There have been stories of people who say they have memories from they were still in their mother’s womb. A simple search online would yield a list of people who claim that they can remember being in their mother’s womb, up until their mother gave birth.
However, is there any truth to their stories? Is it possible for children to remember anything from the womb?
It’s called prenatal memory
Most psychologists find it hard to believe that a person can have any memory of when they were still inside their mother’s womb. Most people don’t even have any memories of when they were just 1 year old, so it’s a bit of a stretch to think that someone could remember being inside the womb so vividly.
Interestingly, some researchers tried to do an experiment in order to test whether or not babies can remember anything from when they were still in the womb.
What they did was they asked mothers-to-be to play a recorded sound clip of the nonsense word “tatata” every so often to their unborn babies. Once the babies were born, the researchers checked the babies’ brain activity when the word “tatata” is played.
They found that when the babies who were exposed to “tatata” heard the phrase, there was significant activity in their brains which meant that they were able to recognize and remember that word. When they tested it on other babies, those babies didn’t show a response.
Why can’t most people remember being babies?
Now, if babies can remember things while they were in the womb, then why can’t most people recall any memories from when they were still babies?
According to Dr. Ulric Neisser, a psychologist at Emory University, “At around 3 or 4, you find mothers talking a lot about past events to a kid. Then a kid starts to value her memories and starts to tell stories about herself. The events you can easily remember as an adult are those you had, back then, put into a narrative, at least in your own mind.”
Regardless, it’s still important to make sure that your little one has a lot of happy memories, even if they’re still little. The memories that they build while they’re still young does have an impact on them when they grow up, so those memories do last, even if they can’t recall it perfectly.
There’s no such thing as “they’re too young to remember”, as they will surely recall the happy emotions and the bonds that you create with them while they’re still young.
*Republished with permission from theAsianparent Philippines
Source: familyshare.com
READ: Researchers discover that learning about language starts in the womb