MP asks, "How is it possible that no one remembers their own birth, the baby can see and hear and smell and feel... How is it possible that such a traumatic event no one has even a faint memory of what happened?"
In the play "The Seven Beggars" by Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, how many people ask each other about the first memory. The old man in the group says "I also remember that they cut the apple from the branch" meaning the cutting of the umbilical cord and the younger ones bring up memories of the womb or the moment of conception. The action is of course fantastic and symbolic, but the lack of memory from infancy is interesting.
Not only do we have no memories of birth itself, but there is almost no person who can claim any memory of the first two years of life. 24 months in which we learned to walk, get to know mom, dad and grandma and say our first words. The agony of circumcision and the eruption of the first teeth and, like them, the first smile and laugh: everything was erased as if it had never been. From the three years between the ages of 5 and XNUMX, we carry fragmented images and fragments of memories that it is difficult for us to arrange in chronological order or even to determine with certainty which of them is a "real" memory and which is an imagination that we created based on the images and stories of mother. The ability to piece together a life story gradually develops: from isolated images to a chronological sequence in early childhood, then to a sequence of cause-effect relationships and finally to a cohesive story in which the person recognizes recurring motifs and guidelines (thematic coherence). The creation of an autobiography with internal legality is a component in building self-identity and is important for mental health. Difficulty recalling autobiographical memories (General autobiographical memory Associated with disorders such as depression and even an increased risk of suicide.
Forgetting infancy is strange because it is selective. We forget events but remember well what we learned in those lost years. A very large part of our knowledge and understanding of the physical, social and emotional world originates from those years of strength. The first to wonder about the loss of childhood memories was Sigmund Freud who, as usual, blamed our primal instincts for sex and violence that are repressed into unconsciousness and disappear. Modern psychology offers better answers, but even today science does not have a clear answer to the riddle.
It turns out that humans have several types of memory and forgetting childhood concerns a very special type of them. Like Pavlov's unfortunate dog who "remembered" the sound of the bell preceding the meal and began to drool, humans also have conditioning - the basic and primitive type of memory. Another type of implicit memory is the acquisition of skills and preferences without always knowing their origin: even if we forgot the calculus lessons in the third grade, the multiplication table is still kept with us and will not be lost if we forget where and when we were taught to swim. The type of memory unique to humans is the autobiographical memory, that mysterious and unnecessary component of consciousness that allows us to travel through time and re-experience events from the past. This memory is the youngest from an evolutionary point of view, it is unique to a person alone, it appears last in childhood and it is also the first we lose. For the purpose of the journey, of course, a traveler is required to be the "I": a stable character that can be examined from the outside as well and that will be a central player or at least the "photographer" from whose point of view the film is viewed. A key stage that indicates the development of the "I" in a child is The ability to recognize oneself in the mirror.
In order for a child to identify the reflection with himself, he must see himself from the outside, an essential ability to imagine yourself in other times or in different situations. The poetic description in Bialik's "Sfih" of the child studying his reflection in the mirror cannot be autobiographical - as long as there is no "me" there is no memory and it seems that until the age of two there is no "me" that can accumulate memories. Some particularly intelligent animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins share with us the ability to self-identify, which means that they can be attributed an "I", but this I is in a constant present and they cannot drive it back and forth in time. This journey requires, apart from the passenger, also a mental "vehicle of transportation", meaning subjective time that we are aware of and the difference between it and actual, physical time. When we remember the past we are aware that the time in which the imagined event takes place is not the objective time we are in and this awareness develops quite slowly. Animals and like them children live in the present and it seems that this is enough to survive and even learn quite a bit. There are elderly people who, due to illness or an accident, have lost their autobiographical memory, they have no memories of the period before the amnesia, but their knowledge of the world is preserved and, like it, intellectual skills and abilities. There are those who see the late appearance of autobiographical memory as an essential adjustment. The toddler is assigned difficult learning tasks and must first of all generalize: from the first meetings with a "car" it is more important to form general concepts about how it behaves and what is done in it instead of creating a private story about a certain driving experience. In terms of brain development, the time when the first memories appear (a little after the age of two) corresponds to the maturation of the hippocampus, an area of the brain that enables orientation in space and is also responsible for long-term memory. Damage to the hippocampus leads to the loss of autobiographical memory while preserving knowledge and language, that is, to a situation similar to forgetting infancy. The later type of forgetting: the one that obscures the kindergarten years is parallel to another type of amnesia related to the functioning of the frontal lobes whose role in memory is to bring to mind what was coded in the past and to create connections between the pieces of information. People who have been affected by this ability manage to recall facts concerning the past, but they are unable to know when and how they received this information. Our memories from kindergarten are of this type: we remember cake, candles and balloons, but the pictures do not add up to a continuous story of a birthday celebration. Another factor that determines the ability to fix long-term memories is language
To remember an event from the past you need to link sights and sounds to the place, time, people and situation and the more details are linked to a story that has a logical "plot", the more vivid the memory. From the moment we acquire a language we live in it: words are used to bring memories to mind and the child should be able to describe the experience in words so that it is preserved in the memory. Indeed, recall of an event improves when it is mentioned in the toddler's vocabulary at the time of the occurrence. The ability to construct from various details a story that preserves the unity of time, place and plot (the details are linked in a cause and effect relationship) is not complete until about the age of 6 and indeed only from the time of elementary school do we have memories that we are sure of their origin and can place with certainty in the autobiographical context. Although there is a biological basis for forgetting childhood, the age from which first memories are preserved depends greatly on the environment. Children in the Western culture that emphasizes the importance of the individual's personal history remember earlier events than children raised in the Chinese culture where the social context and not the personal memory defines the personality. Maori children, born in New Zealand, a culture that places great importance on remembering the past, are especially good at remembering their infancy and report on average every two and a half years as the age of their first memory compared to three and a half years for European children. The more the parents strengthen the toddler's ability to build a "story" from the experiences he goes through, the stronger the memory. What helps with this is not repeating in the child's ears the details of the event, but the child's participation in creating a story. Monitoring the communication style between mothers and their children revealed that events were engraved in the child's memory when the mother spoke to him and encouraged him with open questions ("What gift did grandma bring?" "What happened to the balloon?") to experience the event as a story.
In "Story of Love and Darkness" Amos Oz, in contrast to Bialik, places the first childhood memory at a time when there is already an "I" and memories: the age of two and a quarter. The memory described with talent and depth is of receiving the first shoe. The isolated image "New shoe, still a bit stiff. I loved its smell so much, a delightful breath of new, shining skin.." It may be permanent as a real memory, but the other parts of the love story with the shoe "the pleasure of the penetration of the foot groping in the bosom of the inner sides of the shoe", the Oedipal description of the mother coaxing the child to wear it and of The dialogue with the parents reflects a mature autobiography that links details and characters to a plot that makes internal sense. Although we do not learn much about Amos Oz the baby from the description, but remembering, as mentioned, is not a retrieval of data from an archive in the brain, but a journey of man through time and all our lives are a reconstruction of the story from the raw materials that memory gives us.
Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, delusional or funny question occur to you? sent to ysorek@gmail.com
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One response
Hello Dr. Yoram Sorek
In your interesting article about childhood memories,
You expressed your opinion like this: circumcision, the unnecessary operation that will not stop.
I asked you, Honorable D. Sorek: How come you don't have the knowledge and experience to make this firm determination?
Beyond the importance of the subject in Judaism, a custom that preserved the identity of the Jewish people for thousands of years,
According to important medical professionals in the world, there is a medical and hygienic importance to circumcision.
So, your honor, a little modesty.