Why Can't You REMEMBER Being Born? — Feynman on Memory, Neurons, and Consciousness
# Why You Can’t Remember Being Born: The Neuroscience of Childhood Amnesia and the Making of the Self If you can remember your first day of school, your favorite childhood toy, or the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen, it may feel strange that your earliest years are almost entirely missing. You were there. You saw, felt, heard, and experienced the world. So why is the beginning gone? The answer is not that your earliest experiences were meaningless. It’s that your brain had not yet built the machinery needed to store those experiences as retrievable long-term memories. This is the story of **childhood amnesia**—and it reveals something profound about memory, identity, and consciousness itself. --- ## **What Is Childhood Amnesia?** Childhood amnesia is the near-universal inability to recall specific episodic memories from the first few years of life. In practical terms: - Most people cannot remember events from **before age 3 or 4** - Some can recover fragments from around age...