03/31/2025
Engaging read.
New research published by Tristan Yates, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University and her colleagues in the journal Science, proposes that babies are able to form memories, even if they become inaccessible later in life.
The scans revealed that starting at about 12 months of age, the more activity there was in the baby's hippocampus when seeing an image for the first time — like that canyon — the more likely they were to remember that image later.
These results allow scientists to "put the time stamp of our first memory a little bit earlier than when we thought possible," says Flavio Donato, a neurobiologist at the University of Basel who wasn't involved in the research.
He says it now appears that infancy isn't a passive, forgettable stage of our lives — a relevant consideration for how we raise and educate children, and even how we understand early trauma or stress.
"It's an important question," says Donato, "how these traumatic events might lead to memories or traces in the brain that might persist for a long time and might even influence the way in which this person will develop."
Read more and let us know our thoughts about this research: https://n.pr/4c2xDuU
