It is a source of frustration, along with a disconcerting mystery. Where were the first years of our life? The events we experience during our first three years seem to evaporate from our brains.
This great void in our adult memory was called “infant amnesia” by Sigmund Freud. But where does this early childhood team forecast come from? Was our brain too imitation to encode traces of memory, only rudimentary? Were the thesis traces formed in the brain of the small child that we once went, only to be deleted due to the lack of reinforcement? Or persist in a latent state, inaccessible to remember? The answer is not simple, since studying the children’s brain raises a technical challenge.
An American team has increased to this challenge. His work, published in the magazine Science On March 21, he reveals a surprise. At the age of 12, the human hippocampus seems able to encode “episodic” rudimentary memories, the bases of our autobiographical memory, long before the age of the first memories that we can count as adults.
The researchers, coordinated by Nicholas Turk-Browne of Yale University, achieved a small feat: place 26 small children, from 4.2 months to 24.9 months, in the tunnel of a magnetic resonance machine (MRI) and the tallity.
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