For most of us, early childhood memories resemble videos posted on Vine: brief, random snippets of various times, places and people. But our difficulty recalling our earliest life moments isn’t a result of diminishing brainpower; quite the contrary, it could be the byproduct of our brains’ processes of self-renewal.
In a study published this week in the journal Science, researchers show that our brains’ continual process of adding new neurons disrupts older memories, making them increasingly foggier or non-existent. Since neural regeneration peaks when we are babies and slows down as we age, this finding might explain why we don’t recall memories from our infancy.
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