It is hard to understand why we don’t remember anything that happened before age 3. Even some momentous event in a toddler’s life has not left behind a wisp of memories.
Scientist call this phenomenon “infantile amnesia”. Now a new study, which was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, finds 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.
Normally youngsters do seem to remember important events for a short time after they occur, they lose these memories as time goes by.
Scientists have guessed that the hippocampus had something to do with the puzzle, says Dr. Eric Kandel, Kavli professor and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University and senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But nobody really knew the mechanism of what happens in a toddler’s brain.
They did experiment to test the theory and found that it seemed like a case of overload that cause the phenomenon. 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment