You Lived Through Your Entire Babyhood and Remember Absolutely None of It

Somewhere out there, there is a version of you who tasted kenkey for the first time and had a very strong opinion about it. There is a version of you who heard your mother's voice and felt something profound. Who cried at specific things, laughed at others, recognised faces, felt warmth and hunger and comfort and fear.

That version of you was a full human being having real experiences. And you cannot remember a single moment of it.

This is not a small thing. You spent at least the first two to three years of your life completely and permanently off the record. Whole years of experience, emotion, learning, and growth, just gone. Scientists call this childhood amnesia, or infantile amnesia. And for over a century, nobody could fully explain it.

A new study published in March 2025 has upended what we thought we knew. And the answer is stranger and more fascinating than anyone expected.

What scientists used to believe

The old explanation was simple: babies cannot form memories because their brains are not developed enough yet. The hippocampus, the brain region responsible for encoding and storing experiences, is still growing during infancy. So the memories just never get made in the first place. Nothing to retrieve because nothing was ever stored.

Tidy. Logical. And apparently, wrong.

What a 2025 study actually found

Researchers at Yale University, led by neuroscientist Nicholas Turk-Browne, managed to do something genuinely difficult: they put awake babies into fMRI brain scanners and watched what happened while those babies were shown images and then shown them again.

This is harder than it sounds. Babies are not known for lying still and following instructions. Getting them comfortable enough to produce useful brain scan data took considerable creativity.

What they found was remarkable. Babies as young as 12 months showed clear hippocampal activity during the first viewing of an image. And crucially, when the same image appeared later, the amount of time the baby spent looking at it corresponded to how active their hippocampus had been the first time. In other words, the brain had encoded the memory. The baby remembered.

The hippocampus in infants is not idle. It is not failing. It is actually doing exactly what a hippocampus is supposed to do: taking in and storing experiences.

So if babies are forming memories, why can adults not access any of them?

It is not that the memories were never made. It is that you cannot get to them.

This is the part that genuinely turns the old understanding on its head. The problem is not encoding. It is retrieval.

Think of it this way. Imagine you stored thousands of files on an old computer using a filing system that no longer exists on your current machine. The files are there. The information is real. But the software you would need to open them is gone. You cannot access what you cannot read.

As the brain develops and the adult memory system takes shape, it builds its filing and retrieval architecture around language, context, narrative, and a coherent sense of self. Baby memories were stored before any of that existed. They were encoded by a brain that had no words, no concept of time, no sense of a continuous "me" who things happen to. When the adult brain tries to look for those memories, it is searching in the wrong format entirely.

Turk-Browne himself described the possibility in terms that sound almost like science fiction: those infant memories may endure in some form into adulthood, simply inaccessible. Somewhere inside the brain of every adult human being, there may be encoded traces of experiences from the first years of life that no current method can retrieve.

Your babyhood might still be in there. You just cannot open the file.

The role of language and the self

There is a related reason why memory begins to stick around the ages of three to four, and it has to do with something most people take entirely for granted: the ability to tell a story about yourself.

Episodic memory, the kind where you can close your eyes and replay a specific experience, what happened, where, who was there, how it felt, depends heavily on having a narrative framework to hang it on. You need to know that there is a "you" at the centre of the story. That the event happened at a particular point in time. That it connects to other things you know.

Babies do not have this yet. And so even as the hippocampus faithfully encodes experiences, there is no story structure to make those experiences retrievable later. No timeline to place them on. No self to remember that they happened to.

This is also why your earliest retrievable memory, whenever it is, tends to have a certain quality to it. It usually involves something that created a strong emotional response, or a moment where you became aware, perhaps for the first time, that something was happening to you specifically. The memory that survives earliest is often the first one that had a story attached to it.

Why this matters beyond curiosity

There is something worth sitting with here. Early childhood, the years before memory kicks in properly, is also the period when the brain is developing fastest. The experiences of those years, warmth, consistency, connection, stress, neglect, fear, are shaping the brain's architecture at its most malleable point.

We covered this in our post on screen time and the developing brain. We touched on it in the trauma post too. The first years of life leave deep marks on how the brain develops, even though the person who lived through them will never consciously remember a single moment.

The love your mother showed you before you had words for love. The comfort of being held when you did not know what comfort was yet. The security or the fear of those very early years. All of it shaped the brain you are using right now to read this sentence. You just cannot access any of it as memory.

That is remarkable. And a little haunting.

The slightly mind-bending implication

Here is the thing that the Yale research leaves hanging in the air, unresolved and genuinely fascinating.

If those memories were encoded, and the evidence suggests some of them were, then they may still exist somewhere in the adult brain. Not accessible. Not retrievable by any current means. But there, in some form, folded into neural structures that formed decades ago and have been part of you ever since.

Scientists are now actively investigating whether there might one day be ways to make some of that inaccessible material reachable. It is not something that exists yet. But the question itself is new. Until March 2025, most researchers believed there was simply nothing there to find.

It turns out the story of your first years is not lost. It is just locked.

Sources: Yates, Turk-Browne et al., "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," Science (March 2025); ScienceDaily, Yale University (March 2025); BrainFacts.org (April 2025); BOLD Science (2025).