Why we can't remember things prior to the age of four


Scientists say that most people remember little or nothing about what happened in their lives prior to the age of three or four. I recently discussed this interesting wrinkle in neurobiology with Scott Paulson, my co-host on ScienceTalk, the podcast we produced at wsRadio.com. We were joined by Mary Kenny, an Indiana University journalism student who is interning with the Union-Tribune this summer. Mary is 20. Scott is 52. and Gary is 55. The show transcript has been edited for clarity and continuity.

CLICK HERE to listen to the discussion as a free podcast.

ROBBINS: I have a very distinct memory of my parents bringing my younger sister home from the hospital shortly after she was born. It happened in November 1960, which means I would’ve been five years old. That is the oldest, distinct memory that I have. Apparently, that’s not unusual ... Scott, is that also your experience?

PAULSON: I can remember things from four, maybe some things from three, but, yeah, going back from that…

Gary Robbins at age 5. — Theresa Robbins
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ROBBINS: What do you remember?

PAULSON: Well, I remember being at the New York World’s Fair, and I wasn’t five yet. And I also have some early childhood memories of interactions with my sister and mother, and I also remember a lot of my first time things. I remember my first nightmare, and I think I was only three and I didn’t understand what was real and what wasn’t. And I remember the first time I had orange sherbet. That was at the World’s Fair! And, mostly it’s first time things that I can recall.

ROBBINS: Well, do you recall them clearly? Is there much detail?

PAULSON: Yeah, there is a lot of detail, but only because it was such a big event. I have vague memories of certain pets, certain animals, and certain sounds. Like I remember the first time I heard a real cuckoo bird. And I can remember the first time I saw the Alps. We got off a train, and I couldn’t have been more than three, and I was speechless.

ROBBINS: Well,that makes you a little bit unusual, compared to others. Mary, what about you?

KENNEY: My first memory was at four. And I remember I was in a house, and I have no other memories of this house, apart from what my mom’s told me, that we lived there once. I was sitting on a couch, and the couch was very, very uncomfortable. It was scratchy, it was a terrible couch. And I remember sitting there, and my eyes were closed because my mom told me she had a surprise for me. And as I’m sitting there, suddenly there’s something warm and soft in my lap, and I opened my eyes and there’s a kitten. And this cat lived to be so old, she lived until after I graduated from high school. So my first memory is getting this kitten. I named her Cindy that day. I have no idea why I named her Cindy, I think it’s a dumb name now. Yeah, that’s my first memory. I was four years old.

PAULSON: Gary, isn’t that fascinating how tactile that memory is? So much is about how the couch feels, the warmth of the kitten.

ROBBINS: It is, but do you associate colors with it? Do you remember whether it was day or night, what the cat’s color was, what your mother might have been wearing?

KENNEY: I don’t remember what my mother was wearing, probably because my eyes were closed for most of the memory. I do remember the couch, though. Because I was, I think I was peeking and my head was down so I was looking at the couch. And I remember it was orange – it was such a horrible couch – it was orange and it had a green stripe on it. I don’t remember if it was day or night. And I remember the kitten was grey, but that could also be because that cat lived forever, and that could be a memory from when I was 18.

PAULSON: Colors are a big cue for me too, for what is a false memory. I have a lot of memories that are in black and white and that’s obviously because my early childhood photos are black and white. If my memories are black and white I know that it’s just something more relearned and retold.

ROBBINS: It’s interesting that scientists have learned a great deal about memory over the years, but it’s mostly about memories among teenagers and older. We’re left not knowing why we can’t recall these memories (from earlier years). Some people think it’s because you need to be old enough to have a sense of your own history, of your own self, in order to remember things like that.

ROBBINS: Mary, do you remember anything about acquiring your first words?

KENNEY: No. Not at all. And I know, because my family has told me that I started speaking earlier than I guess was usual for kids, and I acquired language very rapidly.

ROBBINS: I find that to be one of the ironies of this whole thing. Because children, roughly around the age of two years, begin to acquire words very rapidly. It’s not unusual to get ten words during a day or a short period of time. So they’re having, obviously, a lot of experience, and they’re learning a lot really quickly. But they lose that. They’ll keep the words, but not the memory associated with the words.

PAULSON: And in some of these studies, Gary, they relay that not having the vocabulary to relay the memory and your feelings, you’re stuck. Even if you’re able to work with someone in a study and get them to go back, they really can only describe it in the vocabulary that they had at the time. And that’s one of the reasons that, maybe, that there is a little bit of a block there.

Mary Kenney as a baby. — Kenney Family
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KENNEY: I wonder if that’s why a lot of our memories are just flashes that we feel like we can’t describe. It’s just a flash of something.


KENNEY: We have no words for it.

PAULSON: You’re stuck there with the vocabulary that you have, which was limited, or none.

ROBBINS: ‘Flashes’ seems like a very good word here. I was writing down some of my earliest memories, and, as I was doing it, I was having a lot of these little mental flashes. I picked up on a color, a moment, a second of something in time. But not the story associated with it.

PAULSON: Because you weren’t equipped to understand that whole context.

ROBBINS: Exactly. Now, I wonder, if there’s anything to do about it, or whether we should do anything about it. Billions of dollars are spent to try to develop drugs to preserve memory for people who have, say, early onset Alzheimer’s disease, where we’re doing a lot to try to preserve memory. Is there anything we should do to develop drugs to recover memory from when we were, say, one, two, three years old?

PAULSON: Well, probably we shouldn’t. Historically speaking, people who were interested in this field, for instance Freud, feel that those memories disappear just to avoid trauma. And there is such a thing as knowing too much. How many details can you store away? And at one point there has to be some pruning. Even though much of the Freud studies in this area are just anecdotal and not very scientific, there is some validity to thinking, how much trauma do you want to remember?

ROBBINS: That implies that childhood was traumatic for everybody, though.

PAULSON: Well, perhaps it is. Can you imagine just dealing with the world? You know, where a table is actually just a huge forest covering, it’s not a table. And then later as you realize, okay, it’s just a table, it’s not just something in my way that’s huge, keeping me from my bottle.

ROBBINS: I wonder how accurate any of these recovered memories would be. (A Wall Street Journal story I read about this said) an older woman, I think she was in her 80’s, says, “Well, I think I have memories of memories of memories.” So as we get older, we do remember things that are distant, but the accuracy of those memories diminishes?

PAULSON: And that is part of this infantile amnesia study that interests you, this article that prompted all this. You interview two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds, and they have certain memories. But then you revisit these subjects when they’re five and six and they're less and less of those memories. But then after age six, whatever you have, you keep.

ROBBINS: After age six?

PAULSON: Pretty much, and you don’t lose a ton, but these things just sort of slip away.

ROBBINS: Well, I guess I was concerned about the fact that do we accurately remember our lives to a sufficient degree.

KENNEY: I think a lot of that is also the people that surround you. My family is big on storytelling. That’s all they do, they like to gather around and tell stories about one another. So I’m sure that a lot of my memories probably didn’t happen, or are exaggerated in some way, because my family loves to tell stories. But if they hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have nearly as many memories as I claim to have.

ROBBINS: But that’s a really positive thing, Mary, because I read that people who tended to remember more memories belonged to families where the parents talked to the children a lot at a very young age. They would ask the three or four year old, do you remember this? Do you remember that? Which seems like an odd thing to say to a child of that age, but it proved to be an effective way of getting them to encode a memory.

KENNEY: Yeah, and I also noticed in that, the parents, as an event was happening, would talk the child through it, as if they were telling a story as it was happening. That helps them put it into an event, and it’s not just flashes that we were talking about earlier.