Why we can't remember being born

I was born one night in the winter of 1983, in a small city in the southwest of Britain. My parents were havering about how to spell my name so they asked the woman in the next bed over to help them decide, and that’s how I ended up Clare rather than Claire or Clair.

I know these things about my birth and yet I have no recollection of the events themselves. Probably the same is true for you, though with a different set of facts.

So… has the memory of my birth disappeared? Or was it never there in the first place?

Well… I may not have the memory of the event, but I do have the knowledge of how my birth happened, which I gathered from my parents. This tells us something important about how memory functions, which is that there’s a division between recollection of knowledge (called semantic memory) and recollection of experience (called episodic memory or autobiographical memory). Episodic and autobiographical memory are subtly different - episodic memory tells us “this event happened”, while autobiographical memory tells us “this event happened and it is important to my sense of self”.

To understand the distinction between episodic and autobiographical, consider the things that you have done recently. Here are some of mine: I watered some plants, I made a shopping list, I drank a cup of tea. All of these are episodic memories. Now think about this: if you recounted your life story to someone, would all or even any of the events make an appearance? None of the ones in my list would. My life story is much more likely to contain memories like how I discovered I had hypermobile joints by dislocating my kneecap and the summer I met my best friend and I lived in Amsterdam for a while and that’s why I know some Dutch – these are all important to my identity, just like the circumstances of my birth, and that importance is what makes them autobiographical.

A warning

As always, it’s important to remember the WEIRD problem: most of what we know about psychology, and therefore most of what we know about our memories of childhood, is based on research with whoever happens to be available to researchers to test, which is often university students. University students are a very specific subsection of society: they’re by definition highly educated and they tend to be young adults, because that’s a common time in life to attend university. There are also some more concerning ways in which university students are unrepresentative of the global population due to things like racism, sexism and classism in admissions processes and in the wider culture of university.

Later in this blog it will become clear that individual and cultural context is important in determining what we remember about our childhoods – so be careful generalising from your own experience and from this research because it may not be how everyone thinks and behaves.

Childhood amnesia

It’s not just my birth that’s disappeared from my memory. I can’t remember lot of events from my childhood that I know must have happened – meeting my aunts, my first day at school, the holiday we went on to the Isles of Scilly.

At least in Western societies, this lack of early childhood memories – called childhood amnesia - is very common. As adults, we typically have almost no autobiographical memories from birth to two years old. The ‘density’ of autobiographical memories gradually increases till we’re around eight or ten and then levels off, so it’s possible that there are actually two stages to childhood amnesia: an early one where we forget almost everything, and a later one where we forget lots but less than we did before.

It’s not as though we spend the first two years of our lives unable to remember anything – but it does seem likely that we start out not very good at forming memories and gradually improve. Long-term access to memories probably increases across our early childhoods because:

We get faster at storing information, so memories become richer in detail as they are laid down.
We get better at retaining memories once we have them.
We get better at using retrieval cues (things that spark a memory) and therefore there are more chances to encounter things that remind us of a memory.

What is your earliest memory?

As I’ve written about before, it’s possible to form false memories from other people telling us that an event happened. The combination of childhood amnesia and something like a family member reminiscing about an event that happened to us can therefore cause some problems for research on childhood memories – often we can’t be sure whether we really remember something, whether have constructed a memory from something that someone else has said, or whether we have embellished an existing memory with details that aren’t correct. Even if we have remembered an event correctly, there’s no guarantee that we’ve also accurately remembered when it happened.

There are other ways that memory can be modified, which we can see in research on people’s earliest memories. For example, someone who has recently been reminded about personal or public events in the first few years of their life will tend to recall first memories from earlier in life than those who haven’t been reminded – but we don’t know whether that’s because they really have earlier memories, or if they have dated the memories as being earlier. Similarly, if you read an example earliest memory from someone else that’s from when they were 1-2 years old, you’ll probably report an earlier age for your first memory than someone who’s read an example earliest memory from someone who says they were 5-6 years old.

On top of this, research indicates that there are individual differences in how old our earliest memories are, based on factors including your language skills, your understanding of emotion, what kind of family structure you grew up in (for example, nuclear or extended), and how much your parents reminisce about earlier events. The last of these also interacts with other aspects of your identity like cultural and gender expectations about what your memory “should” be like – for example, in Western countries women are often the keepers of family history and may be expected to have better memories for personal events than people of other genders (though whether this is actually the case for a given person will vary depending on things like how relevant they feel their gender is to an experiment about memory).

So, it’s important to bear in mind that people who take part in studies about childhood amnesia might not have totally reliable memories of their own childhoods, may have very variable reactions to being asked about memory depending on their identity and upbringing, and may react to the – frankly very strange – experience of taking part in a psychology study in ways that can alter results. Be cautious about taking research on childhood memory at face value!

Now we’ve got some context, let’s look at three theories that have been put forward to explain childhood amnesia...

Explanation 1: It takes a while for us to develop the ability to make autobiographical memories

As we saw earlier, our capacity to make autobiographical memories can slowly improve over the course of our childhoods. It’s not clear whether we start out with no autobiographical memory at all or one that isn’t yet very developed, but in either case our memories will be shaped by what is around us – in terms of both what we remember and how we remember. In general, cultures are organised around objects and ideas that children who grow up in them are expected to learn in order to become members of those cultures. Different cultures are organised around different things, and it might be the case that individual autobiographical memory is one of those cultural ideas, rather than a universal feature of humans. It may even be that earlier in history, no culture contained the idea of individual autobiographical memory, instead having a more communal and contextual idea of memory (for example, memory as “the story of this place” rather than “the story of me”). To be clear, this doesn’t mean that autobiographical memory is more advanced than other kinds of memory, or vice versa, just that different types of memory could be considered important parts of cultures in different times and places.

So, if there was a point in human history when autobiographical memory didn’t exist, what changed so that it did? One possibility is in the language that we use to share our thoughts, emotions and memories with others – we know that the level of detail in a parent reminiscing with their children can influence the level of detail in the child’s autobiographical memories, so perhaps it’s about slow changes in the way people within cultures talked about memory that eventually became more widespread. If this is the case, then being able to use language in a certain way (and having a grasp of some other concepts like time) might be a necessary condition of having autobiographical memory. When and how the culture you belong to expects you to develop a sense of self, and whether change or continuity is considered more important, may also play a role. Since we’re not born with knowledge of language or culture, we are also born without the ability to create those kinds of memory and later learn to do so - if it’s something that our culture expects us to do.

Explanation 2: Something is preventing us from getting at early episodic memories

What if we form memories right from birth, but then can’t get at them later? Theories of this sort often come back to language: potentially, we form very different kinds of memory before and after we use language, so perhaps learning language locks away earlier memories for good. Similarly, our sense of self is very different at different points in our lives, so we might have a hard time recalling memories that belong to ‘earlier selves’.

On a neurological level, it’s been suggested that the enormous amount of growth and change that our brains go through in childhood might ‘overwrite’ earlier memories as new and different connections form. This might actually be helpful – generally, we don’t need to recall how we learned something like a word, just that we learned it, so we can discard the context and keep the knowledge - but it would mean that we don’t remember lots of detail about the events of our early lives.

Explanation 3: Why not both?

There’s actually no reason why we couldn’t experience a combination of “needing to develop the ability to make autobiographical memories” and “being unable to access some memories at a later age”. We know that autobiographical memory forms gradually, and that we forget more of our childhoods than we do of our adulthoods: as young humans, perhaps we make less enduring autobiographical memories and are not so good at remembering them as we will be later in life. However, if this is the case it’s clearly specific to autobiographical memories – we must have excellent memories in other ways from a very young age because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to recognise our caregivers or learn to walk or (as my nephew did as a toddler) remember that crying about something often equals biscuit.

So, where did the memory of my birth go? There are lots of possibilities, and I don’t have a definitive answer even though a lot of the research in this area and in psychology in general has been done on people like me (white, Western, educated, living in an industrialised nation, relatively well-off, actually interested in taking part in an experiment, and so on). And though childhood memory is clearly heavily affected by individual experiences, we know much, much less about what it is like for other groups of people. That is deeply unfair, especially when we consider that a lot of psychology research is funded by the public in one way or another. Psychologists, consider this a plea to make your research more inclusive.

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