Why can't you remember being born?

[bascule]

I found this explanation in a list of fun facts about the brain, however I was unsatisfied with this explanation.

 

http://articles.health.msn.com/id/100111308

 

You might think something as traumatic as birth would leave its mark on your memory, but chances are you can only recall back to age 5. Why? One theory points to myelin, the protective nerve sheathing that helps with signal conduction; before age 5, a child's brain is low in myelin. "It may be important in long-term memory maintenance," says Schooler. Another possible explanation: As we learn to speak, we can no longer access memories created in our preverbal years. "With the onset of language, the way we think may change, making it impossible to get into the shoes of our older memories," Schooler says.

 

The former explanation does not satisfy me at all, and the latter only partially.

 

I believe our memory is associative and can generally be described in the form of an ontology. Our cerebral cortex is constantly sifting through our memories and looking for things to associate with present experiences.

 

I'm not sure if we are born with an a priori ontology or if the brain simply builds one out of nowhere; however I would contend that the reason we cannot remember early childhood is that this structure was not yet developed to the point where these memories can be retrieved.

 

Philosopher Daniel Dennett goes so far as to suggest that we are not truly conscious when born and consciousness (in the way we experience it) is something we learn by analyzing and mimicking the behavior of other humans. Essentially he's saying natural selection got about 90% of the way there at birth and it's up to our own innate mental plasticity to accomplish the remaining 10% through an autoprogramming process.

[DV8 2XL]

Philosopher Daniel Dennett goes so far as to suggest that we are not truly conscious when born and consciousness (in the way we experience it) is something we learn[/i'] by analyzing and mimicking the behavior of other humans. Essentially he's saying natural selection got about 90% of the way there at birth and it's up to our own innate mental plasticity to accomplish the remaining 10% through an autoprogramming process.

 

I doubt if Dennett watched many babies through the first year. I have and I have a feeling that there is much, much more than just 'analyzing and mimicking'. There is some other innate program running in those little minds, and by it's own agenda.

[JonM]

Philosopher Daniel Dennett goes so far as to suggest that we are not truly conscious when born and consciousness (in the way we experience it) is something we learn by analyzing and mimicking the behavior of other humans. Essentially he's saying natural selection got about 90% of the way there at birth and it's up to our own innate mental plasticity to accomplish the remaining 10% through an autoprogramming process.

 

No way? how did that guy get a phd...

that was basically an old idea by John Locke called tabula rosa...

 

I dont remember what happened this weekend... does that mean my consciousness wasnt developed?

 

When we were born we didnt know what anything was so how can we attach a memory to it?

[Glider]

It is tabula rasa, meaning 'clean slate'.

 

Neonates undergo a huge level of programmed cell death in the first few months of life. Neurons die at a high rate, but synapses form at an immensely higher rate. New connections are formed and older, redundant ones are extinguished. With such neural activity going on at such a rate, it's hardly surprising that memories from that time are wiped.

 

Moreover, in order to remember something, you need to be able to understand it. You need to have 'cognitive hooks' to hang new memories on (see for example Bartlett's 1932 'War of the Ghosts' experiment).

 

Whilst neonates may not strictly be tabula rasa, it is extremely unlikely that they have any relevant cognitive structures that would allow them to interpret and make sense of their own birth. Moreover, why would they need to? Birth must be quite traumatic and remembering it would serve no adaptive purpose.

[aj47]

I've just read quite an interesting book on the brain and it suggests that we remember every event and every image of our entire lives but the memories just stay dormant.

 

Several tests were carried out with LSD on patients and some of these people began to recall memories of thier time in the womb, accuractly describing the way the blood moves and its stucture. Other patients apparantly recalled memories of birth and what the doctors surgery looked like which was later shown to be true.

 

Its an interesting concept and some of the proof is quite astounding, but not sure if I can really believe it.

 

Personally I would find it a bit disturbing if I could remember my own birth.

[bascule]

No way? how did that guy get a phd...

that was basically an old idea by John Locke called tabula rosa...

 

No' date=' not at all. I'm certainly not going into Dennett's ideas in depth at all, but essentially he claims that our internal monologue provides a universal marshalling/demarshalling mechanism in which ideas may be transmitted in uniplex to all the various substructures of consciousness (which he typically refers to as "specialists")

 

I'm not sure how you could misconstrue this idea so...

 

Neonates undergo a huge level of programmed cell death in the first few months of life. Neurons die at a high rate, but synapses form at an immensely higher rate. New connections are formed and older, redundant ones are extinguished. With such neural activity going on at such a rate, it's hardly surprising that memories from that time are wiped.

 

Nice, that's an excellent explanation, thank you.

 

Moreover, in order to remember something, you need to be able to understand it. You need to have 'cognitive hooks' to hang new memories on (see for example Bartlett's 1932 'War of the Ghosts' experiment).

 

Without a well-developed ontological structure there's no way you can relate memories to existing knowledge (because there's nowhere in that structure for things to map to) and your ability to decipher your environment is substantially reduced. So yes, basically my point...

 

Whilst neonates may not strictly be tabula rasa,

 

I know Jung's idea of a collective unconscious has lost favor but I can't help but feel that we're born with some sort of internal ontology a priori[/a]

 

it is extremely unlikely that they have any relevant cognitive structures that would allow them to interpret and make sense of their own birth.

 

Definitely not saying that, just making the suggestion that we don't assemble our ontology of the world from scratch.

 

Moreover, why would they need to? Birth must be quite traumatic and remembering it would serve no adaptive purpose.

 

Yup.

[starbug1]

I have read about instances where some people, even grown adults, can remember being weaned on their mother's milk. I don't know about you, but this memory would altogether be more disturbing that birth itself. So, I'm asking, if there is no reason to remember birth, why is it a rare number of people that remember? How have they slipped past this barrier?

[bascule]

Several tests were carried out with LSD on patients and some of these people began to recall memories of thier time in the womb, accuractly describing the way the blood moves and its stucture. Other patients apparantly recalled memories of birth and what the doctors surgery looked like which was later shown to be true.

 

This sounds far too much like memory implantation through hypnotic "regression" therapy...

[Bettina]

I said this in another thread, but I remember as far back as being held in (supposedly) my mothers arms and someone else was trying to give me a spoon of something. I remember wailing my arms and knocking it out of there hands.

 

Then, someone else held my arms and it was given to me again. I remember crying while it was being given to me....this time with success. Thats my earliest memory...

 

I have others....like being put on a trycycle and pushed from room to room...

 

Bettina

[JonM]

I'm not sure how you could misconstrue this idea so...

 

 

Ha, I switched the 90% and 10% around.. sorry about that... dont know what Im talking about

[CanadaAotS]

One of my youngest memory's is during my parents wedding, hiding under the table. It had a large table cloth that went down to the floor and my grandma was trying to get me out from under the table. I'd been sneaking bits of wedding cake.

 

This is when I was about 2. I have no early memories that I know of (it's hard placing my age with the older memories however).

 

I like the idea that the brains "turn-over" rate is so high, its not given structure enough to map memories to long term. makes sense to me.

[Ophiolite]

I have several well authenticated memories from just after I turned three - a trip to London from a small island in Scotland - dramatic contrast, several recollections. Most people I have spoken to of early memories seem to have theirs begin between five and seven, which just seems incredibly late to me.

CanadaAots was even more precocious than me. How about the rest of you?

[Glider]

Three is a reasonable age. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when people start laying down solid memories (or at least, being able to recal them), but two seems popular (with a large standard deviation). The earliest memories tend to be flashbulb memories though. More pictures and less processes or scripts.

[clarisse]

I think this is my earliest, clear memory:

It was dinner time and my parents came into the room where my brother and I were, turned on the light and my mom took my brother in her arms, my dad turned the light off and the three of them went downstairs. And I remember that I thought that I didn't want to be left alone and that I was hungry too so I started crying and my mom came back and carried me downstairs.

however when i told my mom about it she was very surprised because i detailed her my crib and I recall perfectly that it wasnt very high above the ground and that it had an orange pattern on the edges and we stopped sharing rooms before my brother was three years old so we calculate that i should have been at least a year and a few months old if not younger... but what seems strange to me is all the mental processing I had to do... I understood perfectly that my parents were going down to the kitchen to eat and I remember that I knew that if I cried they would probably take me too...

so sometimes ive wondered if its a real memory or if my brain has reconstructed a simple visual memory...

[lizzy48]

I can remember being born and cawling also being in my pram. If any one wants to know more let me know.

[Moontanman]

Another returned to life thread for sure but I can remember things from about the age of two or so for sure, possibly some other flashes that occurred earlier, I remember being breast fed at least once although my mom says she didn't breast feed which is rather disturbing. i agree that those memories are more of flashes than the type of memories I have now.

[John Cuthber]

Hang on?

"I remember being breast fed at least once although my mom says she didn't breast feed "

So, you know that your memories of early age are wrong but you still think

 

"I can remember things from about the age of two or so for sure"

 

How do you know that these are not false memories where what you are actually remembering is imagining yourself in stories you have heard about you when you were very young?

(and the same goes for other who say they remember anything before about 5 years old.)

 

Also, if you ask a 5 year old what they remember about being two they don't recall it (or they recall very little). How come you can now remember things you didn't know when you were 5?

[Moontanman]

Hang on?

"I remember being breast fed at least once although my mom says she didn't breast feed "

So, you know that your memories of early age are wrong but you still think

 

"I can remember things from about the age of two or so for sure"

 

How do you know that these are not false memories where what you are actually remembering is imagining yourself in stories you have heard about you when you were very young?

(and the same goes for other who say they remember anything before about 5 years old.)

 

Also, if you ask a 5 year old what they remember about being two they don't recall it (or they recall very little). How come you can now remember things you didn't know when you were 5?

 

 

All the early memories i have are of flashes of or pictures, they are not like the memories I have now but they have been confirmed by people who were there except for the breast feeding part but some inquiries did show that a relative who had recently lost a new born was allowed to baby sit me when i was an infant, it would be rather rash to say she had attempted to breast feed me due to a reality disconnect as a result of her loss but it would seem reasonable, she took care of me for an entire summer during the day. real memories of things that i can actually remember in a fashion similar to the way my memories are now start at around 3 or so all before that age are more like flashes of vision with little or no real connection with any other reality.

 

The earliest memory I have that is more like my adult memories was of being told by my grandfather to go over the hill and get some eggs from a duck that was sitting on a nest (my grandparents raised ducks for their feathers and eggs) The duck was huge in my memory and it proceeded to flog me severely and i tumbled on down the hill and cried as I climbed back up the hill, i was a little over three at the time, maybe 3 years + 4 months or so I remember my grandfather holding me and laughing so hard he cried because of the way i tumbled down the hill, he then when down and grabbed the duck off the nest and let me pick up the eggs and carry them back up the hill, I dropped several them and they broke. Anything before that are just flashes of mental pictures, once of seeing a stingray caught on a pier in Florida and the house we lived in when we lived in Florida and getting fish bone stuck in my foot, this happened when I was 2. I also have some flashes of my grandfather's house in WV but since I lived there until i was 6 or so those may not be very early memories.

 

One more memory, when I was a toddler, barely able to walk, I remember playing in the yard, sitting on the ground and screaming as a huge bird flew over me, i fell back and hit my head, the bird seems to fill the sky in my memory, the memory is like a short gif in my mind. The bird I found out years later was a buzzard and my uncle who was about nine or ten came out when he heard my scream and grabbed me up.

Edited July 3, 2011 by Moontanman

[Marat]

Daniel Dennett's theory of learned capacity for self-awareness is well-supported by other theorists, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Julian Jaynes. Wittgenstein's argument is essentially that the ability to understand ourselves as a continuing subject or 'platform' of experience distinct from the jumble of sensations we experience depends on our participation in a society of other language users who first bring us into focus for our own awareness as entities independent of the group and its objective world. Only by going through that process do we fully develop a 'self' to which memories can be attached as 'my own experience,' so it becomes sufficiently important to bother remembering them.

 

Jaynes approaches the issue in terms of the cultural history of consciousness, arguing that pre-Homeric peoples were not fully self-aware in the way we are, since the way their surrounding culture developed their own self-understanding was different from our own. This is why Ancient Greek texts express 'Achilles became angry' as 'Anger arrived at the locus known as Achilles,' given that selfhood was not yet fully developed in our modern sense. This also explains, according to Jaynes, the disturbingly vacant, insect-like eyes of ancient depictions of the human face. If there was little or no self-awareness inside, why depict it as all that significant outside? How this affected ancient memory is a question that is likely beyond our capacities to research.

[Moontanman]

Are animals considered conscious? I am quite certain that many are, even fish, and my experiences with octopus would indicate they are self aware as well. I'm not sure after reading all these posts I completely understand what consciousness is.

[jackson33]

Since a couple folks have found there way to this forum, from an old post by Syntax and this thread, I'll make this post. Note that I could easily argue both directions, however as a strong believer in mind therapy or that what the mind believes can be, will be. Yoga, while I don't involve religion or spirituality on my reasoning, does work for a great many people and I do believe those afflicted with various forms of psychological or mental problems can be helped, where traditional remedies seemingly can not solve the problem.

 

On the link below are "said" testimonials made by young children. I understand parents might have said things to influence memory acceptance, but IMO for life itself to exist the brain/memory must start working well before birth.

 

Interview No. 16: A three-and-one-half-year-old boy

 

I: “Do you remember being in mommy’s tummy?”

 

C: “I made mommy’s tummy really big because I was a big baby.” (He further indicated that it was the lower part of her tummy that he made big.)

 

I: “Did you hear anything when you were in mommy’s tummy?”

 

C: “No. I cried a little . . . and I dropped out.”

 

I: “You dropped out? How did you do that?”

 

C: “I just went plop and I made a hole in her tummy.”

 

Note: This child was delivered by cesarean. The mother indicated that she had discussed this with him previously. [/Quote]

 

http://www.primalspirit.com/pr2_1rhodes_recall_birth.htm

 

Primal Therapy, was "Doc Syntax" only apparent issue, almost an obsession in itself and he was banned from several forums (that I know of), even if accomplished by the same people. If interested here is the a link to the man who formulated the theory...

 

[Marat]

It is certainly true that the brain and memory do start operating before birth. This is substantiated by the fact that children can learn to speak the language their mothers were exposed to during the child's gestation, even if the mothers move to a country with a different language just prior to giving birth and then the children are first challenged with learning the language originally heard in the womb later in life.

 

But 'knowing' something and simply 'being conscious' of something seem to be two different states. Thus a dog may be aware that it is warm in the house, but he can't 'know' it is 'warm' in the same way that a language speaker armed with the concepts of temperature, seasons, external physical states vs. internal physical states, etc., can know and remember this. Similarly, an infant experiencing the trauma of birth may have sufficient intelligence to experience its sensations (a late-term fetus actually screams when aborted), but since it wouldn't have the linguistic and conceptual structure to isolate and fix the experience as a distinct 'something' called 'birth,' it probably couldn't recover and remember it once the child became a linguistic entity.

[John Cuthber]

"but IMO for life itself to exist the brain/memory must start working well before birth."

IYO perhaps, but in fact, life can exist perfectly well without any memory, even in adulthood.

Ask a mushroom.

[Green Xenon]

All the early memories i have are of flashes of or pictures, they are not like the memories I have now but they have been confirmed by people who were there except for the breast feeding part but some inquiries did show that a relative who had recently lost a new born was allowed to baby sit me when i was an infant, it would be rather rash to say she had attempted to breast feed me due to a reality disconnect as a result of her loss but it would seem reasonable, she took care of me for an entire summer during the day. real memories of things that i can actually remember in a fashion similar to the way my memories are now start at around 3 or so all before that age are more like flashes of vision with little or no real connection with any other reality.

 

The earliest memory I have that is more like my adult memories was of being told by my grandfather to go over the hill and get some eggs from a duck that was sitting on a nest (my grandparents raised ducks for their feathers and eggs) The duck was huge in my memory and it proceeded to flog me severely and i tumbled on down the hill and cried as I climbed back up the hill, i was a little over three at the time, maybe 3 years + 4 months or so I remember my grandfather holding me and laughing so hard he cried because of the way i tumbled down the hill, he then when down and grabbed the duck off the nest and let me pick up the eggs and carry them back up the hill, I dropped several them and they broke. Anything before that are just flashes of mental pictures, once of seeing a stingray caught on a pier in Florida and the house we lived in when we lived in Florida and getting fish bone stuck in my foot, this happened when I was 2. I also have some flashes of my grandfather's house in WV but since I lived there until i was 6 or so those may not be very early memories.

 

One more memory, when I was a toddler, barely able to walk, I remember playing in the yard, sitting on the ground and screaming as a huge bird flew over me, i fell back and hit my head, the bird seems to fill the sky in my memory, the memory is like a short gif in my mind. The bird I found out years later was a buzzard and my uncle who was about nine or ten came out when he heard my scream and grabbed me up.

 

 

Hi:

 

I am aware the average age at which long-term retention of memories is 3. What the earliest age known at which a person has had long-term memories that were retained in adulthood [i.e. something similar to the Guiness Book of Records for earliest memory]?

 

I seem to be able to remember things that happened when I was 2 years old and slightly earlier. I am now 27 years old.

 

I used to live in Stamford, Connecticut.

 

I really like the house in Stamford, Connecticut. It was on 263 Strawberry Hill Avenue. I lived in that house for the 1st 2.5 years of

my life. I was born on 10-22-83. It was my favorite house. But I wasn't in that house for the entire first 2.5 years. I had gone to India in

'86 from January to July. I could differentiate Stamford and India from each other. I can remember returning from India to Connecticut. I

recall feeling a sigh of relief after I came back to Stamford. After I came back we only stayed in the Stamford house for 3 days [well, my

parents think it was 3 days! For me it felt much longer, even though I loved the Stamford house!] before moving to a borough called "Queens" in New York. I recall begging to go back to Stamford after we move to Queens.

 

My family is Indian. There are some Indian songs that they played that remind me of the house in Stamford, Connecticut. When listening to those songs, I actally feel like I am in that house again! It is just so amazing and real.

 

I can remember seeing one of my aunts in the hospital. This was when my aunt was giving birth to her son in September of '85. I obviously didn't know why she was in the hospital but I do remember her lying on a bed. I can remember her being very uncomfortable. This memory has been confirmed by my parents as the day my aunt gave birth to her son. During this, I was a month less than 2 years of age!

 

Scientifically [at least in current research] what determines how early long-term memory starts, whether these memories are retained, and how long they are retained?

 

 

Thanks,

 

Green Xenon