Thursday, May 16, 2019

DO YOU REMEMBER ANYTHING BEFORE AGE 3?



A few days back I attended an interesting talk that turned out to be a debate at the end. The talk was about "Recovery of lost memories in infant mice". The researcher described that according to engram theory any event that is occurring /occurred will be stored in the brain in a specific engram cell (a subpopulation of the neural cell) which if elicited by the same pattern of stimuli will get reactivated and the memory can be restored back. For eg: Consider a scenario where you visit a cafeteria to have a coffee with your friend/love. The smell of the coffee will be stored in a specific engram and conversation you had in a different engram. So when you go back to the same cafeteria and have the same coffee, the smell (stimuli) will elicit your stored memory in the specific engram. While not all the time it works, if the pattern of stimuli and the threshold varies then the brain may either fail to recover or will partially recover it. This is the reason why we sometimes feel that some events have already happened in the past but still, we won't be able to recover the whole memory of it. But unfortunately, infants tend to lack this ability to recover the memory, a condition known as "Infantile amnesia". Researchers say that the infant memories are most probably not lost but became inaccessible over time which can be recovered back. On the other hand, the neuroplasticity theory says that the brain recovers its memory by rewiring itself. That's why synapse since birth (2500) tend to grow rapidly and reach 15000 by age 3. While most of the researchers dispute about the acceptance of these theories, still the fact by which the brain works remain a mystery. So do you remember anything before age 3?

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