If someone tells you that he remembers the more or less anguished time when his mother brought him into the world, be sure that he is lying. The brain structures that help us produce memories are not mature in the newborn, so the newborn does not have the tools to retain that decisive event. Episodic memory, related to the autobiographical events that we can remember , develops from the age of five or six, the age at which we begin to store experiences that we can later evoke explicitly.
In fact, we do not keep memory of our first three or four years of life . The alleged memories of that time are misleading, according to neuroscientists, and are due to stories that our elders later tell us and that we integrate in such a way that we end up making them our own unconsciously.
The neurological systems of the youngest children are not fully developed, and memory does not improve until the brain structures involved – the hippocampus and the frontal cortex – have reached a maturation that allows them to organize mental representations of space and time in form of cognitive maps that we call memories.
