JITOTM10: Childhood Amnesia

Do you remember your fifth birthday? Very likely. Your fourth? Quite possibly. Your third? Maybe... but your second? Forget about it. More accurately, you already HAVE forgotten about it, no matter who you are or how good your memory is.

Childhood amnesia is a fascinating, and somewhat perplexing fact of growing up. For reasons that remain unclear, it's really not possible to show definitively that anyone can remember anything accurately if it happened before the age of three or four.

There are plenty of theories to account for this, and they seem to show that there's a connection, at least to the development of language. As Jay puts it, "it may be a software issue," but what's really cool is the experimental "machine" designed to see how that software might function.

Shrinking teddy bears, anyone? Past life regression? Plumbing the memories of chimpanzees? It's all in a week's work on Episode 10 of Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind, Childhood Amnesia.

Behind the curtain

• Who shrank the teddy bears? It was Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hayne.
  
  
• Read highlights of the shrinking teddy bear experiment at Cognitive Daily.
  
  
• If you're hard-core, you might want to read Simcock & Hayne's paper in pdf form.
  
  
• Past-life regression is fascinating, but... read what the skeptics have to say about it.
  
  

Erratum: last week's song of the week was Yael Wand's You Are Not My Life, and not Living in Grey as we mistakenly announced. They're both great songs... our apologies for the error.

We love to hear from you, remember? Tell us your own stories about early memories, past lives, or whatever's on your mind. We're just an email away...

Thanks for listening. We're listening too.

This audio portion of this episode of Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind has now been archived and is no longer available.
You can listen to new episodes as they are published by subscribing to our RSS feed. It's easy and free- just click on the icon below.

Subscribe to Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind.