你最珍视的一段童年记忆是什么？一些研究的结果可能会让你感到惊讶：人们早期的记忆不一定准确。这究竟是为什么？

 

What's the first thing you remember doing? It could be playing with your friends at school, or going to a birthday party and eating amazing cake. Most of us have a treasured early memory of our childhood, but can we really believe those vivid memories? Did those special moments really happen – or did we make them up?

 

It's a strange concept to grasp, but according to research, about four out of 10 of us invent our first childhood memory. Rather than having experienced something, we could have fabricated a fake memory from videos or photos we've seen. We could have been influenced by a story recounted to us that spurs our minds on to adopt someone else's memory as our own. What it means is that memories of our younger years, especially before the age of two, may be inaccurate¹, or entirely² false.

 

But why don't we have clear memories from that age? Well, our ability to retain memories from before the age of two isn't great. While at that age we do have short-term memories, according to Catherine Loveday, an expert in autobiographical memory at the University of Westminster, the memories that infants make are not long-lasting. This is possibly due to the rapid creation of brain cells in our early years. Some scientists also believe that as we get older, our childhood memories fade and after the age of seven, we get some kind of 'childhood amnesia³'.

 

So why do we create fake memories? Some experts believe that there is a clear desire for a sense of self and having a cohesive⁴ story of our existence. Creating memories can fill in the gaps – giving us a more complete structure for our early lives. As we get older, we want to have a complete picture of our entire lives.

 

So, the next time someone says they have a clear memory from when they were one – or even before - just remember that while it could be true, there's a chance they just invented it at some point in their lives.

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