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Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
Question: Why do we have memories? How early on in life do we begin to remember things?? :)
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Simon Albright answered on 17 Mar 2014:
To the first I honesly have no idea. Memory is a very tricky thing and I don’t know how close we are to even knowing how it works. We know which part of the brain is responsible for converting short term into long term memory but I don’t think we know where long term memory is stored.
To the second I think it varies from person to person. I have an awful memory and can only remember small amounts of my childhood but my mum has memories from when she was about 2.
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Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 17 Mar 2014:
Memory is indeed a tricky thing. It also plays tricks on you: you may rather remember stories that you were told about what you did, images you have seen in pictures, rather than things you have experienced yourself. In that sense, I have made some connections between pictures of myself and true (but incomplete) memories that I had.
Memory is also a tricky thing at a biochemical level. Not being a biochemist myself, most of what I will share is hearsay rather than sound explanations. It seems that memory is formed from the exchange between the 2 lobes of the brain, rather than located in either side. That makes it a much more complicated system than your normal brain functions, and could be an explanation as to why you may lose all your memories while keeping your knowledge intact. In that respect, my sister has a high capacity at separating her left and rain brain activities, resulting in a total lack of memory! I have had to tell her a few weeks back which school she went to when because she can simply not remember that on her own!
Memory also has many layers: it is not only what you’ve seen, or heard, but also what you’ve smelled or tasted. Those last two are actually much stronger in humans and trigger much higher emotional responses than the latter. You should try sometimes to smell the roses or taste that favourite dish of yours with your eyes closed, just for the experience!
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Clara Nellist answered on 18 Mar 2014:
Memories are vital for the survival of a species. Especially one as complicated as humans! We learn when we are young from the experienced members of our social group, our parents, grandparents, even siblings, what to eat, what’s dangerous, and this is how we don’t get killed. But it would be terrible if we had to learn the same thing every day, so the brain stores it for later use. This is why we have memories from an evolutionary point of view. The neuroscience point-of-view is a little trickier because I’m not a neuroscientist, so the brain is not something I’m an expert in.
To answer the second part of your question: Children do remember things. In fact they remember from even before they were born. Babies can recognise their mother’s or father’s voice because they heard it every day when they’re in the womb and they’ve remembered it. But they don’t have the complicated structure in the brain yet to store these memories for a long time, so at about the age of 7 we start to lose the memories we had when we were little. It’s only when our brains are older that we are able to store memories for longer, which is why we only really remember events from after a certain age.
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Clara commented on :
Here’s a good quote from an article (“Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade” by Carol Clark) talking about scientists working on childhood memories:
“Young children tend to forget events more rapidly than adults do because they lack the strong neural processes required to bring together all the pieces of information that go into a complex autobiographical memory, she explains. “You have to learn to use a calendar and understand the days of the week and the seasons. You need to encode information about the physical location of the event. And you need development of a sense of self, an understanding that your perspective is different from that of someone else.”
She uses an analogy of pasta draining in a colander to explain the difference between early childhood and adult memories.
“Memories are like orzo,” she says, referring to the rice-grained-sized pasta, “little bits and pieces of neural encoding.”
Young children’s brains are like colanders with large holes trying to retain these little pieces of memory. “As the water rushes out, so do many of the grains of orzo,” Bauer says. “Adults, however, use a fine net instead of a colander for a screen.””