Babies can make memories, so why can’t we?

Why do we never make good memories when we’re infants? New research from Turk-Browne and his colleagues in a pediatric neuroimaging unit

Is it because we don’t make good memories when we’re infants or is something else to blame? Now, in new research published by Yates and her colleagues in the journal Science, they propose that babies are able to form memories, even if they become inaccessible later in life.

The first two years of life are the most important years in a person’s life. “That’s the period of by far the greatest plasticity across your whole life span. Your brain learns in infancy and it is the foundation of everything you know and do the rest of your life.

“They are the worst subject population, in many ways,” admits Turk-Browne. They don’t understand the instructions. It’s similar to taking a photo, you get a blurry picture. [so] you can’t move a millimeter. And also they have really short attention spans. So we had to adapt.”

Turk-Browne and his colleagues have spent nearly a decade figuring out how to do fMRI research on babies. They have come up with a lot of tricks to make them happy. If the baby cries, the experiment will stop so the baby can play. He states that they have comfort items like a pacifier or a blanket for them to bring. “I’ve given babies a bottle during these scans.”

Early childhood memories in baby’s hippocampus are more likely to last longer than they thought possible, says neurobiologist Flavio Donato

An image appears for two seconds and then disappears. They have never seen images like a canyon, a dog toy, and a woman’s face.

“About a minute later,” says Yates, “we show them one image they just saw alongside a different image from the same category.” It’s possible that it’s the canyon along with a waterfall.

The scans revealed that starting at about 12 months of age, the more activity there was in the baby’s hippocampus when seeing an image for the first time — like that canyon — the more likely they were to remember that image later.

These results allow scientists to “put the time stamp of our first memory a little bit earlier than when we thought possible,” says Flavio Donato, a neurobiologist at the University of Basel who wasn’t involved in the research.

He says it now appears that infancy isn’t just a boring stage of life, but can be relevant to how we raise and educate our children.

“This is an important question, how traumatic events might lead to memories in the brain, that may persist for a long time, and possibly influence the way in which this person will develop,” says Donato.

The researchers are looking to answer this question by asking parents to record home videos from their baby’s perspective. When they play those videos for the infants, they will look to see what happens in the baby’s hippocampus and how long those earliest memories can last.

The study co-author said that the proof of concept was that theEncoding capability exists.