[HN Gopher] Brain Scans of Infants Reveal the Moment We Start Ma...
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Brain Scans of Infants Reveal the Moment We Start Making Memories
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-03-21 16:32 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (singularityhub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (singularityhub.com)
| ofrzeta wrote:
| the truth is the scans "offer some intriguing clues" but future
| studies "might shed light on the minimal brain architecture
| needed to support vivid autobiographical memories."
| CarRamrod wrote:
| >Failure of any of these steps [encoding, long-term etching, and
| recall of memory] causes amnesia. So, which steps are responsible
| for the erosion of baby memories?
|
| >Who knows! Kids squirm around too much in MRI machines! But they
| start encoding things around a year, or maybe before, or maybe
| after!
|
| I've been clickbaited
| larodi wrote:
| total clickbait, indeed, author makes no substantial claims of
| any sort.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That is not an accurate summary. The article clearly discusses
| how they limited squirming enough to gather actual data.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| A Very long time average, by the way. 8 minutes is a long
| time for a baby to stay at once: not squirming, not upset,
| not touching mother and awake.
| CarRamrod wrote:
| i'll let you go ahead and explain how they controlled for
| squirming, I'm interested
| Retric wrote:
| They presumably don't have any extra information except
| what's in the article which said they "often squirmed"
| rather than always, which means simply repeating the
| process enough gives times when they didn't.
|
| If you want technique: "infants were _ to reduce movement."
|
| If you missed what was in the blank you might want to
| reread to see what else you missed.
| ziddoap wrote:
| You can find the answer in this link:
|
| https://singularityhub.com/2025/03/20/new-baby-brain-
| scans-r...
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Haha, fair... there's definitely a bit of "science marches
| forward... sort of!" energy here
| locallost wrote:
| I didn't read the article, but when I got kids I was surprised
| they can actually remember for a very long time. Both of my kids
| could at e.g. 3 remember things that happened a year earlier,
| which still surprised me with the younger one. There was however
| a point when the older one could no longer remember some things
| from the past, as if there was a cutoff line to a previous life
| and he had transitioned into a new phase of his life.
| leoedin wrote:
| That's been my observation too. My completely amateur theory is
| that a young child's perception of the world - their ability to
| contextualise what they're looking at - changes so much that
| even if those old memories are still hanging around, they don't
| really make sense any more. It's more like a sliding window
| than a hard cutoff.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I read a similar discussion here on HN before and the
| explanation that its how our brain decodes memories shifting
| over time really hit me. I have a theory that if that in fact
| is the case, then things like journaling would help to retain
| memories in a superior way, since we can review such things
| as our encoding changes and retain it while we can still
| decode. Even if we dont remember it as richly though we will
| still be able to go back to a journal to remember something
| at a bare minimum.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I don't know what the state-of-the-art is, but there was some
| work done that suggested that memories are formed encoded in
| the language you know at the time of formation.
|
| I dug up some of this a while back[1].
|
| My dad, who taught our language to immigrants, mentioned that
| it was known in that field that immigrants who lost their
| native language would also lose a lot of the knowledge they had
| from their home country, like stuff taught at schools.
|
| Thus the memories might be there, one just can't make sense of
| them anymore and so they become forgotten.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37204047
| sideshowb wrote:
| I suspect it goes deeper than language even. We have
| associative memories, right? Given our learning, modelling,
| pigeonholing of the world along with our changing bodies, our
| older selves are unlikely to experience anything close enough
| to what our younger selves experienced to trigger that
| association and recall the memory.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm approaching 70, and my mental model is that the graph
| is getting so big that it's getting harder to navigate
| through it to the memories I'm looking for.
| petemir wrote:
| I'm currently finishing the related work of my PhD thesis
| which deals with memory, so I want to chime in to say that
| some studies [2] have tested this, i.e. that memory recall is
| tied to the linguistic environment in which the learning took
| place.
|
| [0] https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361
|
| [2] Nevertheless, I am usually dubious about multiple
| experiments confirming related things from the same
| author(s).
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think I read here on HN a theory that memories are like
| encoded and as we grow the encoding changes and we forget
| how to access certain memories, this was a theory of
| course. Probably explains people with Dementia (I think?)
| where they randomly remember something and a ton of joy
| rushes them, but they also get very confused as well,
| probably trying to decode memories but they cannot, they
| instead seem to ramble and get angry.
|
| I dont remember the thread but the context I think was
| regarding reading memories digitally somehow.
|
| I am slowly becoming convinced of this the more I hear
| about it. We encode and store memories, we decode them, but
| as we grow and adapt our thinking, we forget. I wonder if
| revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before
| they are lost?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will
| reencode them before they are lost?
|
| There's work that suggests our memories are kinda like
| magnetic core memory[1] in that a read operation is
| destructive and requires a rewrite.
|
| I heard about it in the context of phobia therapy, where
| participants would get some drug that for a short term
| prevented new memories from forming, and then exposing
| them to their phobia. That would trigger a recall but not
| the rewrite thanks to the drug, and after just a couple
| of such sessions their phobia would be gone as there was
| nothing to recall.
|
| I have a couple of distinct but mundane memories from
| early childhood, when I was 1-2 years old. I'm nearing my
| 50s and they're not nearly as vivid now as when I was a
| teenager say, but I've long suspected that the reason I
| can still relive them is because I kept recalling those
| moments.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
| throwanem wrote:
| I've heard of beta blockers, specifically propranolol,
| being used in this way in an experimental PTSD therapy
| protocol, I think back in the 80s or 90s. It didn't seem
| to go anywhere, or at least I stopped hearing about it.
|
| This 2016 metareview suggests the reason is insufficient
| evidence of efficacy, for that and a couple of other
| anxiety indications:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724794/
| petemir wrote:
| > I dont remember the thread but the context I think was
| regarding reading memories digitally somehow.
|
| Funnily enough, apparently the language in the different
| parts of memory process (i.e. encoding+storage+retrieval)
| stems exactly from "digital computer memory" :),
| psychologists in the 40s/50s looked at the development of
| computers and started making analogies with the brain.
|
| > I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will
| reencode them before they are lost?
|
| Well, you have Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve, which shows
| how (in this case, semantic) memory decays with time but,
| with rehearsal, the memory trace (i.e. the neural
| substrate) gets "stronger" ("neurons that wire together
| fire together") and lasts longer in memory.
|
| There are multiple types of "forgetting" (Schacter's "The
| Seven Sins of Memory"), what we usually mean by it is the
| "transience sin", i.e. forgetting because of elapsed
| time. There are several views why it happens, mainly
| storage failure, i.e. that memory trace getting weaker,
| or retrieval failure, being unable to get the right
| "memory cue" to retrieve that memory.
|
| So, probably, if you start associating one particular [0]
| cue with the memory, and training that over time, yes, it
| should be possible to not-lose the memory (I don't think
| it will help with Alzheimer's, though).
|
| The funny thing is that every time you retrieve a memory
| from long-term storage, it gets re-encoded before it goes
| back to storage so, basically, every time you remember
| you are modifying the memory a bit with your current
| biases (another sin!), thus also forgetting :).
|
| [0] And choosing the best cue is already a hard topic, as
| it should be different enough as to not trigger many
| different memories ("cue overload principle" from
| Surprenant and Neath's "principles of memory"), and the
| memory should be not so different enough that you may get
| the risk of other singular memories interfering with it.
| quesera wrote:
| > _every time you retrieve a memory from long-term
| storage, it gets re-encoded before it goes back to
| storage_
|
| I don't know how literal you're being (e.g. read once,
| fully overwrite previous), but it's a good model for
| "reinterpreting past events, with a new perspective".
|
| This may be a tool/strategy for therapists -- I've spent
| zero hours in clinical psychology classes.
|
| But anecdotally, very few people are open to reflecting
| on past events with greater charity for the remembered
| villain of the story. :)
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| The explanation can't be that neat. You can have a stroke
| and lose language and still retain and form memories. Maybe
| there's a subtle effect but that's very different.
| petemir wrote:
| > The explanation can't be that neat.
|
| It's not an absolute, I was telling OP that, in fact,
| there was some research on what he mentioned. Basically,
| that memory is linguistic-context dependent, but as a
| subset of cognitive-context dependent (as well as
| physiological-, affective-, and several types of
| context). This doesn't mean that memories are ONLY linked
| to language, they have lots of different associations,
| things that work as a cue of the memory, this (language)
| is only one of them.
|
| > You can have a stroke and lose language and still
| retain and form memories.
|
| What does it mean to "lose language"? Are you unable to
| speak, to express yourself, to comprehend others, all
| together? What memories do you retain and form? Are you
| talking about semantic memories, or episodic memories?
| How do you measure that those memories are retained and
| formed, if you cannot test the subject due to the
| impossibility of communication?
|
| It's a lot more difficult than absolutist statements.
|
| Edit: typo (thinks->things)
| ben_w wrote:
| Huh. I know very little on this topic, and am pattern-
| matching that to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder how this relates with my anecdotal
| observation that my aging immigrant parents and their
| similarly aged friends increasingly rely and use the language
| of their youth found in the home vs what they learned in
| school and used in their adopted country and while raising
| us. Are old encodings being rediscovered and decoded? Or is
| there a degradation in the power of their decoder and so it
| is slowly going back to a foundational level? Fascinating
| stuff.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| It's like there's a window where early memories seem pretty
| solid, and then suddenly parts of that window just vanish
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| I'd go so far as to liken it to a series of memory wipes
| between age 3 to 4. Memory otherwise appears to function
| quite fine, from day to day and year to year, but then large
| blocks all vanish in rapid succession.
|
| Also interesting, as the article alludes to, is that
| infantile amnesia seems specifically related to episodic
| memory. Motor skills, language, and other learning obviously
| survives.
| rng-concern wrote:
| I might be misremembering, but talking with a friend years ago
| he was talking about a "New Scientist" article that described
| how the brain is flushed/cleaned of most memories at age 4 and
| again at age 7. Or something like that.
|
| I was also surprised with my kids at 4-5 remembering when they
| were 3 or so, but now those memories seem to be completely, or
| near completely gone (at age 10). Perhaps they are just
| remembering the remembrance.
| vel0city wrote:
| I experienced this with my older child. Ever since he could
| begin to talk he seemed to have exceptional memory, seemingly
| recalling things from even before he had words to describe
| them. But somewhere between 3 and 4 it's like there's been some
| culling of memories where a lot of things he would have known
| if you asked him on this third birthday he's seemingly
| forgotten by his 4th.
|
| Not enough to be concerned of any cognitive things, and he
| still otherwise seems to have an excellent memory.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| My child, at 8 or 9, remembered a game I used to play that
| scared her when she was 2 or 3. At 10 she could no longer
| remember the game.
| naikrovek wrote:
| yeah i think enough rewiring and adaptation happens in the
| brain that the older memories are still around but are no
| longer stored in the way the brain needs them to be stored in
| to be accessible at an older age, or something like that. they
| become inaccessible as the brain matures its ability to
| remember effectively.
|
| anyone with kids knows that children remember all kinds of
| things, very, very early. habits, games, routines, schedules,
| things like that. these things are almost never able to be
| recalled later in life but they become part of your psyche
| somehow. for example you will often feel comforted when they
| are repeated later and you feel a bit "off" when they are done
| differently, even as an adult. I think a lot of parenting
| instinct is actually rooted in this kind of memory. The
| inclination to raise your children as you yourself were raised.
| milesrout wrote:
| I can remember very vividly experiences that cannot have happened
| after I turned 2.
|
| It is nice to have something I can show people when this
| infrequently comes up, because I have had people insist that
| these must be false memories, as children cannot form memories
| before 3. Or before 5. Or in one case, before 10? Like what?
| sethammons wrote:
| I've had people full on state as fact children can't recall
| anything before age [4-7]. 10? Wow haha.
|
| My earliest memory is at around 18mo. When I was nearly a
| father myself, I told my mom of my early memory and she
| remembered it too and told me how old I was.
|
| My kids, especially the first, would routinely recall things
| when she was 3 that happened when she was 2 or slightly
| younger. I can recall thinking, "I barely remember that, how
| the heck do you remember that!?" However, she had forgotten
| most of those early early memories a few years later.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| > 18mo
|
| I wonder if it's something to do with the memory being
| reinforced (maybe in surprising ways). E.g one of the
| memories I have from around a similar time is me receiving a
| toy gift (video memory) . It makes for a decent display item
| and has been kept out in one bedroom or the other in every
| house my family lived in since. So I would have seen it every
| now and then throughout my childhood. Perhaps, this
| reinforcement can occur in other, more non-obvious ways in a
| child's brain, offering a similar explanation for your
| experience.
| quesera wrote:
| It's surely true that a memory fragment can be kept alive
| or reinforced by stories or physical tokens (objects,
| photographs). This can be true of a high-fidelity "correct"
| memory as well as of a sketchy incorrect one!
|
| It's also well-established that "memories" can be
| purposefully _created_ by the application of the same
| tools.
| CarRamrod wrote:
| How vivid are we talking, on a scale of 1 to Young Sheldon?
| https://youtu.be/od6Zq5T57R0?&t=26
| dsego wrote:
| But it becomes all so elusive when you grow older. I remember
| remembering moments before I could speak or walk, but I think
| those memories were clearer when I was a little kid (I'm 40
| now). Too bad I didn't write them down back then. Things like
| trying to utter a word but parents giving up before I could
| produce the sound, or using a baby walker (those were a thing
| in the late 80s). I think I have a picture in my mind of a
| scene where my little brother was just born and I was 1 year
| old, but my mother says it couldn't have happened like that, so
| it might be my memory or hers that's playing tricks. But for
| some memories it's also hard for me to determine whether they
| are confabulations from stories I've heard and pictures I've
| seen, or happened later than I think, eg. at age 5-6 instead of
| 2-3.
| dfawcus wrote:
| Likewise. I have a handful of memories from between 18 and 24
| months.
|
| I know they're from that period, as they relate to a place
| where my parents lived at that time.
| sersi wrote:
| My parents moved when I was 3 and an half. I remember
| distinctly our previous house. I described (much later) to my
| parents the layout and the colors of different rooms and they
| were shocked that I could remember.
|
| My 3.5 years old son, still remembers things that happened when
| he was 2 (visit to disney land for example). But I think it's
| maybe a bit different nowadays because we have a lot more
| photos that might help him form and recall his memories
| compared to when I was a child in the 80s.
| vel0city wrote:
| Nearly all my memories I have from when I was 2-3 years old
| were reinforced by having photos from around the time that I
| looked at as I grew up. Like I remember painting cabinets
| with my dad as a toddler as they prepared the house to move,
| and I have photos of the kitchen before the cabinets were
| painted. I have memories of the move, and I have photos
| related to the move as well.
|
| I remember being frustrated in a 4th of July bike parade as a
| small child, as I had lots of long ribbons off the handlebars
| which I kept getting tangled up in on the bike with training
| wheels. We had a photo of me on the bike in that parade. I
| probably couldn't tell you anything else about that parade,
| but I do remember how annoying those ribbons getting wrapped
| around me and the sweat and heat of the day.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My daughter remembered the names of all her daycare friends not
| long after turning one. They always took their shoes off, and
| she would tell the adults whose shoe it was immediately. At 2
| she would say things like "I fell I got booboo" referring to
| having fallen at Daycare during playtime. Its really funny
| because she can recollect some things but others like what you
| just told her are completely alien. I wonder if it has to do
| moreso with physical events being easier for her to describe vs
| trying to summarize my grown up words so she can relay them
| back. As she gets older repeating more complex sentences and
| fully understanding them will be easier for her to store.
|
| I wonder if this is why smell helps to reactivate memories,
| your ability to recollect smells is probably the more
| consistent way to retain memories.
| jajko wrote:
| Yeah I don't have a lot of early childhood memories that
| probably aren't just re-creation of things I see in old photos,
| but one memory stands out - my late uncle leaning over stroller
| I was in, me getting properly scared of his mustache and
| starting crying.
|
| I mean stroller where infants lie flat down and have this
| canopy above head, sorry don't know exact english term. Can't
| be more than 1 year in any normal case, I was a tall child.
|
| But then again who knows, maybe its a memory of a dream
| experienced later. Our mind is a weird place, and
| subconsciousness is making various cleaning activities and
| modifications to make us feel better about ourselves (something
| I try to fight consciously to remember things as they truly
| were with all the warts and all, but it ain't easy).
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >But then again who knows, maybe its a memory of a dream
| experienced late
|
| Or that sounds like the kind of event your uncle would tell
| you about when you were a few years older. Probably every
| time he saw you. I know I have several childhood stories I've
| heard so many times they feel like memories.
| bildung wrote:
| There's research that has shown that stress in the early years
| of life delays development of the hippocampus - and without
| sufficiently developed hippocampus you can't have these kinds
| of memories.
|
| So the generalization ("all kids") is wrong, but _some_ people,
| being exposed to toxins or stress sources (fetal alcohol
| syndrome, cigarettes, lead, premature birth, asthma, ...), can
| really only develop memories later. 10 years is a bit much,
| though...
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Curious to see if future studies tie this in with memory
| consolidation during sleep
| dwighttk wrote:
| Brain scans are like those scientists putting together the
| iguanodon skeleton... we may eventually get to a likely story but
| we're gonna spend a lot of time on to be discredited
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I have two early childhood memories.
|
| I remember a brief moment standing in my crib during the morning.
| And a dream I had in Pre-K where my pre -k teacher was the moon
| above me at night. Pretty early memory?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People might call BS on this, but I can recall the full layout
| of the home I lived in until I was 2 (to the shock of my family
| when I laid it all out). I have a memory from my first birthday
| as well. There are many people who have legitimate memories
| from very early on.
| bildung wrote:
| "The early years are chaotic. The brain undergoes extensive
| rewiring. This makes it a difficult to form lasting memories."
|
| That is reduced too much from the actual state of research,
| presumably for the sake of accessibility. We obviously already
| learn before the hippocampus starts to really develop (18-24
| months). But what episodic memory means is that the learned
| things have no episodic context, i.e. they are learned and
| applied more broadly, not just in the situation where they were
| learned in the first place. Learning in the early years isn't
| "chaotic", it is just very generalized.
| drooby wrote:
| Something must be slightly unusual about me.. because I have
| retained some very early memories..
|
| I have confirmed with my parents the placement and orientation of
| my crib. I can tell you the exact process that my parents
| performed to change my diaper. I remember being bathed in my tub
| with my toys.. list goes on. These are visual memories, I can see
| them right now. I'm nearly certain they are real.. it's possible
| my brain has made some up, but I've confirmed enough with my
| parents that I feel confident that they are real.
|
| I swear I remember waking up in the middle of the night once in
| my crib.. heart beating out of my chest.. I was really scared of
| something.. and I just remember this pure consciousness ..
| staring up into the darkness. Same consciousness I have now.
| deepsun wrote:
| A lot of early memories are induced, e.g. parents told you a
| story, and your brain "fills it up", so you think it's your own
| memory, but it's actually more of imagination. Or you imagined
| where the crib were, and parents confirmed, so you think you
| remembered.
|
| Watching crime witness testimonies reveals how much we actually
| imagine, not remember.
| netsharc wrote:
| I've wondered whether one can train a child to remember
| things by recalling things that happened to them repeatedly,
| but I guess it will create such an induction. And they don't
| even have language to understand "Remember Monday, 2 days
| ago, grandma visited.".
|
| And perhaps under a certain age, the brain really has no
| programming to store anything as memories...
| dhosek wrote:
| It's actually remarkably easy to induce false memories in
| people. There's substantial research on this.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>I have confirmed with my parents the placement and
| orientation of my crib
|
| Is there _any_ way you have seen those things in some of the
| old family pictures? Because I know I am definitely guilty of
| that, I can _swear_ I remember bits from my family 's trip to
| Pompeii when I Was 2 years old, not much but little bits here
| and there, and only when I was older I noticed that what I
| remember is suspiciously similar to what my mum has in the
| family album from that trip(which I most likely would have seen
| as a child too).
|
| In fact I worry about it with my own son now, I don't think
| he'll be able to tell the difference between his own memories
| and things he has seen in 1000s of pictures and videos I have
| been taking since he was born.
| davidgay wrote:
| > Because I know I am definitely guilty of that, I can swear
| I remember bits from my family's trip to Pompeii when I Was 2
| years old, not much but little bits here and there, and only
| when I was older I noticed that what I remember is
| suspiciously similar to what my mum has in the family album
| from that trip(which I most likely would have seen as a child
| too).
|
| Maybe in a sense, both are true? When you saw the photos as a
| child, you did remember them then, but that's what reinforced
| those memories enough that you now remember them?
|
| Similar to 'remembering that you remembered X', even though
| you don't directly remember X now.
| mushroomba wrote:
| Other commenters are trying to gaslight you into believing this
| isn't possible, but I also have a memory from before I could
| walk.
|
| I was lying on the floor, contemplating a toy that had been
| hung above my head, when someone who was not one of my parents
| came to pick me up.
|
| Years later, I told my mother about this. She then searched
| through the family film archive, and found the moment in
| question. The person who picked me up was my uncle.
|
| This was not a film we had watched before, it came about
| because I was discussing with my mother our earliest memories.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| You have one memory of all the time before you could walk,
| and it just so happens to have been caught on film? You don't
| find that suspicious?
| marliechiller wrote:
| Seems farfetched to believe that you happened to have the
| exact moment you discuss on video
| drooby wrote:
| Haha yeah, I am used to the skepticism.. I've thought about
| this a lot. There are so many things I've confirmed that
| aren't in photographs or stories I've been told that it seems
| to be real.
|
| I also have aphantasia, I have wondered if my lack of
| visualization has somehow empowered my long-term memory. I
| rely on memory for "visualizing" things.
| verbify wrote:
| I'm the opposite. I started making memories very late - I have
| only the vaguest memories of primary school. I think I formed
| long-term memories at around 10 years old.
| hereme888 wrote:
| This supports the observations made by Dr. Piotr Wozniak,
| inventor of spaced-repetition algorithms, from anonymous data
| gathered from users of all ages: children up to around age 7 have
| poorer-memory than adults because their brains are focused on
| rewiring.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| oh boy! another brain imaging story. I wonder if they can also
| identify the moment trout start making memories?
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