Brain Scans of Infants Reveal the Moment We Start Making Memories
1 min read
Summary
Researchers at Columbia and Yale universities used MRI scans to investigate how the brain forms memories when young.
The scans revealed that a year-old toddler’s hippocampus lights up when shown a familiar image, indicating that new memories are being formed.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain associated with memory formation, but its immaturity had previously been blamed for babies not being able to remember events from their early life.
The authors of the new study suggest that while young children may not be able to form lasting memories, the events of early childhood are still stored somewhere in the adult brain.
The next step will be to investigate how these early memories might be recovered.
