Because I saw something strange, my memory before the age of 3 was deleted?

If I think about it carefully, the first time I had a clear memory of this world was when I was 4 and a half years old. Now I can still clearly remember the scene when I proudly declared to my neighbor aunt that I was already 4 and a half years old. However, everything that happened before that has disappeared from my mind.

Due to individual differences, everyone starts to remember things at different ages, and most people say that their memories begin after the age of 3, so where are the memories before the age of 3? A superstitious saying is that babies can see things that adults cannot see, and in order to forget these strange things, these memories will be deleted after the age of 3. This statement is interesting, but it is obviously not true. The eyes of babies are no different from those of adults in terms of structure or function, so it is impossible for them to see things that adults cannot see.

So is it because the baby's brain is not fully developed that they can't remember anything before the age of 3? Not really. Scientific research shows that infancy is the peak period of human brain power in life.

Whether a brain is strong enough depends on the number of neurons in the brain. The number of neurons in the brain is the largest during infancy. The number of neurons reaches its peak at about 1 year old. Obviously, the brain of an infant is better than that of an adult. It is very strange to say that, having the strongest brain but not leaving any memory, how can this be possible? Scientists have been studying this issue for many years, but still have not come to a final conclusion. There is no conclusion because there is no evidence, but there are still reliable guesses.

Some scientists believe that the loss of memory before the age of 3 is related to the decrease in the number of neurons in the brain.

Infancy is the peak period of the brain, and after that, the number of neurons in the brain will decrease, and the purpose of doing this should be to reduce energy consumption. The brain is the organ that consumes the most energy in the human body, so even if you sit at your desk and listen to a morning class, you will be hungry at noon, and the amount of energy consumed by the human brain is closely related to the number of neurons. At birth, in order to enable us to better perceive the world, the brain prepared enough neurons for us, and then the brain found that the preparation of neurons was a little too sufficient, and the world did not seem that complicated, so the brain began to reduce the number of neurons.

Our memories are stored in the connections between neurons. As the number of neurons decreases, the memories stored in them disappear. In other words, all memories before the age of 3 are "reduced" along with the neurons.

Another view is that memories before the age of 3 have not actually disappeared, they have always been stored deep in our brains, but we have no way to extract them. When we go to the library to find a book, we will first find the category to which the book belongs, and then find the corresponding bookshelf according to the first letter of the first word of the book title, and then it is easy to take out the book we want. But if the books in the library are randomly placed without any clues, then finding a specific book is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The same is true for memory.

There are clues to everything in our memory. Nothing exists independently without any connection to other things, and the connection between these things is called "clues."

Clues can be strong or weak. The stronger the clue, the easier it is to remember. For example, I can recite an article of about 1,000 words after reading it twice, and I can recite it word for word after reading it three times, because each sentence in the article is strongly related to the previous sentence, and each word is also strongly related to the previous word. But if all the words are shuffled, making the connection and clues very weak, then even if you read it 30 times, you will not be able to remember it. When we are infants, we have no concept of everything. Even our parents are just two unidentified objects that move, so we cannot establish clues for anything. Even if these independent memories stay in our brains, we have no way to extract them.

There is also a theory that memories before the age of 3 are actually overwritten.

We actually rely on language to remember anything, so when we want to retrieve a certain memory, we also have to repeat it in our mind using language. For example, when we think "there is an orange in the refrigerator", we will quickly say this sentence in our mind. In this case, when the language we use for memory is covered by other languages, our memory is also covered. Babies cannot speak, but they have their own way of describing things. For example, they will remember apples as "Ya Ya Yi". As the language system is established, baby language is covered by the mother tongue, and the things remembered in baby language are also covered. The same logic applies to adults. We learned English, but we did not forget our mother tongue. However, if we forget how to say our mother tongue after learning English for some reason, then the memory that existed before learning English will probably disappear along with the mother tongue.

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