Our earliest years are a time of rapid learning, yet we typically cannot recall specific experiences from that period — a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia.A new study published in Science on Thursday challenges assumptions about infant memory, showing that young minds do indeed form memories. The question remains, however, why these memories become difficult to retrieve later in life.”I’ve always been fascinated by this mysterious blank spot we have in our personal history,” Nick Turk-Browne, professor of psychology at Yale and the study’s senior author, told AFP.Around the age of one, children become extraordinary learners — acquiring language, walking, recognizing objects, understanding social bonds, and more. “Yet we remember none of those experiences — so there’s a sort of mismatch between this incredible plasticity and learning ability that we have,” he said.Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, hypothesized that early memories are repressed, though science has since largely dismissed the idea of an active suppression process. Instead, modern theories focus on the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for episodic memory, which is not fully developed in infancy.Turk-Browne, however, was intrigued by clues from previous behavioral research. Since babies cannot verbally report memories before acquiring language, their tendency to gaze longer at familiar things provides important hints.Recent rodent studies monitoring brain activity have also shown that engrams — patterns of cells that store memories — form in the infant hippocampus but become inaccessible over time — though they can be artificially reawakened through a technique that uses light to stimulate neurons.But until now, pairing observations of infants with brain imaging had been out of reach, as babies are famously uncooperative when it comes to sitting still inside a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine — the device that tracks blood flow to “see” brain activity.- Psychedelic patterns -To overcome this challenge, Turk-Browne’s team used methods his lab has refined over the years — working with families to incorporate pacifiers, blankets, and stuffed animals; holding babies still with pillows; and using psychedelic background patterns to keep them engaged.Still, inevitable wiggling led to blurry images that had to be discarded, but the team accounted for this by running hundreds of sessions.In total, 26 infants participated — half under a year old, half over — while their brains were scanned during a memory task adapted from adult studies.First, they were shown images of faces, scenes, or objects. Later, after viewing other images, they were presented with a previously seen image alongside a new one.”We quantify how much time they spend looking at the old thing they’ve seen before, and that’s a measure of their memory for that image,” said Turk-Browne.By comparing brain activity during successful memory formation versus forgotten images, the researchers confirmed that the hippocampus is active in memory encoding from a young age.This was true for 11 of 13 infants over a year old but not for those under one. They also found that babies who performed best on memory tasks showed greater hippocampal activity.”What we can conclude accurately from our study is that infants have the capacity to encode episodic memories in the hippocampus starting around one year of age,” said Turk-Browne.- Forgotten Memories -“The ingenuity of their experimental approach should not be understated,” researchers Adam Ramsaran and Paul Frankland wrote in an accompanying Science editorial.But what remains unresolved is what happens to these early memories. Perhaps they are never fully consolidated into long-term storage — or perhaps they persist but become inaccessible.Turk-Browne suspects the latter and is now leading a new study testing whether infants, toddlers, and children can recognize video clips recorded from their own perspective as younger babies.Early, tentative results suggest these memories might persist until around age three before fading. Turk-Browne is particularly intrigued by the possibility that such fragments could one day be reactivated later in life.

The United States fell to its lowest happiness ranking ever partly due to a rise in the number of Americans eating their meals alone, an annual UN-sponsored report said Thursday.Finland ranked as the world’s happiest country for the eighth straight year in the World Happiness Report, with locals and experts thanking its grand lakes and strong welfare system for boosting its mood.Afghanistan, plagued by a humanitarian catastrophe since the Taliban regained control in 2020, once again ranked as the unhappiest country in the world.The United States fell to 24th place, its lowest score since the report was first published in 2012, when it recorded its highest showing at number 11.”The number of people dining alone in the United States has increased 53 percent over the past two decades,” the authors said, noting that sharing meals “is strongly linked with well-being”.In 2023, roughly one in four Americans reported eating all their meals alone the previous day, the report said.”The increasing number of people who eat alone is one reason for declining well-being in the United States,” it said.It also noted that the United States was one of few countries to see a rise of so-called “deaths of despair” — from suicide or substance abuse — at a time when those deaths are declining in a majority of countries.The report surveyed people worldwide in 2022-2024, before US President Donald Trump’s shakeup of national and global affairs since returning to the White House in January.Nordic countries all stayed among the 10 happiest, with Denmark, Iceland and Sweden trailing Finland, which slightly extended its lead over runner-up Denmark.Meanwhile, Costa Rica and Mexico entered the top 10 for the first time, at the sixth and 10th spot respectively.The happiness ranking is based on a three-year average of individuals’ self-assessed evaluations of life satisfaction, as well as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption.- Finns ‘relatively satisfied’ -“It seems that Finnish people are relatively satisfied with their lives,” Frank Martela, an assistant professor specialised in well-being and happiness research at Aalto University, told AFP.It could largely be explained by Finns living in “quite a well-functioning society”, he said.”Democracy is functioning well, we have free elections, free speech, low levels of corruption and all of these have shown to predict higher levels of national well-being,” Martela said.He added that the Nordic countries also all have relatively strong welfare systems — with parental leave, unemployment benefits and mostly universal healthcare — which also contribute to higher levels of well-being on average.Eveliina Ylitolonen, a 23-year-old student in Helsinki, said she believed that Finns’ focus on enjoying beautiful nature could help explain the consistently high level of happiness in the Nordic country, known for its deep forests and over 160,000 lakes.”Nature is an important part of this happiness,” Ylitolonen told AFP.Jamie Sarja-Lambert, a professional video gamer who moved to Finland from the United Kingdom, agreed.”Seems like everyone is a lot more in touch with nature, going outside and socialising, more of a community,” he told AFP.This year, the authors of the happiness report said new evidence indicates that engaging in acts of generosity and believing in the kindness of others are “significant predictors of happiness, even more so than earning a higher salary”.They also noted that in general “people are too pessimistic about the kindness of their communities”, and that “the return rate of lost wallets is much higher than people expect”.Nordic countries also “rank among the top places for expected and actual return of lost wallets”.