, how much we depended on parents and how selflessly they served us (though my father admits that when he wanted to sleep, he would rub a pain balm on my forehead that would burn, making me close my eyes and fall asleep). If we remembered those days and nights, would we be less angry at our parents as we get older ? Intelligent design ? Well, certainly ironic design.
Curious about everything associated with babies now, I wondered about this inability to remember our earliest times.
The condition is real. It goes by the name of infantile amnesia. The story of what causes it is a long one, it is the story of our attempts to understand the very fabric of ourselves, what makes me think of me as me, the story of memory. Saul Bellow famously wrote “Memory is life”. Several books, some of them bestsellers like Daniel Schacter’s “Searching for Memory”, are devoted to this subject. It is also an ongoing story because there is still much that we do not know. And sometimes new research throws out old, seemingly solid explanations. Here is my attempt to synthesize that story into something small enough to fit a blog post.
Memory is a many-splendored thing. There are many forms of it, many places in the brain where it is constructed and stored. For example, almost everybody is aware of short term memory and long term memory. Short term memory or working memory is how we experience the now, the immediately immediate past. It is where we store the telephone number long enough to dial the number. It is fairly limited in capacity, capable of storing about 7+/-2 items, be they telephone numbers or something else. Long term memory is the remainder of that immediate past, stored and retrieved many, many times, sometimes years later. Another kind of memory is what is called implicit or procedural memory. Even if an Maya can’t remember the details of these initial years, she is learning many things perfectly well, such as the ability to sit, crawl, walk, learning that a cry usually fetches one of us pretty quickly. Contrasting this implicit memory is explicit or declarative memory, the consciously recalled past. Explicit memory itself is made up of two kinds: episodic memory, an example of which is the story at the start of this entry and, semantic memory, which is our knowledge of how the world operates such as physics, maths, social roles and culture.
Like just about everything in neuroscience, or at least modern neuroscience, much of what we know is a gift from a host of unfortunate characters, people who’ve suffered some form of grievous injury to their brains, providing neuroscientists an opportunity to glimpse into the functioning of the brain. For memory, the main individual is known only by the initials H.M (or Henry M). Suffering from epilepsy from an early age, HM was referred to a surgeon, William Scoville, in Connecticut, USA. After localizing the cause of the seizures to his medial temporal lobe, Scoville surgically removed the structure in an attempt to stop the seizures. After the surgery, HM lost his memory, became an amensiac, suffering from severe anterograde amnesia i.e. he was unable to convert any short term memory into long term memory. However, he could still learn new motor skills, indicating that his procedural memory was intact, though he couldn’t remember learning the skills. Since HM had no amnesia before the surgery, the medial temporal lobe was held responsible in the functioning of memory.
Starting from that event in 1953, we arrive at today’s understanding of the parts of the brain that are associated with the functioning of memory. Based on the outcome of the surgery on HM, the hippocampus is generally credited with playing a key role in the creation of new explicit memories. What that role is remains uncertain. A recently published study on two people who both suffered damage only to the hippocampus shows that while one of them showed no deficiency in memory, the other had difficulty creating new memories. The researchers theorized that a very specific location within the hippocampus maybe responsible for creating new memories. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated techniques seem confounded in pinpointing this kind of detail. Amygdala, considered the emotional center of the brain, is responsible for emotional memory. For example, we tend to react and remember emotionally charged words and events more than non-emotionally charged ones. Damage to the amygdala causes us to lose this difference. The prefrontal cortex is considered important in remembering the when and where of our memory, the context of the memory. Called source memory, it is what enables us to distinguish between an imagined event and a real event. To remember what we were doing on October 22, 2008 compared to the date of our wedding. Since this is one of the last parts of the brain to mature, it is suspected to be responsible for why children are notorious at not remembering where they learned something. Besides these structures, a neurotransmitter (chemicals that are used to relay, amplify and modulate signals between a neuron and another cell), acetylcholine is considered to be responsible for promoting the creation of new memory. Acetylecholine is primarily sourced in the basal forebrain and it is the degeneration of that part of the brain that results in the memory loss in that dreaded disease, Alzheimer’s.
Neuroscientists theorize that the brain encodes a memory by strengthening the connections between groups of neurons that participate in the storage of the experience. Many contend that there isn’t a single place in the brain that encodes the memory of an experience. For example, the brain uses different systems for retrieving written and spoken information. Using all the different places where the experience is encoded, the brain reconstructs the experience of that past experience. New research reveals that the very same neurons that fired when we originally experienced something, fire when we remember the experience. But because the brain does not encode every specific detail about an event, it manufactures our memory of that experience by filling in the details from other memories. So what we remember is never really accurate. Worse still, the more we remember an event, the stronger becomes the way we remember it, until eventually we’re only left with our recollection of it, not what really elapsed, the “Rashomon” effect.
A psychologist, Caroline Miles is credited as the first person to have formally studied infantile amnesia, back in 1893. Sigmund Freud proposed the first reason for childhood amnesia. He suggested that we deliberately repress the memories of those early years because of the trauma that we suffer as a consequence of our psychosecual development. This theory has been mostly rejected.
The reasons why we fail to remember those early events are divided into two main causes: that it is a problem of storage and that it is a problem of retrieval . Some contend that the memory never was stored due to a lack of maturation of the two main structures of memory, hippocampus and prefrontal cortexThe “problem with retrieval” camp proposes many different reasons for infantile amnesia, mostly related to context. For instance, it is postulated that since language doesn’t develop until much later and much of what we explicitly remember is verbalized, infants can’t remember those early years. Another theory is that since we develop a sense of self only around two years or so, we can’t remember earlier events because we don’t think of them as pertaining to us. Context is crucial in our ability to recall. So, another theory suggests that we have difficulty recalling those baby times because we are never again placed in the same position as an adult that we were in as infants, surrounded by giants, actions that were beyond our comprehension. As one blog puts it: “Rather than being completely forgotten, our earliest experiences may actually be mislabeled”.
Despite our early, seemingly immature, episodic memory, our implicit memory seems quite up and ready at birth, or even before. Infants learn a variety of motor skills as they grow. Much of new newborn research is based on what is called operant conditioning, the ability to associate our action with subsequent reward or punishment. Infants are known to suck at different rates to obtain a particular reward such as mother’s face or her milk. Another source of figuring out what goes on insider their baby minds is a baby’s preference for new items, the novel over the mundane. An infant will pay more attention to new events and objects compared to older ones. Studies using this technique have shown than newborns can remember a visual stimulus for only a few minutes while a five month old can remember it upto three months later. Novelty preference requires that infants can recognize, distinguish the old from the new. This is also a form of memory that is now called pre-explicit memory, because it uses the same circuitry that explicit memory uses.
Interestingly, it has been found that girls recall much more vividly, much earlier events compared to boys. Studies of infant monkeys have revealed the cause to be the hormone, testosterone. Some others point to culture as the reason for this difference, that we engage girls more than boys when they’re infants. Even more interestingly, Maori children have been known to recall events from a much earlier age as compared to European children and Asian children tend to recall events from an even later age than the Europeans.
I sometimes am glad that infants can’t recall as well as we’d like them to. Maya maybe appalled at how inexperienced we are as parents.
References:
- Wikipedia (the image is from there)
- Searching For Memory by Daniel Schacter
- What’s Going on In There by Lise Eliot
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor ?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from the outside fills the air ? – William Stafford
I am four years old (or is it three ?), walking with my parents down a street in Coimbatore, a city in Southern India, where we lived at the time. All of a sudden, my parents start pointing to things on the opposite side of the street, hoping they can distract me. But, it’s too late. I’ve spotted the red bus in the display window of the toy store we’re passing and start demanding that they buy it for me. I kick up a ruckus in the street. My parents tell me that if I don’t stop, they’ll just abandon me in the street and go away. “Go ahead”, I said, like some miniature Clint Eastwood, “Leave me. I’ll just hop into an auto and tell them to take me to Tatabad and come home”.
This is among my first vivid memories of my life. Is it a real memory or one planted much later, made up after the countless repetitions of the event over the years ? I can recall playing with the maids who worked in the house at that time, a mother and daughter pair, a house on the second floor (first storey for the British versions) with a big balcony overlooking the street. I don’t recall any friends from that time nor any other details such as the school that I went to. I cannot recall anything earlier in my life.
As I played with Maya the other day, it struck me that she will not be able to recall the memory of that day and of all the days before that. The care, the love, the sleepless, exhausting nights and days will all be folklore, hand-me-downs from her parents. Yes, there will be the photos and the videos, but it’ll never be the same as remembering it herself. It seems like one of life’s ironies that we cannot recall those days, when we were so cared for, nursed to life when we were most vulnerable, how much we depended on parents and how selflessly they served us (though my father admits that when he wanted to sleep, he would rub a pain balm on my forehead that would burn, making me close my eyes and fall asleep). If we remembered those days and nights, would we be less angry at our parents as we get older ? Intelligent design ? Well, certainly ironic design.
Curious about everything associated with babies now, I wondered about this inability to remember our earliest times.
The condition is real. It goes by the name of infantile amnesia. The story of what causes it is a long one, it is the story of our attempts to understand the very fabric of ourselves, what makes me think of me as me, the story of memory. Saul Bellow famously wrote “Memory is life”. Several books, some of them bestsellers like Daniel Schacter’s “Searching for Memory”, are devoted to this subject. It is also an ongoing story because there is still much that we do not know. And sometimes new research throws out old, seemingly solid explanations. Here is my attempt to synthesize that story into something small enough to fit a blog post.
Memory is a many-splendored thing. There are many forms of it, many places in the brain where it is constructed and stored. For example, almost everybody is aware of short term memory and long term memory. Short term memory or working memory is how we experience the now, the immediately immediate past. It is where we store the telephone number long enough to dial the number. It is fairly limited in capacity, capable of storing about 7+/-2 items, be they telephone numbers or something else. Long term memory is the remainder of that immediate past, stored and retrieved many, many times, sometimes years later. Another kind of memory is what is called implicit or procedural memory. Even if an Maya can’t remember the details of these initial years, she is learning many things perfectly well, such as the ability to sit, crawl, walk, learning that a cry usually fetches one of us pretty quickly. Contrasting this implicit memory is explicit or declarative memory, the consciously recalled past. Explicit memory itself is made up of two kinds: episodic memory, an example of which is the story at the start of this entry and, semantic memory, which is our knowledge of how the world operates such as physics, maths, social roles and culture.
Like just about everything in neuroscience, or at least modern neuroscience, much of what we know is a gift from a host of unfortunate characters, people who’ve suffered some form of grievous injury to their brains, providing neuroscientists an opportunity to glimpse into the functioning of the brain. For memory, the main individual is known only by the initials H.M (or Henry M). Suffering from epilepsy from an early age, HM was referred to a surgeon, William Scoville, in Connecticut, USA. After localizing the cause of the seizures to his medial temporal lobe, Scoville surgically removed the structure in an attempt to stop the seizures. After the surgery, HM lost his memory, became an amensiac, suffering from severe anterograde amnesia i.e. he was unable to convert any short term memory into long term memory. However, he could still learn new motor skills, indicating that his procedural memory was intact, though he couldn’t remember learning the skills. Since HM had no amnesia before the surgery, the medial temporal lobe was held responsible in the functioning of memory.
Starting from that event in 1953, we arrive at today’s understanding of the parts of the brain that are associated with the functioning of memory. Based on the outcome of the surgery on HM, the hippocampus is generally credited with playing a key role in the creation of new explicit memories. What that role is remains uncertain. A recently published study on two people who both suffered damage only to the hippocampus shows that while one of them showed no deficiency in memory, the other had difficulty creating new memories. The researchers theorized that a very specific location within the hippocampus maybe responsible for creating new memories. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated techniques seem confounded in pinpointing this kind of detail. Amygdala, considered the emotional center of the brain, is responsible for emotional memory. For example, we tend to react and remember emotionally charged words and events more than non-emotionally charged ones. Damage to the amygdala causes us to lose this difference. The prefrontal cortex is considered important in remembering the when and where of our memory, the context of the memory. Called source memory, it is what enables us to distinguish between an imagined event and a real event. To remember what we were doing on October 22, 2008 compared to the date of our wedding. Since this is one of the last parts of the brain to mature, it is suspected to be responsible for why children are notorious at not remembering where they learned something. Besides these structures, a neurotransmitter (chemicals that are used to relay, amplify and modulate signals between a neuron and another cell), acetylcholine is considered to be responsible for promoting the creation of new memory. Acetylecholine is primarily sourced in the basal forebrain and it is the degeneration of that part of the brain that results in the memory loss in that dreaded disease, Alzheimer’s.
Neuroscientists theorize that the brain encodes a memory by strengthening the connections between groups of neurons that participate in the storage of the experience. Many contend that there isn’t a single place in the brain that encodes the memory of an experience. For example, the brain uses different systems for retrieving written and spoken information. Using all the different places where the experience is encoded, the brain reconstructs the experience of that past experience. New research reveals that the very same neurons that fired when we originally experienced something, fire when we remember the experience. But because the brain does not encode every specific detail about an event, it manufactures our memory of that experience by filling in the details from other memories. So what we remember is never really accurate. Worse still, the more we remember an event, the stronger becomes the way we remember it, until eventually we’re only left with our recollection of it, not what really elapsed, the “Rashomon” effect.
A psychologist, Caroline Miles is credited as the first person to have formally studied infantile amnesia, back in 1893. Sigmund Freud proposed the first reason for childhood amnesia. He suggested that we deliberately repress the memories of those early years because of the trauma that we suffer as a consequence of our psychosecual development. This theory has been mostly rejected.
The reasons why we fail to remember those early events are divided into two main causes: that it is a problem of storage and that it is a problem of retrieval . Some contend that the memory never was stored due to a lack of maturation of the two main structures of memory, hippocampus and prefrontal cortexThe “problem with retrieval” camp proposes many different reasons for infantile amnesia, mostly related to context. For instance, it is postulated that since language doesn’t develop until much later and much of what we explicitly remember is verbalized, infants can’t remember those early years. Another theory is that since we develop a sense of self only around two years or so, we can’t remember earlier events because we don’t think of them as pertaining to us. Context is crucial in our ability to recall. So, another theory suggests that we have difficulty recalling those baby times because we are never again placed in the same position as an adult that we were in as infants, surrounded by giants, actions that were beyond our comprehension. As one blog puts it: “Rather than being completely forgotten, our earliest experiences may actually be mislabeled”.
Despite our early, seemingly immature, episodic memory, our implicit memory seems quite up and ready at birth, or even before. Infants learn a variety of motor skills as they grow. Much of new newborn research is based on what is called operant conditioning, the ability to associate our action with subsequent reward or punishment. Infants are known to suck at different rates to obtain a particular reward such as mother’s face or her milk. Another source of figuring out what goes on insider their baby minds is a baby’s preference for new items, the novel over the mundane. An infant will pay more attention to new events and objects compared to older ones. Studies using this technique have shown than newborns can remember a visual stimulus for only a few minutes while a five month old can remember it upto three months later. Novelty preference requires that infants can recognize, distinguish the old from the new. This is also a form of memory that is now called pre-explicit memory, because it uses the same circuitry that explicit memory uses.
Interestingly, it has been found that girls recall much more vividly, much earlier events compared to boys. Studies of infant monkeys have revealed the cause to be the hormone, testosterone. Some others point to culture as the reason for this difference, that we engage girls more than boys when they’re infants. Even more interestingly, Maori children have been known to recall events from a much earlier age as compared to European children and Asian children tend to recall events from an even later age than the Europeans.
I sometimes am glad that infants can’t recall as well as we’d like them to. Maya maybe appalled at how inexperienced we are as parents.
References:
- Wikipedia (the image is from there)
- Searching For Memory by Daniel Schacter
- What’s Going on In There by Lise Eliot
No related posts.
I was unaware of this science,I am happy to read this and the story of the bus.This part of your understanding is indeed great.I wish you convert your Blog in to a book.If this is published you may expect the “U K Brokers Book Of The Year”
Award.
Good Luck.
My first memories are from age three – about the birth of my sister. 3-4 is apparently the common age for the first memories to be laid down that we can access as adults. Before that… blank. It really is a mystery. The developmental changes of the childhood brain – and again at puberty are rather fascinating and mysterious. Did you know that teenagers actually loose ability in some mental tasks – such as the ability to recognize facial expressions – as compared to preadolescent children? Adults then have to redevelop these skills.
I have been reading about infantile amnesia tonight. I am not sure how much to believe. My memory goes back, easily, in a linear fashion, to about nine months of age. I remember being unable to walk, shuffling, and actually considering the efficiency of walking versus the risk of falling over (I continued shuffling till I must have been 15 or 16 months).
Obviously, I did not know what age I was—those are guesses based on situations around me at the time, which I won’t go into here, since I did not have a concept of age or months. I also cannot mark out when I began verbalizing in language—there was no “moment” where I can tell you others began understanding me. But I remember understanding those around me before I could speak.
I severely doubt that Europeans have earlier memories than I do as an Asian person. In Hong Kong we had to sit an exam to enter kindergarten by 2½, where we had nightly homework. I had to have numeracy and literacy skills prior to starting that. I also had to sit an exam, solo, to enter Man Kee Kindergarten in Kowloon.
When I moved to New Zealand with my parents at age three, most of my contemporaries had not started school, and regular homework was not a reality for these kids till age five. Being a predominantly European society, there is less need for Europeans to practise their memory skills compared with Asians. Consequently, my European friends tend to tell me that their linear memories begin around five or six years—considerably later than nine months. In your case, you recall being three—again, far earlier than most Europeans.
Interestingly, the two people I have met in life, when discussing this topic, who can remember to before they were one, are European women. So there are exceptions, as there are for any race.
I dare say Maya will remember these times. Children are far cleverer than these so-called “experts” give them credit for. Whether Maya remembers these early days as flashes or in a linear fashion is hard to say, but these times may be more precious to her than you think. And that is a good thing because she will remember more of the love you have given to her.