Why don’t we remember being babies? Science has an answer

Most people cannot remember their first birthday, their first steps or the days they spent learning to speak. Even though those years shaped the rest of their lives, the memories usually disappear from conscious recall. This is known as infantile amnesia, or childhood amnesia. It refers to the lack of clear, personal memories from the first years of life. Most adults remember very little from before the age of three, while memories from the years between three and seven are often incomplete. But this does not mean babies have no memory.Babies can remember things but...For a long time, scientists believed that infants could not form lasting memories because their brains were still developing. Research has challenged that idea. A 2025 study published in the journal Science found that babies can encode information linked to episodic memory, the type of memory used to recall a specific event.