Why babies’ experiences matter (even if they can’t remember them)

A happy father feeding his baby. | Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

No matter how hard we try, remembering anything that happened to us before the age of, say, 3 or 4 years old feels impossible. Even memories before 7 years old feel hazy and fragmented.

Our brains just aren’t built to store specific memories from our first few years, something known as “infantile amnesia.”

And chances are, even the earliest memories we think we have might just be amalgamations of stories we’ve been told, images cribbed from old family snapshots and home videos, or scenes we’ve borrowed from movies or TV shows.

So does it really matter if it happened, if we can’t really remember it?

Yes, science says. Even if we don’t have a specific memory of what happened when we were babies, those experiences leave lasting impressions on us of being safe and being loved, which shapes how we form relationships later in life. But whether babies are able to encode and store permanent memories is still an open question.

Columbia University cognitive psychologist Tristan Yates put babies in MRI machines and showed them a series of images, and found that the babies tended to stare longer at an image they’d been shown before, suggesting that they remembered seeing the image the first time.

“We are showing that they’re able to form some memories,” Yates said. “The hippocampus is capable of forming specific memories over a few minutes, but now we need to start doing the research that can get us at longer durations, that can get at more complex memories.”

One theory for infantile amnesia is that an infant’s brain is prioritizing learning general skills, like how to walk or talk or eat, or learning to detect patterns like a bedtime routine, rather than storing specific memories that aren’t necessary for survival.

Noam Hassenfeld spoke with Yates and Dr. Dana Suskind , a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, on the latest episode of Explain It to Me , Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Suskind studies early childhood development and the important role that parents and caregivers play, and she told Noam about how our early childhood experiences can shape us.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.

You started out as a cochlear implant surgeon and now you’re working on childhood development. How did that happen? What’s the connection there?

It actually makes a whole lot of sense. When I first started our pediatric cochlear implant program at the University of Chicago, I started implanting cute little kids who all look like they had the same potential to thrive after implant surgery, and found very quickly that I could implant two children who looked very much the same, who had parents who loved them equally, with the same technology, but they would have very different outcomes, with one of them really thriving after surgery in terms of language learning and trajectories, and others barely able to communicate.

It was that experience and seeing these huge differences in outcomes after the same surgery that led me into this incredible world of childhood development and the importance of the early years and the importance of parents.

Humans come out with brains that are literally only one-third the size of adult brains . That’s very different than any other species . It’s why the puppy can start feeding itself pretty quickly and start walking, whereas the human infant is helpless. In those first three years of life, 85 percent of the physical brain is built during those periods of time.

A million new neural connections happen every second . The environmental input, the input from parents and caregivers — every serve and return, every touch, every gaze — literally is helping shape and strengthen the neural connections that happen in our brain.

The brain isn’t being just built for your child’s vocabulary development or their literacy ability. It’s building their social brain, their ability to relate to and connect to the rest of the world. The relationships and the expectations for relationships are built in those early years.

Tell me if this is maybe an oversimplification, but I’m a parent of a young son; he’s a little over 7 months old. And I feel like what I’m doing when I’m raising him is building the structure of his brain, or building the architecture, and all the other stuff, all the specific things, are going to fill in all the rooms of the big building that we’re constructing together. But he’s not going to start filling those in with specific ideas or specific memories until later on in his development.

The analogy you make is exactly right. I think of building the physical brain — if you were thinking about it through a computer lens — as building the hardware, the firmware, the memory, the RAM. I think of K-12 as really important, but I think of those as software updates. But these early years are building that infrastructure.

“I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence.”

At the end of the day, it’s your attachment with him, being the perfectly imperfect parent. I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence. So feel okay every time you misstep, misunderstand and repair, because that is, for him, building the understanding of, “I can be loved by another human who missteps but is able to repair.” He is starting to understand how to expect to be treated.

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