We’re always amazed when our 2 year old remembers things from months ago. Of course his mind is a lot less cluttered than his parents’. I often wonder what his first memory will be when he gets older and hope that it won’t be a painful one. Infantile amnesia, the term for that profound lack of memory we have for our first few years of life, could be either a storage or retrieval problem. Evidence supports that retrieval, not immaturity of our brain’s storage, is at the root of our inability to recall our early years. Babies have demonstrated memory more than a year later for experiences they had at both 8 weeks and 6 months. As we learn language and our brains are “pruned” for a different form of memory and recall, it may be that we just don’t know how to access early memories anymore. The indexing system is lost.