Why You Remember What You Remember From Childhood

"Aware that most of us have infantile amnesia [1] and rarely remember anything that occurred before we were 3 or 4 (our brain's memory machinery-such as the hippocampus-doesn't mature until then),[1] I went through dusty old family albums to see if there were any photos of that vacation. And sure enough, at Green Lake, Wisconsin, there was my sister Florence in the striped T-shirt that I remember."

"It's understandable why my other memories from early childhood, such as getting food poisoning at a daycare center, or my mother being taken away in an ambulance, have persisted: they were of emotionally charged events, and memory research shows that experiences with high emotional valences strongly encode.[2,3] But my ancient memory from Green Lake is not associated with any strong emotions, so why is it still there?"

"Storage and retrieval of early memories Notice the heading differentiates memory storage from memory retrieval, because it's possible to store early memories but not be able to later retrieve them. Psychologist Carole Peterson found that careful questioning can resurrect memories that would otherwise be lost, extending recall to a time before the previous "earliest" memory.[6] For instance, when adults were primed with questions about their early life before being asked for their earliest memory, or asked"

People tend to recall experiences that are novel, emotionally charged, frequently relived, or often recounted in family stories. Many adults exhibit infantile amnesia and rarely remember events before age three or four because memory systems like the hippocampus mature later. High-emotion events encode more strongly, explaining persistence of traumatic early memories. Some neutral early memories can still persist and be corroborated by photographs. Memory storage can precede retrieval failure, so memories may exist but be inaccessible. Careful questioning and priming can resurrect earlier memories and extend recall to times previously thought unremembered. Recognizing unconscious early choices enables deliberate new choices to improve life enjoyment.

Read at Psychology Today