What is your first memory?

But speaking of remembering and memories, just think about what is the earliest memory in your life? For me, for example, in the kindergarten (I went to the kindergarten when I was 5 months old. I was maybe one year old at the time) I climbed onto a huge (compared to my size at the time) mattress that was laid out in the yard of the kindergarten. My groupmate like me did the same. I was still a toddler in diapers and we couldn't wait to take our place on the mattress, because then we got the drinking juice measured in a plastic cup. (Happy peaceful times.)

I have asked many people about their childhood memories, but many of them are only able to recall events from their lives much later, when they were 3-4 years old. Why is that? What happened before is completely lost from our memory?

There is, for example, childbirth. Even years later, mothers can vividly recall the moment of birth. Although the baby is the other person who experiences this process in the same way, he does not remember how he was born.

The question arose in my mind, if babies don't remember their birth and can only recall memories from the age of two, then are the first two years of their life completely lost?

It doesn't work that way, since even during our development in the womb we learn many new things about the world: lights, sounds, the voice of our parents, which later, together with touch, means the development of a more serious attachment. After birth, we continue to learn and get to know each other.

We know that babies develop tremendously both physically and intellectually in the first three years of their lives. Experiments have shown that babies aged about six months are able to recall an event the next day. As time passes, their minds become sharper and their memory spans longer and longer periods of time.

The first six months after birth is not a long time. If we can recall memories at six months, why is the experience of childbirth erased from us? One of the possible answers is that perhaps we cannot recall the birth because our self-awareness only develops later. Remembering requires self-awareness, which a newborn does not yet have. Then another explanation could be that we don't have language skills as little babies, so we can't invent or recall a story, let alone tell it. Then it could also be that the part of the brain responsible for memory is still so underdeveloped that we cannot remember.

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(Source: marmalade.co.hu | Images: Pixabay)