The Great Forgetting

Our first three years are a blur, and we don’t recall much before the age of seven. It turns out those early memories aren’t merely tucked away.

- Kristin Ohlson

I’M THE YOUNGEST by far of five children. By the time I started first grade, my siblings were gone, and we went from a very noisy household to a very quiet one.

My family has told me stories about those early years before my siblings left. How my brother ambushed me around corners with a toy crocodile. How my oldest sister carried me like a kangaroo with her Joey. But I can offer very few stories of my own from that time.

Hardly any adult can. There is a term for this—infantile amnesia, coined by Sigmund Freud to describe the lack of recall adults have of their first three or four years and their paucity of solid memories until around age seven. There has been a century of research about whether memories of these early years are tucked away in some part of our brains and need only a cue to be recovered. But research now suggests that the memories we form in these early years simply disappear.

Psychologist Carole Peterson of Memorial University of Newfoundland has conducted a series of studies to pinpoint the age at which these memories vanish. First, she and her colleagues assembled a group of children between the ages of four and thirteen to describe their earliest recollections. The children’s parents stood by to verify the memories, and even the youngest kids could recall events from when they were around two years old.

The children were interviewed again two years later. Nearly 90 percent of the memories initially offered by those ten and older were retained. But the younger children had gone blank. “Even when we prompted them about their earlier memories, they said, ‘No, that never happened to me,’” Peterson said. “We were watching childhood amnesia in action.”