Cluttered to Elegance

By Bobbi Falde

When we are born, our brains are full. Full of neural pathways that is! This may sound like a marvelous thing but is the reason we do not have memories from that time in our lives. The neuronal pathways that exist when we are babies are much like a city map that has every footpath, roadway, alleyway, and garden steppingstone path from that particular city on it. There is a mess of connections, none of them standing out and giving specific directions. This is where neuronal pruning comes in. Neuronal pruning is the massive cleanup that happens in the brain, where useless neurons disappear, leaving behind only the pathways that have developed and are useful to our cognitive abilities (Shaw, 2016).

During pruning, our brains start as a cluttered map and develop into an efficient set of directions. This process is necessary for brain growth and development (Shaw, 2016). Along with developing defined connections, pruning unnecessary synapses allows for the brain to become more efficient at task performance. This efficiency is caused by the cleanup of intersections in the brain and leave behind less places for the brain to make decisions.

Until this developmental clean up happens, tiny human brains are not capable of creating memories that will last into adulthood. The structural mess that exists in the brain’s neurons, along with their inability to adequately communicate with those around them, small children are unable to encode long-term memories from their early days. This concept is further explained in an article written for Live Science by Benjamin Shouse (2011). Shouse explains that the lack of memories we have from our early childhoods can be attributed to the fact that we could not cognitively bundle information (2011). Cognitive bundling can be further explained as the dynamic information collecting that the brain does following certain complex patterns, which are later recalled and recognized as memories. As young children we functioned with a semantic memory, which is the idea that we remember short bits of information for short amounts of time. Infantile amnesia is the formal terminology for the lack of memories from our early years of life (Alberini & Travaglia, 2017).

After years of neuronal pruning takes places, and the child is roughly four years old, the brain is capable of collectively, encoding and recalling episodic memories (Alberini & Travaglia, 2017). Episodic memory is the information about specific events that is typically stored in the brain’s surface. Now that the cleanup of the neurons has taken place, the brain can store memories where they belong and retrieve them from their storage space with ease. Episodic memory also relies on many areas of the brain working together, while creating a definitive and specific profile about a topic. The structure responsible for tying all these important areas together is called the hippocampus (Shouse, 2011). Due to the developmental stages of the brain, the hippocampus does not begin working effectively in its role within memory consolidation and recall until 3-4 years of age. This allows for further physiological explanation as to the lack of early childhood memories we possess (Alberini & Travaglia, 2017).

Though they are not readily remembered, the importance of these developmental years should not be dismissed. A study performed by Jack Shonkoff and colleagues in 2012 found that children who were exposed to adverse childhood experiences prior to the age of established memory, still experienced the lasting effects of them (Shaw, 2016). This demonstrates that even if the mind does not remember, the brain does. It is quite alarming to consider that some of the most instrumental years of development are the ones that we are least likely to remember.

References

Alberini, C. M., & Travaglia, A. (2017). Infantile amnesia: A critical period of learning to learn and remember. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 37(24), 5783–5795. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0324-17.2017

Shaw, J. (2016). The memory illusion: Remembering, forgetting and the science of false memory. Random House Books.

Shouse, B. (2011 February, 7). Why don’t we remember being babies? LiveScience. https://www.livescience.com/32963-why-dont-we-remember-being-babies.html