If you think you don't have the memories of when you were an infant, then you are wrong. A new study has found that the human brain stores the memories even during infancy, although you can't access them. 

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A research study at Yale University has revealed that the hippocampus—part of the brain responsible for saving memories—stores information during the earliest years of life, and hence, in adulthood, when one comes across the same information, they recognise it.

The study published in Science on March 20 said that memories can indeed be encoded in our brains in our first years of life. 

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Our inability to remember specific events from the first few years of life is called “infantile amnesia" and studying this area is quite challenging. 

“The hallmark of these types of memories, which we call episodic memories, is that you can describe them to others, but that’s off the table when you’re dealing with pre-verbal infants,” Nick Turk-Browne, professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, director of Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, and senior author of the study, said. 

The researchers used an approach in which they showed infants aged four months to two years an image of a new face, object, or scene. Later, they showed some new images along with the old ones. 

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“When babies have seen something just once before, we expect them to look at it more when they see it again,” said Turk-Browne. 

“So in this task, if an infant stares at the previously seen image more than the new one next to it, that can be interpreted as the baby recognizing it as familiar," he added. 

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What happens to these memories? 

Turk-Browne said that there are chances these memories may not be converted into long-term storage and thus simply don’t last long. 

Meanwhile, other chances include memories are still there long after encoding and we just can’t access them. 

The professor suspected that there are higher chances the latter may be the case. 

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