Does my two-year-old daughter remember the womb? | Hacker News Reader

Does my two-year-old daughter remember the womb?

3 pointstiminman11 comments

My mom once read a theory that very young children can sometimes remember the birth experiences, or even living in the womb, so when my younger brother was about one, she asked him if he remembered being born. He didn't say anything, but what he did astounded us: He raised each of his arms and used his palms to press hard against both sides of his head, straining to squeeze his skull! It seemed like his was trying to show us what it was like to be squeezed from the birth canal.

Fast Forward about twenty years. Last night my two-year-old was afraid so my wife and I let her sleep in our bed with us. After I woke up this morning I heard her quietly wispering to herself, over and over: "siss-SAW siss-SAW, siss-SAW sissSAW".

I listened for a long time, thinking she was probably 'talking' in her sleep, and finally quietly asked what she was saying, in case she wasn't asleep.

She wasn't. She looked over at me and smiled. "Siss-SAW."

"Sister?"

"Siss-SAW."

We went back-and-forth like that a couple times. I realised I didn't understand what she was saying, which is not uncommon, though her speech is getting clearer - she's almost three. I decided to try a different angle, "Where did you hear that?

"Outside," she said first, and then she said, "when I was a baby in mommy's heart." I asked her if she meant she'd heard that sound before she was born, when she was living inside mommy's tummy (inaccurate, I know). She said yes.

It hit me. That siss-SAW sound was like the swishy sound a beating heart makes. You hear it coming out of the speakers of a heart monitor. We usually think "thump thump", but that is more a description of how a heartbeat feels than how it sounds. Was my daughter just telling me what I wanted to hear, or was she waking up this morning reminiscing about her mother's heartbeat from inside the womb?

My mom once read a theory that very young children can sometimes remember the birth experiences

Is you mother a neurologist? A memory researcher? A cognitive scientist, perhaps?

It's pretty well established that long-term memory formation doesn't really begin until after age 1. Here's a brief interview with a researcher: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/11.07/01-memory.htm...

Was my daughter just telling me what I wanted to hear?

Sure sounds that way.

That study tells of kids being given a toy for a little while, then revisiting them months later and seeing if they remember what to do with the toy.

For some reason I find that less than convincing, maybe they weren't interested in it, maybe it wasn't significant enough.

Birth is pretty much the single largest event in a babies first year of life trauma wise, I wouldn't be surprised if some remnant of that experience remained because of its intensity and I wouldn't be surprised if a baby remembered the sounds of being in the womb because of the duration of the exposure. Compared to either of those a toy seems to be pretty insignificant and if there is one thing the brain is really good at it is discarding stuff that isn't relevant. Older children that would remember the toy might have been more captivated by it. Babies that I know can be utterly fascinated by some things and completely oblivious to other things, then reverse their interest a while later for no reason that I as an adult can fathom.

Of course the memories of any early experience will fade over time but I wouldn't rule them out so quickly based on this specific experiment, which seems to assume rather a lot about the subjects desire to remember that particular toy and about vision, not memory per se. It's a pretty indirect test.

If something doesn't interest me I won't remember it even today, and I take it as read that my 'long term memory' has been formed by now.

Interesting reading:

http://www.google.com/search?q=do+babies+remember+the+womb

If there is a definitive study that babies can not form memories that could make it through to the age of the OPs child then you'd have to wonder how come babies age 1 can use words and seem to be able to understand some pretty complicated concepts as well as having learned how to use a good part of their bodies musculature, it's not at all rare to have 1 year olds that can walk or even run. If they can do all that without long term memory you'd have to posit some mechanism that allows them to do all this with a memory that spans at most a day. After all, if every day is a new day then you would have to explain the kind of character development you seen in babies during their first year and all this other stuff that I think is definitely memory based without the ability to form long term memories.

Also, vision is a relatively new thing for a newborn, they've seen colours but not actual objects and it takes them a fair amount of time to start to make sense of our 3D world. Sound is different, babies can hear pretty good at a relatively early time during the gestation period (about 5 months in), which means that they then have 4 months to be exposed to their moms heartbeat in a way that they could be aware of it.

Also, you can refresh memories by re-thinking of something that you still remember and you can remember that experience as something by itself, so even with only a shorter term memory you could theoretically carry things over a longer period. Shades of 'memento' there.

I'm certainly not claiming that infants have the equivalent of Korsakoff's syndrome. And there certainly has been research that indicates that babies respond differently to the speech rhythms of the language they are exposed to in utero than foreign languages, and that infants are calmed by recordings of the fetal heartbeat/mother's heartbeat combination. In fact, when my eldest daughter was born, I bought a CD ("Music to Be Born By", by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead) designed for this specific purpose.

My point is that there is pretty broad agreement that 2 year olds do not have conscious memories of birth or in utero life, of the nature described by the OP's anecdote. In fact, the sound of the maternal heartbeat was presumably so constant that it is difficult to imagine a fetus forming a conscious memory of it, as it would lack the "novelty" necessary for memory formation.

> the sound of the maternal heartbeat was presumably so constant that it is difficult to imagine a fetus forming a conscious memory of it, as it would lack the "novelty" necessary for memory formation.

That's a good point, actually. If something is repetitive enough it fades in to the background. I remember working next to an open window in Toronto while there was major construction going on to replace the road right next to the office. The windows were open because we didn't have money for AC and it was right under a roof. The first two days were terrible, after that we stopped hearing the jackhammers. Only when they finished did we notice...

You stopped noticing them, but you do all the same have a very vivid memory of their existence.

We tend to have memories of dramatic experiences; it does seem logical that being born stands out above being given a toy.

It may be "pretty well established" but I don't believe it.

I read your link, and you are basing memory based on an experiment that is unlikely to have strong emotional impact for the kid. Without strong emotional impact, I wouldn't expect memory to last. That says nothing about what can happen with memories of more impactful events.

Here is an anecdote that happened with my son. Before he was 7 months he spent several hours a week in a mommy and me run by one Tandy Parks. Then we moved and he never saw her again. When he was 1 1/2 we had the opportunity to drop in on that mommy and me class. Despite normally being shy, he quickly found his way to her lap, which is most emphatically not a behavior he shows with strangers.

Going back to your link, the researcher says, "Most single experiences before age 8 months, unless they are very emotional or painful, are probably lost." That qualification makes perfect sense to me, and is very relevant to the example at hand. My son had very emotional interactions with Tandy, and so he still had associations with her. I'm sure he wouldn't have remembered a toy from the same period. And particularly not a toy he had limited interactions with.

Furthermore the researcher has another good reason to put that qualification in there. A number of research studies that demonstrated that strong pain can alter responses to pain months to years later, even in very small infants. This is clear evidence of memory. In particular these studies have focused on comparing the responses of circumcised and uncircumcised males to shots. Many groups of researchers have demonstrated that circumcised males have more trouble with pain at 6 months. Some research suggests it may still apparent as late as 2.5 years.

If you're talking about conscious and structured memories, they appear to start much later than 1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia for more on that topic. Bringing it back to my son, at 5 he shows no conscious memories of things that happened when he was 2 (though he still has positive associations with things we did together), but he has some memories from when he was 3, and a lot of very specific memories from age 4.

I read your link, and you are basing memory based on an experiment [...]

No, I'm not. I'm basing memory on a large, varied body of research, of which the link was just one example.

My point is that the research, as a whole, is not supportive of the idea of infants remembering their birth or in utero experiences.

Detailed, constructed memories? Clearly not.

However given the research on circumcision, I'd be curious to see whether babies who were born through natural childbirth have a different reaction to shots at 6 months than ones born in a planned Caesarean.

I believe it.

Welcome to HN, Jason!

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