童年期遗忘的谜团过去一个世纪以来一直困惑着科学家们。为什么在人类的幼儿期，一个充满体验和学习新事物的阶段，却被许多难以理解的事物而笼罩？
What is your earliest memory? For me, I have a hazy1 recollection of standing2 in a leafy garden surrounded by silver birch trees when I was four years old.
I'm around average: some people remember events as far back as two years old, while for others, things seem patchy until seven or eight.
But what is consistent is that no one can remember their own birth or very early infancy3. And even after the first memory, most of us only have a sporadic4 collection of fleeting5, flickering6 mental images until much later in childhood.
The phenomenon is known as 'childhood amnesia7', a term coined by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. So, what's going on here?
Babies are, writes Zaria Gorvett for BBC Future, "sponges for new information, forming 700 new neural8 connections every second and wielding9 language-learning skills to make the most accomplished10 polyglot11 green with envy".
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