Why can’t you remember being born, learning to walk or saying your first words? What scientists know about ‘infantile amnesia’ [The Conversation, June 2022]

Title:

Why can’t you remember being born, learning to walk or saying your first words? What scientists know about ‘infantile amnesia’

 

Author:

Vanessa LoBue 

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University - Newark

 

Published:

The Conversation, 8 June 2022

https://theconversation.com/why-cant-you-remember-being-born-learning-to-walk-or-saying-your-first-words-what-scientists-know-about-infantile-amnesia-182736

 

From the article:

Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time when they got hurt or upset; some cite the day their younger sibling was born.  

 

Despite vast differences in the details, these memories do have a couple of things in common: They’re all autobiographical, or memories of significant experiences in a person’s life, and they typically didn’t happen before the age of 2 or 3. In fact, most people can’t remember events from the first few years of their lives – a phenomenon researchers have dubbed infantile amnesia. But why can’t we remember the things that happened to us when we were infants? Does memory start to work only at a certain age?

Enhance Your Memory with this Ancient Greek Memorization Technique [Ancient Origins, 2021]

Title:

Enhance Your Memory with this Ancient Greek Memorization Technique

Published:

Ancient Origins, 30 September 2021

https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-europe/ancient-greek-memorization-technique-008047

From the article:

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the personification of memory. In ancient Greece, prior to being written down, stories were recounted orally. Due to that, memory played an important part in the life of an ancient Greek storyteller. Thus, it is not too surprising that the concept of memory was given the form of the goddess Mnemosyne. In addition, the Greeks also invented ways to improve their memories. One of these was the Method of Loci, which was used for a long time in the Western world.