If you remember anything before the age of 3, your brain only puts together bits of reality that you've learned as you've grown up, according to a new research. In the largest study of its kind, researchers asked people about their earliest memory and at what age they believe it took place. They found that a surprising number of people claimed to remember things from their first years of life. But scientists agree that our brain isn't developed enough to keep memories until we're three years old, so researchers wanted to know why so many people insist they remember something before then.
Of 6, 641 participants, 37. 4 percent said they had their first memory before the age of 2. Of those, 893 said their first memories were from the period before they turned 1. Participants' answers were analyzed in terms of their age, language, the content of the memory and the nature of the memory.
" When we looked through the answers from participants, we found that a lot of these first ‘memories' were frequently related to infancy and a typical example would be a memory based around a baby carriage, " said Professor Martin Conway at City University of London.
This means that many of these " fictional" memories are only our minds mixing up what we know about babies and what we actually experienced as a baby. They also found that older people were more likely to report remembering a " fictional" early memory. Researchers couldn't determine why our brains do this but suggested it comes from a personal need to have a complete description of our lives. They added that a positive self-narrative can lead to a better life.