| Kids from age 1-4 also have an incredibly vivid imagination for fantasy, and can't tell apart the difference between reality and imagined scenarios sometimes. The prototypical scenario in which this is relevant is the whole "there is a monster in my closet". Sure, they just imagined it. But the visual feels just as real as if they had actually seen it. It's easy to dismiss this as an adult, but modern parental advice is to treat these flights of fancy very earnestly, and engage it on it's own rules ("I went inside the closet and I chased the monster away" is a much better strategy than "There's no monster in your closet") [this isn't advice for you, I'm sure you don't need it, but any non-parent reading that may find it interesting] My 2 year olds frequently tells me and my wife stories that we know are factually inaccurate. (Like something that happened on a walk with one of us so we know for sure it didn't happen) The best leading theories about infant amnesia is that language IS what causes it. Memories are indexed by different keys until language is developed. Once language comes in, it becomes the only key function for accessing memories, and the ones mapped before language just become unsearchable. I hope I'm wrong. It would be super cool if your kids actually remembered these things for real. But I doubt it. |
That actually makes a ton of sense. Also a bit eerie to think that my brain holds information that I just can't search for. I wonder if certain triggers could cause that information to surface, since even though our memories are searched through language, maybe there are other 'pathways' that can reach those spots. Kinda like memory that's not mapped in any pages, it's physically there but you can't normally address it.