Brain overload explains missing childhood memories - http://news.ca.msn.com/top-sto...
May 27, 2013
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liked this
"Scientists -- and parents -- have long wondered why we don’t remember anything that happened before age 3. As all parents know, no matter how momentous an event is in a toddler’s life, the memory soon drifts away and within months there isn’t even a wisp of it left.
Now a new study shows that “infantile amnesia” may be due to the rapid growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for filing new experiences into long-term memory. (...)
Frankland suspected that memories actually got filed away into long-term storage, but that the hippocampus lost track of where they’d been stacked during the rapid growth phase that takes place in the first few years of life."
- Amira
"As the hippocampus matures, huge numbers of new neurons come on line and need to be hooked into existing circuits, he says. The most likely scenario is that in all that restructuring, the brain “forgets” where it stored the memories.
As the expansion slows down, the brain can better keep track of where everything is filed away – so long-term memory gets better as youngsters get older. (...)
It seems like a case of overload, she says. The hippocampus has two jobs: to make a sort of tape recording of each event and then to file that tape recording away in long-term storage, with flags that allow the person to retrieve it. With all the energy spent making new neurons, the filing never gets done."
- Amira
I always thought it was because of synaptic pruning but the effect is the same.
- Victor Ganata
Interesting...!!
- Harold Cabezas
It seems so obvious now. Thanks.
- Vezquex