A truly amazing characteristic of human memory is that all people seem to experience a

certain type of very specific amnesia, or the inability to remember events that have
occurred in their lives. This particular kind of amnesia, which is apparently experienced
quite universally, is the inability to remember events that took place in the first few
years of life; even though the first few years of life are a time when learning is at its
highest and tremendous amounts of information are learned, people seem to remember
basically nothing from this period. When Freud first noted this interesting aspect of
memory in 1805, he referred to it as childhood amnesia.

Since the time that Freud first noted this phenomenon, numerous studies have been
conducted to learn about it, and the results of these studies are that people tend not to
remember anything from the first three to five years of their lives. A possible difficulty
in this type of study is that one cannot simply ask people if they remember events from
the first five years of life because they may think that they remembers things, but there
is no way to check whether the remembered events actually occurred. Even when this
difficulty is overcome in experiments, at least somewhat, by testing whether or not
subjects can remember events that have been well documented from childhood, such as
family celebrations or births of siblings, the results remain constant, that people tend not
to remember anything from the first three to five years of life.

The extract gives an insight into the nature of infantile amnesia and the barriers
impeding in the process of undertaking the research. Noticeably, this memory
loss exerts a considerable impact on worldwide patients. Specifically, during the
formative years, however extensive and optimal acquirement is, individuals
appear to have no recollection of this timeline. Despite a great many
experiments having been carried out, the subjects are unlikely to reminisce
about the events within the first half decade of their lives. Furthermore, there
are two obstacles remaining in this scientific field. The first lies in the fact that
their retrospection could not be validated by virtue of inadequate evidence. On
the contrary, even if the sufferers retain firmly established knowledge, these
individuals are not bound to recall any evocations at that point.