Why adults do not remember their childhood. All people have a type of memory loss associated with the inability to reproduce life events from early childhood.
Usually, as an adult, a person can describe the school years, sometimes able to tell about some bright moments that happened to him at the age of 5-6 years. But almost no one can remember his life in detail from birth and the next 3-4 years. What causes such infantile amnesia?
Ukraine , Ukraingate , 2 , January , 2022 | Psychology
Protective function
Why even adolescents do not remember their first childhood, in the early XX century tried to establish the Austrian psychologist, psychiatrist and neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. After conducting many studies, he came to the conclusion that it is human nature that thus triggers the protective mechanism of the psyche. A child under 7-8 years is almost helpless, depending on the circumstances and the environment that ensures its survival. The risk of injury of a physical, mental nature, death, from birth to the above age is extremely high. Therefore, to protect the psyche, a person’s personality all this time is at the level of conscious perception of reality, that is, there is no possibility of understanding what is really happening to him. And since there is no comprehension of events, there is no memorization of them .
Thus, the phenomenon of infantile amnesia has a natural evolutionary character, which is associated with the protective function of human mental health. The factor of such amnesia prevents the child from realizing the vulnerability of his own life and blocks the memories so that in the future they can not harm her psyche, if in childhood there was a traumatic event or not even one.
Underdeveloped brain
Many neurophysiologists have also tried to understand the cause of childhood amnesia. They turned to the study of brain structures and, above all, the hippocampus. After all, he is responsible for “transporting and archiving” human memories. The functioning of its paired lobes, located in the medial temporal lobes of the brain, has long been studied by Canadian neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Jocelyn of the University of Toronto. Based on various experiments, they found that the rapid birth of many new neural connections in young, actively developing areas of the brain, blocks access to old memories.
In other words, the rapid growth of neurons provokes their “layering” on each other, so that the part of the brain that stored the oldest memories, is deep under the new layers of tissue and becomes inaccessible. In addition, Canadian researchers have found that young children have underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for short-term memories. Then its further development, as well as growth “closes” access to older information.
Source : Ukrgate
