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You were once a completely different person.

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Not metaphorically.

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Literally.

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There was a version of you who existed for almost two years,

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who felt hunger and warmth and fear and joy every single day,

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and who is now gone.

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Not dead.

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Just unreachable.

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You will never get a single memory back from that person.

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And the strange part is,

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you probably never wondered why.

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Think about it for a moment.

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You can remember your fifth birthday party.

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Maybe not perfectly,

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but something is there.

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A cake,

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a room,

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a feeling.

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Go back further.

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Four years old.

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Three.

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Somewhere around there,

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the lights go out.

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Before that point,

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there is nothing.

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Not darkness,

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not blankness,

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just an absence where memories should be.

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Scientists call this infantile amnesia,

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and almost every human being on Earth experiences it.

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But here's the strange part.

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Babies are not blank.

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From the moment they're born,

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they're learning at a staggering rate.

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They recognize their mother's voice.

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They form preferences.

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They build the neural architecture that will define how they think for

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the rest of their lives.

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So why does none of it stick?

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For a long time,

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the answer seemed obvious.

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Babies just don't have the brain power yet.

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Their brains are still developing.

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Surely memory is one of the last things to come online,

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right alongside walking and talking.

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That answer is wrong.

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And the real explanation is far stranger than babies can't

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remember.

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Let's start with what memory actually is.

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When scientists talk about memory,

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they usually split it into two broad types.

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There's implicit memory,

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which is the kind of memory that doesn't require conscious recall.

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Riding a bike,

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flinching at a loud noise,

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feeling comforted by a particular smell without knowing why.

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And there's explicit memory,

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which is the kind you can consciously access and describe.

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What you had for breakfast,

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your best friend's name,

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the moment you learn to read.

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Babies have plenty of implicit memory.

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A baby who has been startled by a dog will show fear around dogs later.

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Even with no conscious memory of the original event,

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that fear is stored.

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It's just stored in a part of the brain that doesn't produce a story you

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can tell.

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Explicit memory is different,

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and explicit memory depends heavily on a small,

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curved structure deep in the brain called the hippocampus.

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Think of the hippocampus as a kind of index card system.

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It doesn't store memories permanently itself,

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but it tags experiences and helps file them away for long -term

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storage elsewhere in the brain.

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Here's the twist.

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The hippocampus is actually fairly developed at birth.

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It's not fully mature,

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but it's far more functional than scientists once assumed.

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So if the hippocampus is working,

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even partially,

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why isn't anything getting filed?

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This is where one of the most important studies in this field comes in.

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Researcher Carol Peterson,

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who has spent decades studying childhood memory,

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found something unexpected when she interviewed young children about events

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from their early lives.

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The children could describe things that happened to them at two or three

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years old.

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In detail.

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But when researchers checked back years later,

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those same memories were often gone.

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The information had been there.

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It just didn't survive.

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So the problem isn't that babies fail to form memories.

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The problem is that the memories don't last.

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Something about the early brain prevents these memories from being preserved

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long term,

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even when they're initially encoded just fine.

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One leading explanation involves something happening at a furious pace

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in the early brain,

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neurogenesis.

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That's just a scientific way of saying the rapid creation of

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new brain cells.

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In most regions of the adult brain,

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neurogenesis slows to a crawl.

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But in early childhood,

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especially within the hippocampus,

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new neurons are being produced at an extraordinary rate.

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Researcher Paul Franklin,

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working with colleagues,

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proposed something fascinating.

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What if this flood of new neurons doesn't just add to the brain's storage?

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What if it actively overwrites it?

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Imagine a filing cabinet where new folders are being shoved in so

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quickly that old folders get crushed,

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shuffled,

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or destroyed in the process.

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In mice,

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Franklin's team found that artificially increasing neurogenesis in young

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animals caused them to forget things faster.

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And artificially slowing neurogenesis in older animals made memories

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stick around longer than expected.

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If something similar happens in human infants,

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it would mean your earliest memories weren't lost because they were

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too weak to form.

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They were lost because your brain was rebuilding itself so rapidly that

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the old structures literally couldn't survive the renovation.

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But neurogenesis isn't the whole story.

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There's another piece,

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and it has to do with something you don't have yet as a baby.

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A sense of self.

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Memory isn't just about storing information.

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It's about storing information in relation to you.

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A memory needs a main character to attach itself to.

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Researcher Katherine Nelson has argued that autobiographical

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memory, the kind where you remember things as events that happen to you,

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requires a child to first develop a concept of self as

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someone who exists continuously through time.

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Before that sense of self solidifies,

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around the time language really takes off,

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experiences may simply have nowhere to attach.

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There's no narrative thread yet for them to become part of.

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This is why language matters so much here.

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Once children start forming sentences,

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they start forming narratives.

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I went to the park.

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I was scared.

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Mommy left and came back.

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These aren't just descriptions.

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They're scaffolding.

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They give experiences a shape that can be stored,

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retrieved,

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and retold.

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Before language develops,

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an experience might be felt intensely in the moment,

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but it has no scaffold to hang on.

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And without that scaffold,

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it dissolves.

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So picture your earliest years like this.

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Your brain is under construction.

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New neurons are pouring in,

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restructuring the very systems that would normally hold memories in place.

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At the same time,

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the you that memories would belong to hasn't fully formed

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yet.

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There's no stable narrator to file these experiences under.

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The combination is almost perfectly designed to erase everything,

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no matter how vividly it was experienced in the moment.

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Here's where it gets even stranger.

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Even though you can't recall those years,

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they didn't disappear without a trace.

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Remember implicit memory?

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That system was running the whole time,

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quietly building your foundations.

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The way you respond to stress as an adult.

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The kinds of voices or environments that make you feel safe without knowing

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why.

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Certain instinctive reactions to comfort,

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to closeness,

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to fear.

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Much of this may have roots in those first wordless years.

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You're not carrying around memories from that time.

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You're carrying around the results of them.

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This connects to something deeper about what memory is even for.

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Memory isn't a video recorder.

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Faithfully capturing your life for later viewing,

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it's a survival tool.

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Its job is to extract patterns,

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lessons and useful information from experience and to discard

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the raw footage once the lesson has been absorbed.

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For an infant,

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the lessons being absorbed are enormous.

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How to form attachments,

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how to regulate emotion,

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how to trust or not trust the world.

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Once those lessons are baked into the architecture of the brain,

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the original footage of how they were learned becomes unnecessary.

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The brain isn't malfunctioning by deleting it.

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It's doing exactly what memory is designed to do,

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just at a stage of life where the lessons matter more than the record.

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There's a modern mirror to all of this,

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and it's closer than you might think.

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Think about how differently you remember a chaotic week versus

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a calm one.

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During periods of intense change,

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moving to a new city,

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starting a new job,

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going through a major life transition,

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time often feels like it's flying by,

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and yet looking back,

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those periods can feel strangely thin in memory,

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full of gaps.

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Some researchers believe this is because,

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much like in infancy,

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your brain is busy reorganizing itself to adapt,

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and that reorganization competes with the process of laying down stable,

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long -term memories.

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In a much smaller,

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much gentler way,

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you're echoing what happened during your first two years.

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Rapid change.

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A self still adjusting to a new context.

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And memories that don't quite take root the way they normally would.

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So the next time you try and fail to remember anything from

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before you were three,

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don't think of it as a flaw.

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Don't think of it as something missing.

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Think of it as evidence of just how much work your brain was doing during those years

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worked so intensive that it had to clear away the construction debris to

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make room for what came next.

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You weren't there to witness the foundation being poured,

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but you're standing on it right now.

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