• Question: When a baby is in the womb, it\'s brain hasn\'t fully developed.. When a baby is born and becomes a toddler, how come we nowadays not relive those memories??

    Asked by smundy to Chris, Kay, Kerstin, Lorna, Liv on 22 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Chris Needham

      Chris Needham answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      Brains are complicated things. I don’t know enough about them to answer, but I think that they adapt and change to what’s around them, and they spend much of their time interacting with the world and increasing vocabulary (memory) and motor functions (from clumsy crawling to skilled careful movements) and these things take priority, until a point when we have mastered these and start to remember events. ???

    • Photo: Kerstin Zechner

      Kerstin Zechner answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      I think the main theory behind why this happens is because in the late stages of pregnancy and early infancy, the part of the brain for long term memory is more developed. This is important for learning how to do things and recognise things, people etc. The part of the brain responsible for short term memory is only later developed, which allows you to have visual memories.

    • Photo: Olivia Hibbitt

      Olivia Hibbitt answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      Hey smundy,

      one of my friends has a theory that it would be too traumatic to remember breast-feeding!!! I’m not sure why we don’t remember….we probably do have those memories stored somewhere but all the other stuff we encounter during a day crowds it out!

    • Photo: Kay Penicud

      Kay Penicud answered on 24 Mar 2010:

      I’m not sure! but what i find really interesting is when we are born we have the the highest number of neurons in our brain compared to any time in our lives. So our brains becoming fully formed actually involves the death of some nerve cells and and more conncections between those cells.

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