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The first memories? Already two and a half years old

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Carol Peterson of Memorial University of Newfoundland is a researcher for years committed to shedding light on our past, even what we believe we do not remember. Peterson is in fact a hunter of memories, interested in understanding which are the oldest memories that we can retrieve from memory, how it works and what influences all this.

Today he signs an article on the pages of Memory dedicated to early memories and childhood amnesia, in which he basically states that we often remember things that come from a past that is further away than we believe, also thanks to the mistakes we make in dating this past, believing it to be closer than it is. But above all, he says, our most distant memories are not something static, they are rather fluid.

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Finding out when the first memories date back is not easy. If many studies and researches, says Peterson, trace the first memories back to 3-4 years, the differences in methodology between the studies, the context, but also the presence of numerous factors capable of influencing the responses (from culture, to environment and the family in which he grew up) make it difficult to believe the data reliable. Not to mention that things change when we ask adults or children (more precocious) to establish their earliest memories and that the answers given by the participants can also change over time.

All this, Peterson writes, essentially demonstrates how memory is something both fluid and malleable at the same time and that therefore even the very age of the first memories is so to speak variable, he explains. But in general it goes back to when we are small, very small. Obviously net of all the mistakes that are made on the dates, explains Peterson and to which we are all subject.

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Observing the answers given by some children in the course of some of his studies, Peterson noted not only that after some time the earliest remembered memory can change but that the more one investigates the topic, the more memories emerge, even earlier ones. This, he explains, leads one to believe that more than a single first memory, there are several in everyone’s mind: “There seems to be a pool of potential memories that both adults and children can fish from,” he said. Adding to this the fact that people often tend to believe themselves older than they actually were at the time, for Peterson, the age of earliest memories could be that of two and a half years.

“Childhood amnesia is a very fascinating phenomenon, about which we know very little from the biological point of view – he comments Elvira Deleplace of the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, expert in memory neurobiologist – This work highlights the methodological difficulties for its study, since as we know memory is reconstructive and when we try to remember an event we reconstruct it on the basis of inferences and also trying to give meaning to the sequence of events. It is also very difficult to separate our memories from what are the recent stories that our parents make of the events that occurred before the age of 5 “.

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But there are also biological reasons that make it difficult to shed light on what happened in our very first years of life, the researcher goes on: “One of the biological theories that attempt to explain childhood amnesia, which concerns only conscious memories, is focuses on the postnatal changes that occur in brain development. Brain development continues during the postnatal phase, especially for certain areas, including the hippocampus. “

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The result, unlike skills acquired as children (such as walking or talking) that do not require full involvement of the neocortical areas, De Leonibus goes on, is that conscious memories become so to speak unstable: “The fact that during the first years the brain undergoes an important increase in volume with the development and rearrangement of neural networks, causing the explicit, conscious memories acquired in those years to be lost – due to the remodeling of synaptic contacts – or to be present but difficult access due to overwriting or changes of registers “. Alongside this, the expert continues, it should be considered more generally the fact that the decay of memories over time is a spontaneous process, “due to neuronal processes such as, for example, the loss of synaptic connections involved in the processing of those memories. “.

As Peterson writes, the CNR researcher is also convinced that it will be helpful for research on infantile amnesia to have verified dates available, with which to compare the memories reported and inevitably influenced by various factors and prone to errors. of children than of adults.

Not without risk though. “Probably the technological age in which we live will record many of our memories, creating an external memory, on which scientists could work to overcome the methodological limits of the study of childhood amnesia, dating facts, events, verifying the memory of details. he hopes – concludes De Leonibus – that the fact of having an external memory to deposit our memories does not atrophy our hippocampus, stripping it of our personal history “.

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