Babyhood Non-memories

There’s this book, Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am?, on simple answers to great questions kids ask. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot had this answer to an 8-year-old's question about why we don't have memories from the time we were babies and toddlers:

“We use our brain for memory. In the first few years of our lives, our brain grows and changes a lot, just like the rest of our body. Scientists think that because the parts of our brain that are important for memory have not fully developed when we are babies, we are unable to store memories in the same way that we do when we are older.

Also, when we are very young we do not know how to speak. This makes it difficult to keep events in your mind and remember them later, because we use language to remember what happened in the past.”

I tend to both agree and disagree with the first part of the answer. On the one hand, babies learn very fast. How can they do that if they have no way to “store” data and associations? On the other hand, when my daughter was a baby, during her midnight feeds, I used to try to make the sound of a spoon mixing her Lactogen as a signal that milk was on the way, but she never got the message… she just cried louder!

The second part of the answer does make sense. If we didn’t have a “data format” (aka language) identified as babies and toddlers, what are the odds that something that was logged back then in baby gibberish format would still be interpretable later once we’d learnt a language? Was the old data wiped clean as being not read’able anymore?

Whether or not Sharot’s answer is right, it would be way more fun if the correct answer is what Calvin suspected: