{"id":213293,"date":"2025-05-05T13:35:54","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T18:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/why-cant-we-have-childhood-memories"},"modified":"2025-05-05T13:35:54","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T18:35:54","slug":"why-cant-we-have-childhood-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/why-cant-we-have-childhood-memories","title":{"rendered":"Why can\u2019t we have childhood memories?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-cant-we-have-childhood-memories2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Though we learn so much during our first years of life, we can\u2019t, as adults, remember specific events from that time. Researchers have long believed we don\u2019t hold onto these experiences because the part of the brain responsible for saving memories \u2014 the hippocampus \u2014 is still developing well into adolescence and just can\u2019t encode memories in our earliest years. But new Yale research finds evidence that\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n<p>In a study, the researchers showed infants new images and later tested whether they remembered them. When an infant\u2019s hippocampus was more active upon seeing an image the first time, they were more likely to appear to recognize that image later.<\/p>\n<p>The findings, published in <i>Science,<\/i> indicate that memories can indeed be encoded in our brains in our first years of life. And the researchers are now looking into what happens to those memories over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Though we learn so much during our first years of life, we can\u2019t, as adults, remember specific events from that time. Researchers have long believed we don\u2019t hold onto these experiences because the part of the brain responsible for saving memories \u2014 the hippocampus \u2014 is still developing well into adolescence and just can\u2019t encode [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}