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Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Memory Paradox: Why We Forget Our Early Childhood
Most of us have one or two strong memories of our preschool years. This author’s were specks of gravel in her school’s sandpit. Mine was my grandfather’s death. The rest of those years is a big blur.
Nothing new there. Childhood amnesia is a thing; a great paradox in human life and memory. For it is in these formative years that we think, feel and learn the most. And yet, we remember nothing of those years except for a few gossamer flashes.
What is new though is that scientists are finally beginning to understand what exactly happens in our brain during these early years and why we forget most of it. They now have strong evidence to believe that forgetting is necessary for our brain’s transition into adulthood.
Psychologists assumed our early memories did not survive because they were never ‘stable’. But later experiments seemed to suggest that memories of children who are 3 or even sometimes younger persisted, with some limitations. The forgetting actually began much later – around age 7.
It is then that neuroscientists thought there must a strong physiological basis for this loss. Our brain, till we reach our teens, is busy laying down what the author calls ‘its circuitry’ and making them more conductive. This is why we have far more links between brain cells in our early years than in adulthood (and why children learn so many things so quickly). But as the brain begins to adapt and grow, the long-term memories formed in the initial years begin to disintegrate because our brain networks are “still under construction.” This constant restructuring of our memory circuits, an inevitable part of brain growth, conceals some and destroys most early memories. Which is why sometimes a strange stimulus makes us suddenly recall a long-forgotten childhood occurrence.
But here’s another catch. Ground-breaking studies have revealed that our earliest memories are often a mix of reality and fiction—stories we have heard from others and fabrications of our subconscious.
