Three Kings Day is magical for the little ones. Although emotion is the main mechanism that the brain has to form indelible memories, the vast majority of adults do not remember the sentimental experiences of that day, nor the equally impactful ones that could have occurred in our remote childhood and preschool age. My granddaughter received as a gift from Three Kings a stroller with which she later took her first steps, but it will not be she, but me, who will remember that day. I know about my own best Christmas gift, a tricycle, not because I remember it, but because my benefactor, the father of my best friend, explained it to me many times, creating a false memory of that event in my imagination. Photos and filming also help form these types of invented retroactive memories.
Science has always wondered why we don't remember the experiences of the first years of life. In 1893, the North American psychologist Carolina Miles, in an article in the American Journal of Psychology dealt for the first time with the inability of adults to remember events in their lives that occurred before the age of three or four, but it was later, in 1935, when Sigmund Freud referred to this forgetfulness as infantile amnesia, attributing it to repression. mental about events of a traumatic psychosexual nature. Something like not wanting to remember bad things that happened to us in those first years.
The phenomenon is universal. That is, it occurs in the vast majority of people, and even in animals, although with individual and group differences in its retroactivity, which can reach up to five or six years in people. Among the most consistent scientific explanations of infantile amnesia are those that suggest that experiences were forgotten because they were not stored with sufficient consistency, as the brain was immature at that time, or those that suggest that increased infantile neurogenesis, that is, the promotion of new neurons in that time could erase them.
A different explanation is one that postulates that what fails is not so much the storage of early experiences itself as the mechanism of their access and evocation; that is, the ability to remember them. In relation to this hypothesis, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University managed to show that infantile amnesia also occurs in adult ratswhich has allowed an investigation into its biological origin: as expected, it goes beyond the daring Freudian psychoanalytic hypotheses.
To do this, the researchers used a learning process called inhibitory avoidance in which the animals inhibit their instinctive behavior, stopping themselves from entering a dark compartment in which they have previously received an electric shock. In this way, they observed that the rats that were only 17 days old quickly forgot having undergone that experience and re-entered the dark compartment, as if they had forgotten that something bad was happening there. But, surprisingly, the researchers also found that this memory could be successfully recovered by a simple subsequent electric shock that, without the need to repeat the original experience, acted as a reminder. In this way they confirmed the hypothesis of the inability to remember as an explanation for childhood amnesia.
Furthermore, the researchers discovered that childhood memories are stored in the dorsal hippocampus of rats, since when the functioning of that part of the brain is pharmacologically prevented, it is no longer possible to recover early acquired memories with reminders. Also, by manipulating chemical molecules involved in the storage of experience (such as the neurotrophic factor BDNF or glutamate neurotransmitter receptors), they were able to close amnesia in 17-day-old rats and make their memory for the traumatic experience highly expressed. time after it has taken place, particularly in animals 24 days old.
Recover childhood memories
From all this we can deduce, in addition to the important role of the mammalian hippocampus in the formation of early childhood memories, that these memories are not lost but stored as latent (and perhaps also labile) traces, which can be later recovered. It is not unreasonable to think, therefore, that humans also preserve memories that occurred before three or five years of life, although modified by later experiences of a similar or complementary nature.
Something different is the relative importance that these memories could have in the lives of adults. Memory, in general, in addition to giving our lives a sense of continuity, is instructive when it comes to remembering not only what interests us, but also what is good and what is bad. Even if childhood memories were of some use to us, biological evolution does not seem to have taken it into account, at least as far as conscious memory is concerned.
Gray matter It is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.
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