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Infantile amnesia and body memories
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Document about infantile amnesia and body memories (including research).
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Infantile Amnesia and Body MemoriesKey Words:
o Infantile amnesia = the idea that most or all of our memories are lost before the age
of 2 and very few exist before the age of 5.
o Body memories = trauma can be stored in the body and then released from the body
which leads to healing.
Key Studies:
Nadel & Zola-Morgan (1984): growth and maturation of the hippocampus overrides
early memories or isn’t developed enough to hold memories. Episodic memory
attached to self isn’t well stored, but we do have some memories e.g., how to walk.
Howe & Courage (1993): you need to develop a sense of self before you can
categorise autobiographical memories. Sense of self develops around 2 years old,
the same time infantile amnesia begins to fade.
Josselyn & Frankland (2012): mechanisms underlying infantile amnesia: biological
explanations – neurogenesis in the hippocampus. At age 6 people are likely to have
one whole memory, neurogenesis and memory stability are inversely related. The
inability to form stable, persistent memories in early life coincides with a period of
high neurogenesis – persistent memories come about when neurogenesis declines.
Theory supported by evidence in rats and guinea pigs, guinea pigs don’t have
infantile amnesia and also have very low neurogenesis, opposite in rats.
Howe (2019): painful traumatic memories in early life often don’t translate into
declarative memories.
Van Der Kolk (1994): (the body keeps the score book) trauma is stored in semantic
(body) memory as an emergency response to trauma. Traumatic memories can
emerge as affect states, somatic sensations (problem) or visual images.
Rothschild (2000): (the body remembers) influenced by Van Der Kolk, “trauma is a
psychophysiological experience even when the traumatic event causes no bodily
harm”, have to health the traumatised body and mind.
McNally (2005): alternative view, even if trauma does affect the physiological
system, it will be remembered in the mind.
Smith (1993): the theory of body memories is used to describe feelings for which the
individual has no visual, auditory or other sensory memory of. It is claimed that cells,
DNA or the ‘body’ contains 100% recall of what the mind represses or forgets, this is
based on the idea that the body has no intellectual defences and can’t ‘screen out’
memory imprints. “When therapists claim cods, headaches, rashes are body
memories, clients develop attentional biases or predispositions to interpret
mundane sensations to serious illnesses as body memories”.
Notes:
Competing ideas: Freud and some modern trauma dissociation theorists believe early
trauma is the cause of pathology and some think it can be relived and remembered and has
to be in order to heal. Others believe in infantile amnesia.
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