Why don't I remember being a baby?

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What’s the earliest memory you have? I've got bad news: It’s probably fake… According to neuroscientists, anyone who says they   remember being a baby is probably  lying (but they don’t even know it) So what’s going on? Psychologists did an  

experiment where they interviewed  3-year-olds about real stuff:   Zoo trips, the first day of  preschool, that kind of thing. Then they came back years later and asked  those kids to recall those memories. Age 5, 6, or 7… remembered 60%

or  more of those early-life events. But by age 8 or 9? They only remembered like 40%.   Most of that early memory was gone,  and it declines quickly from there  So you didn't forget being  a baby when you were

a baby. You forgot it in like second grade. Researchers from Yale put infant babies  in an MRI, which is probably easier said than done, and they showed that a key memory area of the  brain called the hippocampus   lights up

when a baby locks in  a photo it's never seen before. So our memory is definitely running  by about age one. The memories get made. Something is happening to them after. Here’s what we think is going on: During the first

few years of life, that  memory region of the brain is being flooded   by new growing neurons. This shuffles  around the cells that were already there,   rewiring the chain of neurons  and breaking the old memory. Research in mice suggests

maybe those  memories could still be hiding in there,   but just can’t be accessed. When scientists  zapped the original neurons with light in mice,   some early memories came back. But we’ve  never tested the same thing in humans. Because it

turns out to be hard to recruit people to get  fiber optic cables shoved in their brains.  Why would a brain do this? When you’re like one,  you don’t need to remember specific events as   much as you need to

figure out the rules  for things like language and how the physical   world works. So your brain focuses its energy on that. Still, nearly forty percent of people   say their first memory is from age two or  younger. And, somebody's

probably gonna be in the comments telling me that they definitely remember being born. But you probably don't. All this research suggests those are  almost certainly reconstructions pieced   together from family stories  and photos and later memories. So, some version

of you learned language, discovered  what gravity was, and all those other things. But sadly, you can never meet  that version of yourself. Follow me for more cool science videos.