Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?

Early memories vs. “impossible before 3”

• Many commenters report clear memories from ages 1–3 (moves, house layouts, daycare, siblings’ births, minor events with no photos), some even claim memories from birth or a few months old.
• Others say they remember almost nothing before 4–8, or even lose later years (e.g., due to trauma, alcohol, or medical issues).
• One small group insists memories before ~3 are essentially impossible; others counter that science can say “unlikely” but not definitively rule out individual cases.

Authenticity, confabulation, and verification

• Recurrent theme: we often remember “memories of memories.” Every recall re-encodes and can distort.
• People note strong mismatches when revisiting films or emotionally charged conversations they were sure they recalled accurately.
• Some early memories were later corroborated by parents, relatives, or documents (e.g., house plans, baptism details, random accidents no one ever talked about).
• Still, many concede it’s hard to know whether a memory is from direct experience or reconstructed from stories/photos.

Mechanisms for infantile amnesia

• Hypotheses discussed:
  • Massive brain development and synaptic pruning in early years; “catastrophic interference” where new learning overwrites access paths to old encodings.
  • Memory as a high‑dimensional associative space whose “query encoder” changes so much that old vectors become unreachable.
  • Old memories tied to an obsolete world-model (concepts of self, space, others); later models treat them like “dangling pointers.”
  • Strong role for neuromodulators (e.g., norepinephrine) and arousal in stabilizing memories, which may be lower or different in infants.

Language, symbols, and types of memory

• Debate over whether language is prerequisite for long-term episodic memory.
• Counterexamples offered: animals, pre‑verbal babies recalling events (e.g., freezer pops on the deck), sign‑language babies, pre‑language autobiographies.
• Distinction drawn between:
  • Narrative, verbally accessible memories (what adults usually mean by “remember”), and
  • Nonverbal sensory, motor, and emotional traces (e.g., body posture, smells, existential feelings).

Emotion, trauma, repetition, and what sticks

• Many earliest memories are highly emotional or traumatic (hospitalizations, injuries, fear of drowning at baptism, intense existential dread in the crib).
• Others recall extremely mundane scenes that were repeatedly revisited mentally, essentially self‑imposed spaced repetition.
• Some suggest we retain more than we can consciously access; intoxication, dissociation, or psychedelic states sometimes “unlock” forgotten scenes.

Time, compression, and forgetting

• Several note that time feels logarithmic with age; early years would produce a huge density of snapshots if not heavily filtered or compressed.
• Others argue the brain compresses routines and keeps only schema, not every repetition.
• Comparable to lossy compression or garbage collection: much is stored, but most detail is dropped or made hard to retrieve.

Methodological and cultural points

• Difficulty of “absolutely” testing infant memories is acknowledged; proposed paradigms include long‑lag recall of arbitrary choices (e.g., ball color).
• The linked article’s point about cultural differences in earliest recall ages is mentioned but mostly not explored in detail.

Analogies and side threads

• Frequent computer/AI metaphors: pointers, page swapping, garbage collection, connectionist models, LLM “hallucinations.”
• Brief humorous digression into Rust and memory safety underscores how easily memory topics invite computing analogies.