Why Can't You Remember Being a Baby?

The first time you ate ice cream, you were probably two years old. You don’t remember it. Someone has a photo. In the photo, you are having the time of your life. Your face is completely unguarded — pure, undiluted joy.

You are completely gone.

This is called infantile amnesia, and it is one of the strangest facts about being human. Nearly everyone alive has zero autobiographical memories before age three. Most people have only a handful of fragments before age five. And yet you were there for all of it. You were conscious. You were experiencing things. Someone loved you and you felt it.

What happened to all of that?

The Obvious Answer Is Wrong

The obvious guess: babies can’t form memories because their brains aren’t developed enough.

But here’s the problem: they clearly can form memories. Carolyn Rovee-Collier at Rutgers spent decades proving it. She would tie a string from an infant’s ankle to a mobile hanging above the crib. Babies figured out, within minutes, that kicking made the mobile move. They loved it. Come back two weeks later, and the baby recognizes the mobile immediately — starts kicking before the string is even attached.

Infants as young as three months can retain memory traces for days. By eighteen months, a toddler can watch a complex action sequence once, then reproduce it six months later. The memories exist.

They’re just inaccessible.

The Hippocampus Problem

Here’s where it gets interesting. The hippocampus — the brain’s primary memory structure — undergoes massive neurogenesis in early childhood. New neurons are being produced at a tremendous rate.

Normally, you might think: more neurons = more memory capacity = better memories. But it seems to work the opposite way.

A 2014 study led by Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto found that high rates of neurogenesis in the hippocampus may actually disrupt existing memories. New neurons integrate into existing circuits, and in doing so, they may overwrite or degrade the connections that stored earlier experiences.

In other words: your brain was growing so fast it kept wiping its own hard drive.

They tested this in mice. Suppress neurogenesis in infant mice — memories persist longer. Artificially increase neurogenesis in adult mice — they start forgetting at infant rates.

Your earliest memories may not have faded. They may have been structurally demolished by growth.

You Need a Self to Have a Memory Of You

But neurogenesis alone doesn’t explain everything. There’s a second piece.

Episodic memory — the kind where you remember yourself doing something, in a specific place, at a specific time — requires more than just recording information. It requires a narrator. It requires a self that experiences events and organizes them into a story.

That self emerges slowly. The classic test is the mirror test: can a child recognize their own reflection? Most children can’t do this reliably until 18–24 months. Before that point, they have no stable concept of themselves as a continuous entity moving through time.

Without a “self,” there is no “I remember when I…” There is only sensation. Sensation without a subject. Experience without an experiencer.

Language Isn’t Just Communication — It’s Memory Infrastructure

There’s a third piece, and it might be the most important.

Across cultures, first memories cluster around ages 2–3 in Western countries. But in New Zealand Maori communities — which have extraordinarily rich oral storytelling traditions and begin sharing detailed personal narratives with children very early — adults report first memories from as young as 2.5 years, consistently earlier than Western averages.

In cultures that narrate less to children, first memories come later.

Language is not just how we communicate memories. It is, in part, how we form them. The hippocampus encodes episodes with rich contextual detail — but to retrieve an episode consciously, to reexperience it, you need to reconstruct it through narrative. You need words to tell the story, even to yourself.

If you don’t have the language to narrate an experience, you can’t consolidate it into the kind of memory you can later recover.

The False Memory Complication

Here’s the part that should make you slightly uncomfortable.

You almost certainly have some memories of early childhood. Maybe a birthday party, a house you lived in, a relative who held you. Feel confident about one of those right now? Good.

It might be fake.

Researcher Elizabeth Loftus has spent forty years demonstrating how fragile early memories are. Adults can be convinced they remember getting lost in a shopping mall as a child — a completely fabricated event — with relative ease. Family photographs can plant memories of events that never happened. A story told to you about yourself becomes, over time, indistinguishable from something you actually remember.

Your earliest memories were formed when you were most vulnerable to suggestion, most dependent on adult narratives, and least equipped to evaluate reliability. The adults around you were building the narrative of who you were. Some of that narrative became your memory.

You don’t just not remember your infancy. The memories you think you have from early childhood may partly be autobiographical fiction — stories told about you that you eventually adopted as stories told by you.

The Philosophical Punchline

Here is the strange thing to sit with.

The person who had those first experiences still exists. They’re not gone — they’re the substrate of everything you are. Your earliest relational experiences, before you had language for them, shaped how you attach to people. Your first experiences of comfort and fear shaped your nervous system. The way you respond to raised voices, to being held, to hunger — all of this was wired in during the years you cannot remember.

You were shaped most profoundly by a period you cannot access.

The self who experienced your first ice cream, your first smell of rain, the first time someone’s absence felt like loss — that self is not lost. They are you. But you will never meet them.

Your earliest self is, in every meaningful sense, a stranger.

The science: Infantile amnesia is documented across cultures and species. Key research: Rovee-Collier (infant memory retention), Frankland & Josselyn 2014 (neurogenesis and forgetting), Hayne & MacDonald cross-cultural first memory research, Loftus (false memory implantation). The neurogenesis-forgetting connection is still debated — it is a strong hypothesis with animal evidence, not yet definitively proven in humans.