Why can’t I remember being a baby?

And if babies forget their earliest experiences, do they still matter? This episode is a collaboration with Vox's Explain It to Me podcast Guests: Kristin Ohlson, writer; Tristan Yates, cognitive psychologist at Columbia University; Dana Suskind, professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:11Speaker 02

  What's your earliest memory?

• 1:14Speaker 03

  I have this super specific memory of looking at this wall that divided my parents' living room and their kitchen, and I had a crayon in my hand. And my mom stepped away for just like a couple of seconds. And you know, that urge just overcame me and I started drawing circles on the wall. And my mom must have heard me doing something after she stepped away because she ran back into the room and she goes, oh my God, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. My earliest memory is being in a backpack carrier. I think on my mom's back, or honestly, maybe my dad's. I don't remember that part, but we grew up in a very outdoorsy family, as far I remember.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Honestly, just kind of like bouncing around up high and we're like in nature. My mom was trying to get us to eat clementines. I did not want that clementine. And I just kept peeling it and handing the pieces to my sister, my older sister, and just giggling my head off, thinking that I was getting one over my mom by handing these clementine pieces to my sister. My mom putting my cat Sunshine into my arms and him crawling up on my shoulders.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  Walking on a blanket in the yard and under the blanket, there is a bee's nest. I stepped on a bee stinger.

• 2:34Speaker 05

  That was one weird memory that I don't know if it was a dream that I had, but it was like I was surrounded by a world, this gray or dark black and purply almost goo. Think about like really dark lasagna. I don't know how to describe it other than it was like, yeah, it was so weird. Yeah, it was like floating in part of this world or something.

• 3:02Speaker 06

  I had this memory of being terrified when I was little because two of my siblings had tried to swim across this lake. It wasn't a really huge lake. And I have this memory of my mother standing on the beach, you know, the wind whipping her hair and her jacket, calling into the wind with my siblings out in the lake and the dam, you know, looming in the distance.

• 3:30Speaker 06

  But none of these memories were true.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  A few years back, Kristin Olsen had a kind of unsettling experience. She'd taken a trip with her family back to the cabin where they used to spend their summers when she was little.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  And as I got out of the car and started walking around the cabin, I realized you couldn't see the dam from the house. It was nowhere near the house. And so there were all these things that were just false memories. I realized later, you know, that whole image that I had of my mother standing on the beach, calling, that looked an awful lot like my memory of Auntie M in The Wizard of Oz with Auntie M calling into the tornado, trying to get Dorothy to come back.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Kristin got so interested in memory that she ended up writing an article for Eon Magazine.

• 4:19Speaker 06

  I learned that it's super slippery. You know, it's kind of quirky and weird what manages to lodge in somebody's mind.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  How do you feel about all of this stuff that you don't remember or either remember incorrectly? Like, is the memory necessary for the time to be important?

• 4:37Speaker 06

  You know, one of the scientists that I talked to, I asked her that. I said, well, you know, if something happens in our past and it's like a tree falling in the forest that nobody's around to see, does it really matter? Does it really matter if it happened if we can't really remember it? And she, she said, you might not have the specific memory of what happened, but you have sort of a general feeling about being happy and being loved. And, and so I kind of feel like, you know, even if I can't remember specific moments that I had with my family when it was younger and my siblings were still living at home

• 5:15Speaker 06

  and we were all doing things together, that I still carry that impression of their love and their fun, the fun that they brought into my life and the fun that I guess I brought into their life. I still carry that impression very strongly.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  So after all of this, what is the thing you still want to find out? Like, what's the mystery of memory you want to know the answer to?

• 5:42Speaker 06

  Oh, I guess I'm just fascinated by what remains. Even though we can't remember a narrative and an incident, we have an impression that remains of those early things that happened to us. Why don't we remember things from our deep past? And even if we don't, what kind of impression have they made on us? That tapestry of our early life, you know, it's sort of fascinating to know how much of it persists, even if we can't get at it.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  I'm not really sure about my earliest memory. Maybe something with a stroller near a lawn. I think mittens might have been involved somehow. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether it's real. And recently, I've been thinking about this question a lot for a totally different reason.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  My wife and I just had our first kid. And when I'm sitting with him or making up games, I wonder, is he going to remember any of this? And does it matter?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Today on Unexplainable, a collaboration with Vox's call-in show, Explain It To Me. We're going to ask, why can't I remember being a baby? And what does that mean for how I should think about being a father?

• 7:22Speaker 07

  I first got into psychology because of an interest of who we are as people and how we came to be. And that, you know, starts with our earliest moments in childhood.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Kristin Yates is a cognitive psychologist at Columbia University.

• 7:37Speaker 07

  It's fascinating that, you know, the early life is so foundational to who we are and who we become, and yet we can't recall specifically what happened in our earliest days.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  So how have scientists traditionally understood why we don't remember being a baby?

• 7:54Speaker 07

  There's been a few, you know, different theories. So the one idea that we wanted to tackle in our research is that the brain system that's really important for specific memories is just not yet ready to form those specific memories in infancy. So this is a brain region called the hippocampus, and it takes a really long time to develop. So if you look at the structure of this brain region, it continues to develop well into adolescence. So the thought was, it's just not yet able to store the specific memories that we would have in adulthood. And instead, we're having more kind of general memories in early infancy.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so yeah, you did this study recently on this hypothesis. What'd you do? What'd you find?

• 8:41Speaker 07

  So we, in the lab of Nick Turk Brown at Yale, did an awake infant FMRI study. So that's using the MRI machine that you would normally do at a doctor's office, but kind of tweaking the parameters so we can look at brain function. People aren't doing this type of research because it's so hard to get a baby inside an MRI machine to sit still long enough for us to get those images.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I just flew with my seven-month-old to Chicago and, and that was extremely difficult. Like, how do you get a baby to sit still in an MRI?

• 9:17Speaker 07

  So we use the same MRI machine that you would use at a doctor's office. We just make it really child-friendly.

• 9:26Speaker 07

  So we have toys in the room. We use what's called a vacuum pillow to form like a baby taco around the baby. So they kind of move a little bit less.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Baby taco.

• 9:37Speaker 07

  Yeah. And then one big innovation is we show pictures or movies to the babies right in front of them, right on top of a panoramic scene inside the MRI. So it's like baby IMAX.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Baby IMAX.

• 9:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Does that actually sound, that sounds much better than the MRIs that I have gotten done in my life.

• 10:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Okay, so you got the babies in the baby IMAX, in the baby taco. And then what are you, what are you looking at?

• 10:10Speaker 07

  So for the, the particular study that we published last year on memory, we showed babies different images. And so the idea is that we wanted to know if they would look differently when they saw an image a second time. We show them an image, another image, another image, another image. And then that first image we showed, let's say it was a waterfall. We're going to show it alongside a new image. And so now they, they have something that they've seen before alongside something they've never seen before. So if they have a memory for having seen the waterfall, then we think that they're going to look differently between these two images.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Like staring longer or something like that?

• 10:49Speaker 07

  Exactly. So, so based on prior work, we think that they should stare longer at the thing that they've seen before.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 10:55Speaker 07

  And so that would tell us that they remember, you know, having seen it the first time. And so then we can ask, what was the brain doing the first time they saw that waterfall? Was the brain doing something that enabled them to later look differently? Is the brain forming that memory that later changes their looking behavior? And so that's where we found that the hippocampus was active during the initial viewing of the waterfall that they would later indicate to us that they remembered.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  You basically found that they did remember because they stared longer at the images they'd already seen. And you're getting this additional layer of evidence showing that the hippocampus, the part of the brain that, you know, researchers for a while thought maybe was not developed enough to function in early childhood. You're saying it is functioning. So does that mean the babies are forming memories?

• 11:50Speaker 07

  We are showing that they're able to form some memories. 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.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  So what do we think happens to those memories? If we think they're being formed, do they just get wiped? What's going on?

• 12:14Speaker 07

  We're born with most of our neurons that we'll have for the rest of our life. And a lot of development is pruning away connections between neurons. And what is interesting is the hippocampus is one brain region where neurogenesis or the formation of new neurons happens continuously. And it happens a lot in early infancy. It's as if, you know, you're in a forest and it becomes overgrown. And so you can't reach where you were before.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't find your way through it.

• 12:43Speaker 07

  Exactly, exactly.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  So it's like because babies are learning so much about the world, like object permanence or how to walk or how to speak, they might just not be able to actually remember things because too much is happening.

• 12:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's like a key way that I'm thinking about this is that, you know, what is the point of infancy? To me, you're learning a lot of the general things. You're learning who your parents are, you're learning how to walk, you're learning language, things that co-occur or happen more frequently. A few years ago, our group published work looking at the hippocampus for a different type of memory, something we call statistical learning. That just means that like you remember kind of a sequence of events that happen. So an example in a baby's life might be a bedtime routine. You know, that reoccurring pattern is something that we think babies are really good at.

• 13:41Speaker 07

  And in our previous study, we found that babies as young as three months use the hippocampus for this kind of statistical learning, this, this learning of these patterns. It gets back to this question of like, what is the point of, of infancy? You know, it might be the case that the hippocampus prioritizes learning regularities in the environment, learning patterns. And then after a while, once it's got that foundation, then it can start working towards learning more specific things.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  The idea of your question, what's the point of infancy is so interesting to me because it's as if we have to almost learn how to remember, if that makes sense. It's like we have to learn all these basic skills of how to perceive and get around the world. We have to understand like, I don't know, looking at my kid and seeing him learn that his hands are his hands, you know? Like you have to learn those basic, basic things before maybe you can carve a path through the forest, to use your metaphor.

• 14:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I mean, this is what some of our theories are pointing towards is that, you know, we're building the memory system in early life. In the science of development, we talk about sensitive periods. So you might be aware of the fact that babies and children learn language better than adults. We call childhood a sensitive period for language. And so there are these theories that maybe early life is a sensitive period for learning in general, that, you know, we're building up the system and that it's really responsive to how the environment allows you to kind of form this memory system.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  You know, one thing that, that this brings up for me, especially as the parent of a young child, is, you know, the fact that he probably is not going to have specific memories that last the rest of his life for a couple of years. You know, he'll have some vaguer feelings, I guess, that are not specific memories, like you're calling them. But what does that mean for this period? What does it mean for how much what I do for him matters?

• 15:53Speaker 07

  As a new parent of an also very young child, these are the thoughts that I think about as well. And it's actually what I'm studying in my postdoctoral work here at Columbia is what are parents doing in early life? And how is that shaping their kid's memory and development? I mean, we know, on the one hand, there's infantile amnesia. On the other hand, early experiences matter. If you grow up in, you know, circumstances that are unideal, that can have lasting impacts. And I think it comes down to, you know, this kind of specific versus general thing.

• 16:35Speaker 07

  Like if you are providing daily enrichment and love for your child, they're learning, you know, I am safe, I am loved. These are the things that matter. And so I think that's comforting.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Okay, but really, what should I do? I can love my kid, that's good. But what else should I be focusing on if he's just going to forget everything? I called up someone who studies childhood development to find out, and we'll get to that in a minute.

• 17:22Speaker 01

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• 19:02Speaker 11

  My name is Dana Suskind. I'm a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, and I study early childhood development and the important role that parents and caregivers play.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  You started out, I believe, as a cochlear implant surgeon, and now you're working on childhood development. How did that happen? What's the connection there?

• 19:24Speaker 11

  Yeah. Well, it actually makes a whole lot of sense. So, long ago, when I first started our pediatric cochlear implant program at the University of Chicago, I started implanting cute little kids who all looked like they had the same potential to thrive after implant surgery and found very quickly that I could implant two children who looked very much the same, who had parents who loved them equally with the same technology, but would have very different outcomes with one of them really thriving after surgery in terms of language learning and trajectories, and others, same time out, would barely be able to communicate. And it was sort of that experience and seeing these huge differences in outcomes

• 20:08Speaker 11

  after the same surgery that led me into this incredible world of childhood development and the importance of the early years and the importance of parents.

• 20:20Speaker 11

  Humans come out with brains that are literally only one-third the size of adult brains. That's very different than any other species, and that's why we're basically completely helpless. It's why, you know, the puppy, you know, can start feeding itself pretty quickly and start walking, whereas the human infant is helpless because our brains, in those first three years of life, 85% of the physical brain is built during those periods of time. And a million new neural connections happen every second. And basically, the environmental input, the input from parents and caregivers, you know, every serve and return, every touch, every, you know, gaze, literally is helping shape and strengthen the neural connections

• 21:03Speaker 11

  that happen in our brain. The brain isn't being just built for your child's vocabulary development or their literacy ability. It's building their social brain, their ability to relate and connect to the rest of the world. The relationships and the expectations for relationships are built in those early years.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Tell me if this is maybe an oversimplification, but, you know, I'm a parent of a young son. He's a little over seven months old, and I feel like maybe what I'm doing when I'm raising him is I'm building the structure of his brain, or I'm building like the architecture and all the other stuff, all the specific things are gonna fill in all the rooms of the big building that we're constructing together. But he's not gonna start filling those in with specific ideas or specific memories until later on in his development.

• 21:58Speaker 11

  The analogy you make is exactly right. I think of building the physical brain, sort of like, if you were thinking about through a computer lens, I think about it as building the hardware, the firmware, the memory, the RAM.

• 22:16Speaker 11

  You know, I think of K-12 as really important, but I think of those as software updates.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:23Speaker 11

  But these early years are building that infrastructure. At the end of the day, it's your attachment with him. Being the perfectly imperfect parent, and I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don't grow from perfection and frictionless existence. And so, feel okay every time you misstep, misunderstand, and repair, because that is, for him, building the understanding of, I can be loved by another human who missteps but is able to repair. He is starting to understand how to expect to be treated, and that's why, you know, it's almost like you're

• 23:07Speaker 11

  building the relationship map for him that's going to allow him in the future to have expectations of how he's going to be treated and loved by an imperfect human, you know, building that strong bond, showering him with rich language, you know, that back and forth, looking at him as a conversational partner from day one.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting you brought up AI and friction. What do you think this idea of a more frictionless existence is gonna start meaning for kids?

• 23:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, it's a lot. I mean, I had a book that just came out, actually, on this. It's called Human Raised. And really, that's a lot of the argument of the book, that, you know, children learn from imperfect parenting through friction, through the productive struggle. And we're seeing that friction that we've always looked as like sort of a bug in the system, like, oh, my gosh, I wish this was a more frictionless existence with the other humans in our world. What we're finding is that it is key for relationships development, learning to have relationships, and actually even learning. I mean, that's why writing an essay with an LLM, you don't remember it at the end of the day, because

• 24:21Speaker 11

  there's something about what happens in the brain that we've sort of discounted on the friction side of things. So I actually think in some ways, friction should be the word of the year, and we need to embrace it a little bit more. I mean, we don't need to friction max, but we do need to see the power of the friction, so.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  So it sounds like, you know, even if my son is gonna forget all of this, I mean, maybe on a deep level, it'll stick with him, but, I don't know. Should I still have a nice, big, you know, one-year-old birthday party?

• 24:58Speaker 11

  Heck, yes. Heck, yes, because you're doing it partially for you and the grandparents, let's be clear. And those are wonderful moments that they do remember at some level. My son, who's now 20-something in medical school, he was obsessed with Thomas the Chuchu Train.

• 25:21Speaker 11

  I still have the box of the Thomas the Chuchu Train. So, yes, he may not remember exactly that birthday party and the cake that I worked very hard on, but it's even fun to talk about it now in his 20s and his girlfriend laughing. So, yes, do enjoy every moment. Don't get obsessed like it's got to, everything has to be perfect, but, you know, it's, those are memories for everyone.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, editing from Avishai Artse, fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch, and engineering from Patrick Boyd and Christian Ayala. It originally ran on the Explain It To Me feed. That's Vox's call-in show. So if you want to hear more episodes trying to answer all your questions, check out Explain It To Me wherever you listen. If you have thoughts about Unexplainable, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected], or you can support the show by joining Vox and becoming a member. Just go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time.

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