CNN recently showcased a commentary from The Conversation, a collaboration between academics and journalists. The August 13, 2021 commentary by Jeanne Shinskey, of the Royal Holloway Univeristy of London, focused on a phenomenon known as "childhood or infant amnesia."
Childhhod amnesia is a puzzling occurence with which we are probably all familiar, but did not realize it had a scholarly name. It is the little understood situation where most of us do not remember much about our lives from before age 7. And even when we try to recall early childhood memories, we are often faced with wondering if they are actual personal memories or mere recollections based on stories from parents, older siblings or others, photos, etc.
Research into the phenomenon of childhood amnesia has looked at the obvious possibility that a simple explanation could be that young children just do not yet have the capacity for forming fully developed memories. But experiments have demonstrated that babies as young as six months have the ability to create short-term memories lasting minutes and even long-term memories that can last weeks and perhaps as long as months. So the thought is that maybe the issue is not the ability to form memories, but rather the capabilty of maintaining them. Studies have shown, for instance, that children and teenagers have earlier memories than do adults.
Language also appears to be an important factor in the process of remembering. The hippocampus in the brain is considered essential to the ability to form memories and it is not fully developed until about age seven. Language develops during roughly the same time period when an infant goes from one word utterences to complete fluency in a native languge between the ages of roughly one and six. And during that time the child learns to use words and concepts important to having and maintaning memories. Personal pronouns like I, me, you, they, us and concepts like "to remember" and "to forget" are learned and used properly. So the physiological structural ability to create and maintain memories overlaps the development of the language necessary to communicate those memories. The ability to verbalize an experience or event relates to the preditability concerning how well the experience or event will be recalled months or even years later. One study found that children a little older than two years who had been to an emergency room due to common childhood injuries could remember the event up to five years later whereas children who were younger than 26 months old, and who could not talk about and describe the event, remembered little if anything about it.
Much of the research on childhood amnesia concentrates on the function of language in helping to create and maintain memories. And to do this, the role of what is called "narrative expression" is examined. As Jeanne Shinskey, of the Royal Holloway University in London, describes narrative expression and its social function, "When parents reminisce with very young children about past events, they implicitly teach them narrative skills, what kinds of events are important to remember and how to structure talking about them in a way that others can understand." To further elaboate she explains. . .
Unlike simply recounting information for factual purposes, reminiscing revolves around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family stories maintain the memory's accessibility over time, and also increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and their degree of emotion. More coherent stories are remembered better. Maori adults have the earliest childhood memories (age 2.5) of any society studied so far thanks to Maori parents' highly elaborative style of telling family stories.
All of this, of course, got me thinking about what, by analogy, I could call "genealogical amnesia." Like lost childhood memories, how many people (who are non-genealogists) do we know who cannot even name their eight great grandparents, who apparently have lost the family "memory" of almost anyone beyond the parents of their parents? I have met people who sometimes struggle to recall the names of even all four of their grandparents and are clueless as to the maiden names of their grandmothers, let alone the maiden names of great grandmothers and earlier female ancestors. Genealogical amnesia!
It seems to me that the rise in popularity of genealogy as a hobby gives hope that through research and narrative sharing of research results, there can be more fact-based stories to pass on about ancestors and generational chains of reminiscence can be created that will help reverse the cases of "genealogical amnesia" so common in our culture.
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Copyright 2021, John D. Tew
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I was glad you mentioned the need of language skills in children to hold onto memories. (I just recently learned that when I read Lisa Genova's Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting.)
ReplyDeleteAs far as genealogical amnesia, I think lots of people just don't know, never knew, the names of grandparents. We're such a "now" society these days. However, my sister definitely has genealogical amnesia. We didn't know my father's parents (they we both dead by the time we were born) and my dad never talked about them. We did hear their names, including our grandmother's maiden name, at some point in our childhood. I can't remember the number of times my sister has asked me who was who of the grandparents on that side of the family, what their names are, etc. But, she's really interested in living people and can tell me the names of our step-cousins and plenty of details about them. I suppose some with genealogical amnesia just aren't interested enough to remember.
Great post!
Thank you for your comment -- much appreciated! I have a family member who has said to me more than once, "You are really into dead people." It is amazing to me that so many people have little or no interest in their departed ancestors. While the amount of DNA passed down from ancestors varies greatly, of course, there are social traits and other factors that survive through the generations independent of biology -- things like the foods we learn to like or never have tried because of earlier family preferences, the way we speak or certain words we use, etc. etc. The reasons for these things are very often unknown until the stories emerge through family history research. I find those things fascinating and have a hard time understanding why others often do not. ;-)
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