Why babies’ experiences matter (even if they can’t remember them)

A happy father feeding his baby. | Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images No matter how hard we try, remembering anything that happened to us before the age of, say, 3 or 4 years old feels impossible.

Even memories before 7 years old feel hazy and fragmented.

Our brains just aren’t built to store specific memories from our first few years, something known as “infantile amnesia.” And chances are, even the earliest memories we think we have might just be amalgamations of stories we’ve been told, images cribbed from old family snapshots and home videos, or scenes we’ve borrowed from movies or TV shows.

So does it really matter if it happened, if we can’t really remember it? Yes, science says.

Even if we don’t have a specific memory of what happened when we were babies, those experiences leave lasting impressions on us of being safe and being loved, which shapes how we form relationships later in life.

But whether babies are able to encode and store permanent memories is still an open question.

Columbia University cognitive psychologist Tristan Yates put babies in MRI machines and showed them a series of images, and found that the babies tended to stare longer at an image they’d been shown before, suggesting that they remembered seeing the image the first time.

“We are showing that they’re able to form some memories,” Yates said.

“The hippocampus is capable of forming specific memories over a few minutes, but now we need to start doing the research that can get us at longer durations, that can get at more complex memories.” One theory for infantile amnesia is that an infant’s brain is prioritizing learning general skills, like how to walk or talk or eat, or learning to detect patterns like a bedtime routine, rather than storing specific memories that aren’t necessary for survival.

Noam Hassenfeld spoke with Yates and Dr.

Dana Suskind , a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, on the latest episode of Explain It to Me , Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Suskind studies early childhood development and the important role that parents and caregivers play, and she told Noam about how our early childhood experiences can shape us.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts.