Why can't we remember things from infancy?

New from Laura DeNardo's lab at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the team found that a brain region called the retrosplenial cortex physically matures on the same timeline that memories shift from fleeting to permanent. 

Early in life, its neurons stay densely wired and barely reactivate during recall, but as the brain develops, those synapses get refined & the region kicks into gear during memory retrieval. Even more striking, artificially reactivating an infant memory's neurons weeks later could bring back a "forgotten" memory, suggesting it was never erased, just inaccessible. 

These findings present a great window into how the architecture of memory itself develops. 

Read the entire paper: Retrosplenial cortex maturation aligns with the transition from infant forgetting to persistent memory