Remembering our childhood

"Many people claim to remember events or impressions from as young as two or even into babyhood. But how much can we trust our memories, especially those of early childhood? Do you really remember going to the seaside as a toddler that summer day and grazing your knee, or do those vivid images derive from what your aunt has often told you?" "In this book, Karl Sabbagh looks at the growing scientific understanding of the nature of memories from early childhood. Memory isn't a bank of recordings to be replayed, but rather something dynamic, in which scenes and events are reconstructed, and continually prone to shaping by other information. For young children, memory is a tool for learning, and memories from before the age of two are discarded. Whatever we may think, we simply cannot remember back to such early times. The experiments of Elizabeth Loftus and other psychologists show how unreliable our memories are, particularly those of childhood, and how easy it is for false memories to become planted in our minds." "Yet, Sabbagh points out, the implications of this work do not seem to have reached the courts. The scientific study of childhood memory was stimulated by several high-pro