There’s a lot to remember from your time as a baby — your first smile, your first steps, your first words. But chances are, you’ve forgotten all of it, a phenomenon called infantile amnesia.
For a long time, infantile amnesia was thought to be tied to an inability to make memories in infancy. But a new study supports the idea that babies do, indeed, encode memories in the first years of their lives, by linking measures of brain activity to measures of memory recall in infants for the first time.
Though our days as infants are filled with new experiences, we don’t remember those experiences later on in life. Researchers long thought that the hippocampus, the region of the brain that’s in charge of making memories, wasn’t developed enough during infancy to encode specific events as memories. But the results of the new study indicate that isn’t true.
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