Experts have rejected celebrity claims that they can remember incredibly early experiences in their life, including being in the womb.
Empire actor Terrence Howard stated during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he remembers “the entire nine” months of being in the womb and even “being compressed” and “wanting to panic” during his own birth.
Actor Nicholas Cage made similar claims earlier this month.
While there are around 100 people with a condition that gives them a photographic memory of their early childhood, the four experts DailyMail.com spoke to said remembering being in the womb or being born is “impossible”.
Human babies are “quite neurologically underdeveloped and not able to remember,” Robert Friedland, a professor of neurology at the University of Louisville, told DailyMail.com.
Empire actor Terrence Howard had a great interview on The Joe Rogan Experience on Saturday, during which he floated some wild ideas about the universe.
“The brain’s memory systems do not function well until several years of age,” he added.
Howard claimed he remembered being “maybe six months inside the womb.”
“And I was like, ‘Okay, don’t forget I’m here, don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget,'” he told Joe Rogan.
He continued: ‘Go to sleep. You wake up again. Now something moves in front of you and you say, “Oh, that’s my friend.”
“But I gave it a different name, I didn’t know it was my hand.”
—Do you remember going out? Rogan, astonished, continued to ask.
“I remember it was compressed and you want to panic,” Howard responded.
“But you’re flooded with some serotonin and dopamine, to the point where you feel relaxed and go back to sleep.”
“And you remember being born,” he added, stating that he also remembers being circumcised.
But the reality is that most of us will never remember anything before the age of three, Dr. Dung Trinh, an internal medicine doctor in California and director of the Health Brain Clinic, told DailyMail.com.
This is due to something called “infantile amnesia,” Dr. Trinh said, where most previous memories are lost.
“When we are born, our brain size is probably a quarter of the size of the adult brain,” Dr. Trinh said.
As the brain develops, it creates new brain cells at a rapid rate, disrupting previous memories and overwriting them.
Most of our memories are formed and stored in the hippocampus.
“At birth, the hippocampus is not yet fully developed,” Dr. Trinh said, meaning it cannot perform important memory retrieval functions until years later.
As for remembering being in the womb, “it’s certainly not a case that I’ve ever known or heard of,” she said.
Other brain regions are also involved in memory, such as the prefrontal cortex, said Dr. Aaron Reuben, a neuropsychologist and doctoral candidate at Duke University.
Like the hippocampus, “it is not developed enough to assist in the storage and retrieval of memories over several years,” he told DailyMail.com.
The brain structure responsible for emotional memory, the amygdala, is more developed than the structure for episodic memory, Dr. Trinh said.
“It may be possible to remember certain emotions related to birth, but that is also rare,” he said.
This means that an emotionally significant event like a traumatic birth can affect how a child behaves later in life, even though they may not be able to remember the event itself, Dr. Trinh said.
But it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll remember anything from the womb, he added.
Actor Nicholas Cage also claimed that he remembered seeing “faces in the dark” while still in his mother’s womb when asked about his first childhood memory on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert earlier this month.
The Hollywood star explained: “I know this sounds really far away and I don’t know if it’s real or not, but sometimes I think I can go back to the womb and feel like I could see faces in the dark.” or something.
“I know it sounds powerfully abstract, but somehow it seems like maybe it happened.”
Dr. Reuben was not convinced.
“While learning occurs very early, potentially in utero, the ability to consciously remember images, sounds and experiences later in life depends on a mature hippocampus,” he said, which newborn babies do not have.
At one point, Howard claimed to be able to remember being in his mother’s womb, echoing claims made by fellow actor Nicolas Cage on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month.
The 59-year-old Hollywood star explained: ‘Let me think. Listen, I know this sounds really far away and I don’t know if it’s real or not, but sometimes I think I can go back to the womb and feel like I could see faces in the dark or something.
Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM, is the ability to accurately remember details of daily experiences that took place over many previous decades.
The condition was not discovered until 2000 and is still not well understood.
Becky Sharrock, 34, the only known case of HSAM in Australia, says she remembers the day she was born and the “intense curiosity” she felt as a newborn baby.
‘There is a memory I have and I suppose it was my birth. I found myself wrapped in a blanket and then they cut my ankle with a tag,” she said. 60 minutes Australia.
“Of course, this cannot be proven 100 percent to skeptics,” he said.
‘I had an intense curiosity. When he was a baby he didn’t know the word curiosity, but he wanted to know everything about everything. He was probably 5,000 percent more curious than he is now.’
This is “more feasible,” Dr. Trinh said. ‘The brain is obviously more developed after birth than when it is in the womb. I think it’s rare, but probably doable.
Another argument for why we can’t remember our births is that autobiographical memories require a sense of identity, which we don’t develop until around age two.
“We have no idea what happens when we are born,” Dr. Trinh said.
Dr. Keith Vossel, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, added: “We haven’t developed any kind of language processing skills or any kind of sense of self at that stage where an autobiographical memory can be created.” “.
Dr. Vossel said Howard and Cage could be remembering “false memories” of a “vivid dream.”
“Some false memories can be created through dreams,” he said. ‘Since sleep is important for creating new memories and consolidating them, it can also be a time when we create new memories that are false.
‘It may be that you are remembering a vivid dream you had in the past and have created a reality around it. “It has been reported that this may occur,” Dr. Vossel added.
Cage admitted, “I don’t even know if I remember being in the womb.”
Dr Reuben told DailyMail.com: ‘It is perfectly possible and quite common for false memories to be “implanted” into our memory system.
“In essence, we can have very vivid memories of things that never happened; all we have to do is imagine it often enough.”
The memory of being in the womb may seem real to Howard and Cage, Dr. Vossel said, because “they have experienced it over and over again in their minds, and
‘It is essentially a memory that seems real to them. and that is why you have experienced it over and over again in your mind. And so it becomes a reality and a truth for that person.’
Howard and Cage may want to believe they can remember their own births and may want to impress an interviewer or their fans with their strange experience.
“(Wanting to seem interesting) could be a motivating factor,” Dr. Vossel said.
Dr. Trinh said that confirmation bias (the tendency to search for or remember information in a way that confirms prior beliefs) is “certainly possible” in Howard and Cage’s recollection of their in utero experiences.
‘We can’t really prove either. Because none of us is present at anyone’s birth and we don’t remember our own.’