AI Summary
5 min readNoam Hassenfeld, sitting in as host of Today, Explained, has a seven-month-old son. He spends hours with him making up games and wonders a question that haunts many new parents: will the baby remember any of this? And if he won’t, does any of it matter? The episode sets out to answer why we can’t remember being babies—and what that means for how we should raise them.
The mystery of infantile amnesia
Most adults cannot recall anything that happened before age two or three, a phenomenon called infantile amnesia. The episode opens with listeners sharing their earliest memories: drawing on a wall with a crayon, riding in a backpack carrier, refusing a clementine. But one contributor, Kristin Olson, describes a more unsettling experience. She had a vivid memory of standing at a lake with her mother calling into the wind, a dam looming in the distance. Years later, she returned to the cabin where her family spent summers and realized the dam was nowhere near the house. Her memory was a composite, stitched together from a scene in The Wizard of Oz. The episode uses this to illustrate how slippery early memory can be—and to frame the central question.
The hippocampus is working earlier than we thought
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:55) **The Mystery of Earliest Memories** - The episode opens with listeners sharing vivid but potentially false earliest memories, setting up the central question of why we can't remember being a baby.
- 2 (10:08) **The Hippocampus Hypothesis** - Cognitive psychologist Kristen Yates explains the leading theory that the hippocampus, the brain's memory center, might be too underdeveloped in infancy to form lasting specific memories.
- 3 (11:25) **The Baby fMRI Study** - Yates walks through her groundbreaking awake infant fMRI study at Yale, designed to test whether baby brains can actually form memories.
- 4 (14:12) **Babies Do Form Memories** - The study found that the hippocampus is active and functional in infants, meaning they are forming specific memories, at least over short periods.
- 5 (14:53) **The Overgrown Forest Theory** - If babies can form memories, what happens to them? Yates explains the "neurogenesis" theory, where rapid new neuron growth in the infant hippocampus may overwrite or obscure older memories.
- 6 (16:01) **Statistical Learning vs. Specific Memory** - Yates distinguishes between the kind of memories babies *do* keep (patterns and regularities) and the kind they lose (specific episodes).
- 7 (18:33) **What This Means for Parenting** - The host asks the practical question: if his son won't remember specific moments, does his parenting in these early years even matter?
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Show Notes
Even if we have little to no memory of our first few years, our earliest experiences still matter.
This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Avishay Artsy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld.
A baby crawling on the floor. Photo via Getty Images.
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