Almost nobody can remember anything from before the age of two or three

Most adults' earliest memories date from around age three and a half, with almost nothing retrievable from infancy — a gap Sigmund Freud named 'infantile amnesia' in 1905. The leading modern explanation isn't repression but biology: the hippocampus and the language-based systems needed to store autobiographical memories are still immature in early childhood, so the memories were likely never durably encoded in the first place.

— Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality — 1905; modern account per Patricia Bauer's developmental memory research

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