What If We Are Born With Knowledge We Forget? | Unveiled

<h4>

What If We’re Born With Knowledge We Forget?</h4>

Do you remember your first day on Earth? How about your first week, month, or year? As vital as those early times are to our existence, and as dramatic as they would no doubt have seemed to our freshly formed brains, no one is able to fully recall them. Today, we’ll look at the science as to why, the philosophical approaches to explain what’s happening, and the theories on what we might have forgotten, in the meantime.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if we’re born with knowledge that we forget?

How would you rate your memory? How far back in time can you recall with accuracy? Of course, there have been countless studies into the reliability of memory… but in all of them there’s a vast, automatic blank spot where the cognitive processes at play are still largely unknown; during our infant lives. Everybody’s born; everyone has twelve whole months before their first birthday; thirty-six before they turn three. That’s more than 150 weeks of our opening gambit on Earth, but almost all of it is lost to us later in life. Perhaps flashes remain, indistinct visuals and hard-to-place emotions, but for the most part it’s gone. So, how should we feel about that?

At the heart of today’s question is an age-old philosophical debate; innatism versus empiricism. In one corner, innatism argues that we are born with certain, fundamental ideas (and perhaps even beliefs) already in place. It says that while we go on to acquire knowledge throughout our lives, there are certain aspects of it that we’ve never had to learn because they’re simply there, within us. In the other corner, empiricism argues that, actually, the human mind is a blank canvas at the beginning of life, and that all of our knowledge is gathered post birth, imprinted onto our brains thanks to sensory experience. This is otherwise known as the tabula rasa theory, i.e. the blank or scraped slate.

Innatism can be further split into smaller, more specific groups, including psychological nativism, which broadly is the belief that innate ideas exist… but that they’re genetically created, in some way. In ancient history, the Greek philosopher Plato was one of the first known innatists, wrestling with the feeling that there are some things that human beings just know… although Plato’s mechanism as to why was still quite vague, loosely linked to ideas of the soul. Therefore, many of today’s innatists tend towards nativism, as it promises a more solid scientific grounding. And, indeed, there are some physical studies which seemingly back it up, as well, including multiple experiments to show that a new-born brain does have certain clusters of neurons already formed within it. These clusters then seem almost universal, leading to the suggestion that we are indeed born with some effective building blocks for knowledge - with what might be described as innate ideas.

The seventeenth century philosopher, René Descartes, offered something of a bridge between innatism and empiricism… although ultimately he, too, was an innatist first and foremost. For Descartes, it could be that empirical evidence encountered throughout one’s life might serve to reveal to us our own innate ideas. Here, it’s as though we could move through our lives essentially unaware of all that we already know, until such time as a here-and-now experience unlocks that preheld knowledge. Naturally, empiricists - including, most notably, John Locke in the late seventeenth century - came down hard on Descartes. For them, the blank slate was (and is) still entirely unmarked until we begin our own sensory experience - i.e., until we begin our own lives.

What’s your verdict on this issue? Are humans born with innate ideas already inside our minds? Or are the empiricists right, and everything we know we’ve learnt? On both sides, the argument usually falls back onto some of the most basic, underlying aspects of reality - such as language, or the knowledge that something can exist without it being seen - but how do we get to know that? The debate still rages.

It’s a debate that can be turned on its head, though. Because, rather than considering how it is that we arrive at all the knowledge we have, some argue that actually we lose a lot of knowledge along the way. The hippocampus is a key region of the brain for memory development, but we aren’t born with it fully formed. Instead, it can take between two and three years before the hippocampus is up to scratch, which is why it’s so rare to accurately remember your earliest times, in the first place. We have a massive blank spot there, because our infant brains - at the time - were not capable (or didn’t feel it necessary) to keep a mental log of everything that happened. But, of course, the major event that happened to that infant brain was its own birth and, going even further back, its own growth within the womb. We’re constantly told that first impressions count for a lot, but our first impressions of life are seemingly irretrievable… although some believe that there could be far wider implications to that, as well.

On one level, for all its value, could there be a problem that grows with the hippocampus and memory itself? Of course, without our memories, we would certainly be lost, emotionally and physically, and also constantly at risk, without ever remembering what is (and isn’t) safe to eat, for example, or where is (and isn’t) safe to walk. The immense challenges of a worsening memory tragically reveal themselves in cases of dementia and Alzheimers, which are typically (although not exclusively) encountered during old age - when a whole lifetime’s worth of memories are at risk. However, how should we feel about what we’ve all lost from infancy? 

Over time, as they rack up memories, all of our brains change and evolve in a  unique way… but not always in preferred or enjoyable ways. We pick up trauma, fear, anxiety, perhaps prejudice, all of which serve to bend and shape our life experiences in the present and the future. And perhaps, also, to negatively muddy our memories of the past, as well. We can become unhappy, as a result, and sometimes desperately unhappy. And, while it is possible to return to balance and then happiness again, it isn’t possible to outright erase memories (or to live without memories) as we all seemingly did, in our earliest lives. The innocence of youth is clearly a cliché, and unfortunately not always applicable… but another cliché is that many wish to turn back time, or to return to a simpler time. For our developed brains, carrying the baggage of memory, that so-called “innocence” is impossible to regain. Turn that around, though, and the innocent state could then be viewed as knowledge; knowledge we’ve forgotten.

But, could there yet be more to it than even that? Perhaps one of the most unsettling, largely unexplained phenomena to modern minds is children who seemingly report memories not just of their earliest lives, but of past lives before they were born. A leading voice in this unusual field is Dr. Jim B. Tucker, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Since the early 2000s, Tucker has compiled an ever-growing number of seemingly bizarre cases, in which children up to around the age of seven apparently recall events and experiences that either definitely happened before they were born, definitely happened to another person, or about which they can’t possibly know (or have learnt) within their own, short lifetimes. For example, and again disturbingly, Tucker’s work includes in the majority of cases a direct (or indirect) reference to a previously, in-some-way traumatic death.

No one case is the same, although there are some shared qualities - including, as well, references to when the child was an adult, or to having met people that their parents know… but that they do not. While there is no confirmed, scientific link, as of yet, it might be argued that memories of past lives should be more closely investigated along a psychologically nativist way of thinking. That is, do past life memories in any way emerge out of inherited, innate ideas? Really, nativism itself doesn’t stretch that far. Those who discuss it - including the likes of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker - tend more toward suggesting that the human brain comes as if pre-set with certain psychological capabilities, rather than specific and distinct memories. But, nevertheless, what do you think is happening whenever a child recalls the impossible? And could any of this, ultimately, be linked back to metaphysical theories on reincarnation?

That’s a question for another video… but, for now, this remains a mysterious part of the human story. What we know is that there is a long stretch of time, at the beginning of all of our lives, that our memories don’t (and can’t) retain. And that, arguably, is why we might be born with knowledge that we forget.