Can you remember being born?

Some people have memories of very early childhood, but how far back can you go? Is it possible to remember your own birth? Josh and Chuck are on the case in this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from how Stuff works dot Com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps,
and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,

(00:22):
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:42):
I'm Josh Clark with me as always as the lovely
and esteem of Charles W. Chucker Bryant. Are you going,
buddy right? Are you slightly under the weather? I see Ted? Yeah.
Everyone send other well wishes things. You'll be well by
the time it's can tell them, probably, but it'll still
warm my heart to see well wish exactly. Chuck. I
don't know if you've got the email, but we've been

(01:03):
asked to mention a couple of shows that are coming
out companion shows. They're coming out on the Science Channel, um,
The Road to punkin Chunking and punkin Chunking Itself Naturally. Yeah, yeah,
and that Josh is uh, Thanksgiving night if you're board
after your turkey on the Science Channel eight Eastern time, right,

(01:23):
So can we get back to it? Yeah, let's do it, great, Chuck, Josh,
do you remember coming into that delivery room from the
womb with your mom going and you all wet and
nasty and cold all of a sudden and everything's bright
and there's people spanking you and you're suddenly a little perturbed.

(01:46):
I remember being perturbed. That sounds like last Friday night
for me. I'm not talking about any goat being around show.
I don't remember that, do why? I'm totally full of it?
And apparently no one members this. Being born is impossible
as far as we know. As far as we know.

(02:06):
Um so, anytime you hear somebody describing how they remember
being born, you can punch them in the stomach and
call them a liar. Do people say that I've heard
it before. Yeah, it's rare, but yeah, people do say
that they have uncovered that memory. What through primal therapy?
Or are we getting there? You've got a little foreshadowing binge.

(02:30):
That's literally like the last thing we're probably gonna cover
and every end. Well, let's talk about this, Chuck, Why
can't you remember being born, especially because there they think
that infants are able to form memories, So why wouldn't
we be able to be formed? And what's going on here? Like,
that's just weird that our brains wouldn't start forming memories

(02:52):
until a certain age after we're born. What's up with that?
Why don't we remember being in the womb or sitting
on a cloud waiting to come down into your mom's tummy,
or you know, being like uh lay ocean gunman or
something before you got to the cloud that why don't
we remember any of that? Well, we can get to
that in one second, but we should go ahead and

(03:14):
just say historically that for many, many, many years, like
a hundred years, they thought that we just simply our
little baby brains weren't formed enough to uh, to be
able to make these memories happen. Which it's a legitimate theory. Yeah,
I don't think they looked into it that much though,
But I mean, we develop at a certain pace, like
we don't even have knee caps for the first several months,

(03:36):
two years. Maybe, yeah, you don't have knee caps, pal,
I don't think I knew that. That's why baby legs
are so weird looking. You just want to chew on them,
right yea um, but yeah, so we developed like we don't.
We don't come out of the womb fully grown, so
you can. It's not the most bone head. It's not
spontaneous regeneration theory. No, but they didn't. For about a

(03:56):
hundred years, they didn't even look into it much, I
don't think. And then for the past twenty years they've
started to well, hold on, what is it called? Are
you talking about childhood amnesia? I am previously known as
infantile amnesia by your favorite Mr Sigmund Fruid. Oh and
guess what, what a surprise? He said that I had
to do with repressed sexual urges. Holy cow, I can't

(04:17):
believe it. Freud equated something with sex everything sex sex, sex.
It's crazy. Sure, he said that we What we did
was we repressed our memories of traumatic often sexual urgings,
and formed screen memories to uh, to block the unconscious.
I'd right, And by screen memories, no memories is another
way to put that, because most people apparently can't come

(04:40):
up with a concrete memory from their childhood until they
turned about age three, right, But when you that's as
far back as most people can remember it. Yeah, I
can remember back that far. My first memory was in
my first house that we moved from when I was three,
and I remember very specifically a couple of things. I

(05:01):
remember my mom wrapping her wedding ring on the back
window when it was time to come in and eat.
And I remember right before we moved out, we were
eating on the floor that was you know, the furniture
was was gone, and the next door neighbor, Billy Bright,
came up to our screen door and like stood in
the doorway and just watched us eat. And I remember
that and I was three. What about you my earliest memory, Um,

(05:25):
I must have been pretty young because I was still
wearing diapers. Definitely less than I was younger than seven. Um.
And I was banging goodbye on a storm window a
storm door. Uh. And my older sister Karen was babysitting
me and my mom was leaving this how I used
to say goodbye so I couldn't talk. So it's definitely
younger than six. Um. And I was banging on the

(05:46):
storm window and just put my arm right through it.
And I remember that scene. Um, but that's that's my
no one. Do you remember that where you cut and wounded.
I was. I don't remember paying or anything like that,
but I was definitely bleeding everywhere. I remember my sister
Karen just screaming, bloody murder. She was so freaked out.
I love that you were mannish enough at that age

(06:07):
to put your arm through a storm. I was like,
it's nothing, don't worry about it, Karen, it's not a
Josh door. Yeah, and then I went and started a fire.
Good for you. So, um, that's my earliest memory. Um.
But again, it's like it's sporadic. I can't really I
can't tell you what agent it took place at well,
either aside from knowing that I lived in that house
and I moved it three. One of the things that um,

(06:30):
I I recognize that as a very concrete memory, though,
is that there's no photos of it. Apparently, if you
look through family photos, it's very easy to generate false memories, okay,
um or you know, obviously you can support the memories
that you do have, as vague as they are, by

(06:50):
looking at family photos, but these serve as cues. There
were no photos of this one, and I was wearing diapers,
So to me, this constitute is my release We'll get
to the cues as well in a minute. But what
they did figure out in the past twenty years from
doing a lot of studying is that they've determined that
children as young as three months old can't actually form memories.
It's just the fact that these memories don't stick around

(07:11):
as long term, right. And even more than that, they've
also determined that we're born with UM, the ability to
form unconscious memories. Talk about that. That's pretty cool. Okay,
So basically we have two kinds of memory. We have UM, uh,
explicit memory. Right. Do you remember when we talked about
dogs perceiving time? We touched on this then too, we

(07:33):
talked about explicit memory or UM semantic No, I'm sorry,
we talked about explicit memory, right, or episodic memory is
the name of it. UM. And then there's the other kind,
the unconscious memories UM, which are referred to as semantic.
So you remember when I asked you and how do
dogs perceived time? Um? You know what you had for

(07:54):
breakfast and you were describing it in detail, which lent
itself to have It was evidential that that was an
episodic memory, like you clearly had memories and with a
semantic memory. That's where you learn how to play a piano. Uh,
And you might not remember learning to play the piano,

(08:14):
but you can remember how to play the piano because
you've learned it. You're accessing a different kind of memory, right.
And oddly enough, if you like lose your memory and
an accident or something and anesia, you may be able
to still remember how to play the piano. I find
this stuff absolutely fascinating. Okay, So for unconscious memory, um,
we're born with that, but it take it does take

(08:35):
uh several months, if not years to start to develop
episodic memory. Right, So how does episodic memory work? Well?
Is that what are you talking about? Encoding? Yeah? Okay,
Well the brain obviously, to create a memory, you need
to create a synapse, which is just a connection firing
within your brain between two neurons. And uh, what happens

(08:56):
is when you, when you have a memory, encode that
memory that sensory information into your memory bank, and then
from there your brain categorizes it kind of files it
away like you would on your computer, and then weird
to think think about this, chuck, There are a series
of brain cells in your brain right now, just a
few that that are connected via synapsis that are responsible

(09:20):
for maintaining your memory of the scent of a guardinia.
How mind boggling is that my brain is melting? Okay,
So when you think of the scent of a gardenia,
you can come up with it, right, You can kind
of remember what it's like right now that I'm right there. Apparently,
when you smell a guardinia over and over, um, you

(09:40):
can pick up more elements of that smell, right exactly,
and you can add to that memory more and more
and more. That makes right. But also the more that
you think about the scent of a guardinia, the more
that you recall it, the stronger that memory gets. Right.
Uh yeah, I would think so yeah, kind of like

(10:00):
a chef with their palette. So yeah, right. But I
mean it's like if you train yourself to think of
something or you think is something a lot, naturally your
memories of it become stronger because that neural connection through
the synapsies becomes stronger, biochemically stronger. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Like when I think of milk steak, I can recall

(10:20):
that scent because I think about it on a daily basis.
I don't know what that is. But that's like the
second time this week I've heard that what is milk steak? Well,
it was from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia last week. Okay,
so what was that? The milk steak is a real thing.
I think it's a steak that's literally boiled in milk.
And I get the impression there's some old school like
from the two. But it was very funny obviously on

(10:41):
that show for Charlie to say it's his favorite food. Anyway,
Uh so where were we? Memory? Once your brain has
filed those things away, if you want to recall that
memory after it's consolidated, you need to retrieve these files
like you would on your computer again, same way and um,
well not the same way, but the same same theory
and uh. In order to do this, your brain literally

(11:04):
retraces those original synapsis that led to the memory in
the first place. So it pulls up all that information
for you. I've read another article on memory formation and
that process was compared to, um, wearing a path through
the woods. Right you go through the first time, you
might it might consist of like some broken ferns or
branches or something like this. You can kind of find
your way. But over the course of months or years,

(11:26):
the more you use it, the more visible it is,
the more easily accessible it is. That make like forging
a trail. Oh cool, Yeah, alright, So what we're talking
about encoding Because of the original held belief that babies
could not encode, they thought, all right, well, maybe they
have this memory, but they can't encode it. Uh not true.
So it says a study with the mobile, the little

(11:48):
babies in the mobile in the ribbon, they're little needless baby.
They took these little chubby baby legs and they were
talking two and three month olds, and they tied ribbon
to Uh. I guess jute rope would have been cruel
to pull tender baby legs just so it with like
a rusty needle in twine. Yeah. So they take ribbon
and they tied to the baby's legs and then tied

(12:09):
to a mobile above their head. And they found that
a baby learned that by kicking their legs they would
make the mobile move, which made the babies coup and
perr I would imagine, But I thought babies always kicked
their legs, So I kind of wondered about this that
one I found that same. I had that same idea myself,
because later on when they placed the same babies under
a mobile, uh, they would start kicking their legs like

(12:31):
they wanted to make it move with the with the ribbon,
although the ribbon was no longer attached, and they took
from that they remembered that if you're under a mobile,
kick your legs. Maybe they were saying, I don't have
knee gaps, maybe kicking their legs around. Yeah, but that
that actually raises a really excellent point, like, I'm pretty
sure any evidence that you can come up with, it's
like trying to determine whether or not animals are happy.

(12:53):
We uh, we express our world views, our emotions, everything
verbally or or through written language. But it's through language.
So before while we're pre verbal, um, everything is up
in the air. We it's it's almost impossible to come
up with definitive evidence of anything that surrounds That's actually

(13:14):
that's a good setup for later two with the verbal
But that's just a tease. Uh. Just to close on
that study, though, they found that six month old babies
actually picked up that relationship between kicking legs and the
mobile moving faster. So this is what led them to
think that babies actually gradually accelerate that instead of oh,

(13:34):
we have no memory, and all of a sudden, it's
my third birthday and now I do have memory. So
it's a gradual thing instead of a sudden rapid growth.
And there's another type of memory called implicit memory, right, yes,
is that this is um. This is we're born with this,
but it's also different from uh our ability to form
unconscious memories. It's controlled by the um cerebellum um. And

(13:57):
basically this is like our ability to remember that, oh, yeah,
we are hungry and we need to eat um, or
you know, we need to seek out the our mother's
warmth or something like that. Sure, like I hear her
voice and I know that means that the milk is
coming soon. So that that but that also sticks with
us throughout our entire lives, so we don't necessarily forget that,

(14:19):
right right, So I mean you don't ever forget like,
oh I'm hungry, I need to eat, or you know,
I would like to be warm right now? Right? That
usually helps me survive. UM, But we're not. That's not
centered around necessarily is a specific event in time. We've
yet to figure out how to put things in the
context of a timeline, which apparently is where real explicit

(14:42):
memory begins, right, and that's when you need the cues.
And that's what we've kind of figured out, not we,
of course, but that's what they have figured out. Is
the death between the babies and the adults is they
cannot pick up on the cues from their past. And
one of them that you were talking about was speech verbalization. Right,
so we we apparently not only do we use uh

(15:05):
language to express ourselves our thoughts or views or opinions
or emotions even um, we also apparently four memories using language,
autobiographical memories. Right. There was this really interesting study that
um is in this article, which by the way, is
called kind of Person Remember Being Born? It's on the site.

(15:26):
It was written by the esteemed and um now famous
Christen Congery of Steph Mom Never Told You and Uh.
It's a very dense article. I gotta say, there was
not much fluff in here, right, no chuck chuck usually
highlights like the most important ones. I'm looking at this
article right now. The entire article is yellow yellow. It's
a article. Um So this study it was a two

(15:48):
thousand four study um, and it found that um. It
was a study of twenty seven and thirty nine month
old boys and girls, and it found that if children
didn't know the words to describe an event when it happened, uh,
they couldn't describe it later after learning the appropriate words.
That is awesome? Isn't it very cool? So apparently our
language development and memory formation are very closely tied. And

(16:11):
as you'll notice, that was a two thousand four study.
We're just starting to crack um the the mystery of
childhood amnesia, right right, you know, I got another one
for you to, let's hear it. In relation to memory,
context has a lot to do with it. And what
they found in another study was that preschool aged kids
can explain sequential order. But sequential order is not the

(16:35):
same thing as a timeline of your life. Right, So
if you if you're taken to a circus, you might remember,
first the clown came out, and then the bear attacked
the trainer and that kind of thing, but it's not
like this happened two days before I started reading the
Ramona Quimby series something like that, and that like you like,

(16:55):
like I was saying that timeline is what forms our
life or else we just have a cluster of like
weird memories of like bears attacking trainers and you know,
one chapter of a Ramona Quimby book or setting something
on fire, And how can you if our lives are
nothing but a string of memories and hopes for the future,
what kind of life is that if we don't have

(17:16):
a timeline to fit it? On good point, that's how
we develop our sense of self absolutely and what was
there was another cool stating here about how it ties
to self recognition and your ability to recognize yourself as yourself.
And they say that they don't think babies have this
skill and they cannot basically don't have a personal identity
until they're about two years old. Not only that, they

(17:37):
have no um sense of um concreteness of the world
around them. So I can't remember what age it's it's
a very young age that they start to develop this.
But say within the first two months, when you're sitting
there cooing over a baby and you leave their field
of vision, you're gone. You don't exist any longer, and

(17:59):
you never did. Well, that's sad, isn't it. So Luckily
that goes away very quickly because I mean, again, what
kind of way is that to live? Don't tell the
mom's that isn't that odd? Like you don't exist when
you're not in their field of vision? Yeah? Are this
kind of comforting? Almost in a way too. I guess
when you thump them and run away, they're just like
I wish I could be forgotten instantly by many people
I meet. It's nice, um. And what about the cultural

(18:22):
aspect of this? I found this interesting as well, step boy. Yeah,
they found that, uh, and this isn't surprising for some reason,
but they found in relation to memory that Westerners personal
memories focus more on themselves, whereas Easterners remember themselves as
part of a group scenario. Isn't that yes, because we're selfish,
selfish Westerners. And the other cool thing too about the parents.

(18:45):
They said that parents can and this is really good
for parents to know. Actually, the more that you describe
things to your children as they're growing up, the better
they're going to not only be able to recall that,
but be able to describe their own experiences later in life.
The more detailed you get with your recounting, Like, you know,
remember we went to the zoo yesterday and you saw

(19:06):
the bear that had the the bow tie on, and
then the guy through the peanut atom and where should
I go from here? So the more detailed you are
with with going over these things with your kid every day,
than the more they're gonna be better off later on
in life and stuck you're gonna like this little outside research. Um,
I read a study, or I read an article, honest
study I should admit um of fifteen months old that

(19:29):
shows that sporadic napping actually helps us form the memories
needed to learn languages. Yeah, so they used made up
language that they taught to these kids, esperanto, not quite um.
It was like just babble, but it did have UM
patterns in it, recognizable patterns UM. And they found that

(19:52):
kids who nap more often were able to pick up
this language or retain memories of how to speak this
language better than kids who didn't nap. His offen. You know,
I think that ties into something we said a long
time ago about the brain during sleep using that time
to file file everything away. That maybe, and that's what
dreams are too, That they're misfiles. Dude. Yeah, we're just

(20:14):
covering everything that's covered in the past. So the whole circle, buddy,
And yeah, we're good like that, aren't we. We should
we talk about how toothpaste and orange juice don't mix.
That's a classic. UM I guess that's it, right, I'm done.
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