Your Brain
Your Brain Recorded Being a Baby. Then It Hid the Tape.
· 7:41
Why can’t you remember being a baby? You learned to walk, to talk, to recognize the faces you loved most - and then the whole thing vanished. Most of us cannot recall a single real moment from before age three. For over a hundred years, science had a tidy answer: a baby’s brain was simply too undeveloped to record anything. In 2025, that answer fell apart.
A team at Yale slid wide-awake babies into an MRI scanner and watched the hippocampus, the brain’s memory-maker, light up as it formed memories, from as early as age one (Yates and Turk-Browne, Science, 2025). The memories were being made all along. So where do they go?
This is the strange science of infantile amnesia: the quiet cliff that swallows your earliest years around age seven (Bauer and Larkina, 2014), why Freud’s repression idea was wrong, the mouse experiment where a pulse of light switched a lost memory back on (Guskjolen and Frankland, 2018), and why children who hear the most family stories remember the furthest back (MacDonald and Hayne, 2000). You were awake for all of it. You just can’t find the receipts - and they may never have been thrown away.
Chapters
- 00:00 The blank wall
- 00:24 You were a genius (infantile amnesia)
- 00:49 The 100-year answer just flipped
- 01:22 What you lose, and when (the cliff at 7)
- 02:14 Why Freud was wrong
- 02:51 Inside the Yale baby scanner (2025)
- 04:09 So where do the memories go?
- 05:11 Three reasons the key stops working
- 06:25 It is not only biology: words and culture
- 06:55 What those lost years built
- 07:37 Next time
Sources
Every Norbo Explains video is built on real research.
- Babies form memories in the hippocampus (the 2025 flip): Yates, Ellis and Turk-Browne, 2025, Science
- Plain-language summary: Yale News, 2025
- The onset of childhood amnesia around age 7: Bauer and Larkina, 2014, Memory
- The term infantile amnesia (and the repression idea, now rejected): Freud, 1905, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
- Recovering lost infant memories in mice with light: Guskjolen, Josselyn and Frankland, 2018, Current Biology
- New neurons and forgetting: Akers et al., 2014, Science
- Culture, storytelling and earliest memories: MacDonald, Uesiliana and Hayne, 2000, Memory
Questions people ask
Why can't I remember being a baby?
It's called infantile amnesia. Your brain was recording — but the hippocampus, the structure that files experiences into long-term storage, was still wiring itself, so those early recordings became unreadable rather than never made.
Do babies actually form memories?
Yes. A 2025 Yale study put awake infants in an fMRI scanner and watched the hippocampus encode memories in real time. The tape exists — it just gets hidden.
When do first lasting memories start?
For most people around age three, sometimes later. It's not a hard line — and it isn't a sign anything was wrong with your early childhood.
