Infant Amnesia

The earliest memory that I can recount out of my 18 years of being alive is from when I was 4 years old. My cousin and I were running around my house playing tag when my cousin “accidentally” pushed he into the glass table in the living room. The table split in half and I ended up with a deep cut on my face that started at the bottom right corner of my nose and ended at the center of my cheek. My mother rushed me to the hospital and received 7 stitches. I still have a small scar today. But after reading “The Mystery of Why You Can’t Remember Being a Baby” by Zaria Gorvette, I began to question my memory ability. Why can’t I remember anything beyond the age of 4? Are those missing early memories somewhere hidden in my brain? Did the memories
Infant amnesia is defined as the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories which are memories of specific events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual who, what, when, and where) before the age of 2–4 years (wikipedia.org). Because of this amnesia, it is almost impossible to remember your birth, your first steps, saying your first word, or your first day of nursery school. How is this possible? Part of the puzzle comes from the fact that babies are, in other ways, sponges for new information, forming 700 new neural connections every second and wielding language-learning skills to make the most accomplished polyglot green with envy (Gorvette). As they grow older they retain language and habits acquired but in terms of autobiographical or episodic memories, the earliest years will be almost a complete blank. Even other mammals, lacking language and presumably less burdened by psychosexual conflicts, show the same loss of early memories while having perfectly good long-term memory for later
He used himself as a test subject to test out which methods of memorization work best. He set out to memorize “nonsense syllables” because they were unfamiliar and he had no prior knowledge on them. Through this process he discovered how the human mind attains information. Based on his results he created the forgetting curve. The forgetting curve is exponential. That means that in the first days the memory loss is biggest, later (as you can see in the forgetting curve at the right side) you still forget but the rate at which you forget is much, much slower. The way we forget is predictable. I’ve experienced this curve when I study for a test the night before compared to when I study the information over time. The large amount of information that I rushed to learn in one night is hard to recall days after the test. But if I study over a week and learn smaller portions at a time, the information sticks in my head for a longer time. The forgetting curve supports the theory that as children go through events in their lives, they remember them for the first few days or weeks but as time goes on their memories become patchy. They forget specific details about the