Why we don't remember our first years of life

Childhood amnesia

Almost nobody remembers events from before age 3 or 4. Scientists call it childhood amnesia. The strange part is that babies and toddlers learn and remember a lot at the time; the forgetting comes later.

Read also: The Mandela Effect: why so many people remember it wrong and Why déjà vu happens, according to science.

The study that tracked the forgetting

Patricia Bauer and Marina Larkina, at Emory University, recorded 3-year-olds talking with their mothers about recent events, then asked about those events again years later. At ages 5 to 7, the children still remembered much of what happened. By 8 and 9, recall dropped sharply. For the authors, the forgetting of the earliest years happens during childhood itself.

Source: Bauer and Larkina, The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood, Memory, 2014.

The role of the hippocampus

The hippocampus is the brain region essential for storing memories of events. In early life it produces new neurons at a very high rate. A study in Science, in mice, linked that intense production to forgetting: new neurons may rewire circuits and make older memories harder to reach. It was done in animals, and it is not yet known whether the same mechanism explains childhood amnesia in people.

Source: Akers et al., Hippocampal Neurogenesis Regulates Forgetting During Adulthood and Infancy, Science, 2014.

Babies do record memories

In 2025, researchers at Yale University ran functional MRI scans on awake babies from 4 months to 2 years old while they looked at pictures. When the hippocampus was more active on first seeing an image, the baby tended to look longer at it when it appeared again, a sign of recognition. The effect was clearer after about age 1. The finding suggests the problem may be retrieving those memories later, not storing them.

Source: Yates et al., Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants, Science, 2025.

What about "memories" from when you were a baby?

Very early memories are often rebuilt from photos, home videos and family stories. Talking with children about the past seems to help them form longer-lasting memories. See also the Mandela Effect and false memories.