Regarding the memory of people when they were young, I have said many times in the past, but I see that many friends on the Internet are still very confused and interested in this problem, so I will briefly summarize it and strive to make it more clear.

Both philosophy and physiology believe that consciousness is a mechanism unique to the human brain, a reflection of the world by the human brain. The meaning of this sentence is that consciousness is the human cognition of the world, and without everything in the world, there is no everything in human consciousness.

And memory is a part of human consciousness. Subdivided, consciousness includes self-awareness, experiential memory, and logical thinking. Self-awareness is the basis of consciousness as a whole and therefore of memory. That is to say, without self-awareness, there is no memory of experience, and there is no logical thinking.

But with self-awareness, thinking and memory also need tools, without which it is still difficult for humans to form thinking and memory.

So, what is self-awareness?

Self-consciousness can also be called self-cognitive awareness, which is not unique to human beings, but only human beings are the clearest and most mature. In layman's terms, self-consciousness is the recognition that oneself knows that it is oneself and distinguishes oneself from others and other objects.

In this way, we should be able to deduce that without self-consciousness, we cannot even distinguish ourselves from ourselves, let alone distinguish between ourselves and other people or other objects, how can we think and remember?

Human self-consciousness is brought from the mother's womb, that is to say, it is gradually engraved in the genes of human evolution over millions of years. But this inheritance is only the inheritance of genes, and it is not shown at birth, but gradually as the baby grows and matures.

It's a bit like some people have a genetic defect in their genes that can induce a disease, but the disease caused by this defect doesn't appear until the person grows older. Research and experiments have shown that human self-consciousness does not gradually appear until 18 months after birth, and it is only through the gradual accumulation of experience in world cognition, supplemented by thinking tools, that it gradually matures and becomes clear.

At this point, if you have a friend who has a baby at home, you can do a small test before and after the child is under 18 months. The simple way is to make some obvious marks on the child's body that he or she cannot see directly when he or she is not aware or asleep, and then let him (or her) see these marks in the mirror to see if he (or she) can look for the marks on his or her body according to the marks he or she sees in the mirror.

If there is such a reaction, it means that there is self-awareness, otherwise there is none.

This kind of experiment is called the "mirror test". Scientists have conducted mirror tests on some animals, and very few animals have passed the mirror test, only orangutans, macaques, bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants, European magpies, crows, pigeons, pigs and other animals have passed the experiment, indicating that there is a certain sense of self-awareness.

有些搞笑的是，在对猪的镜子试验中，测试了8头猪，其中7只通过了镜子实验，只有一只就是傻乎乎通不过，因此人们把这只猪叫“蠢猪”。

However, since the vast majority of pigs have passed the test, the whole "pig family" cannot be pitted because of a "stupid pig", and people still classify pigs as self-conscious "smart" animals. As a result, some foreign netizens called for stopping eating pork. And to the surprise of many, dogs and cats, which humans have always thought were very smart, did not pass the mirror test, that is, they were stupider than pigs.

Studies have shown that babies before 18 months of age generally fail to pass the mirror test.

What are memory and thinking tools?

Although some animals are self-aware, why don't they reach maturity and become more intelligent? This is because the biggest difference between other animals and humans is that the sense of self passed down in genes is not so strong in itself, and it lacks the tools for memory and thinking.

This tool is the concept of language and time.

After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and learning accumulation, human beings have formed a rich and complete language system, and the most important cell in various languages is concepts. Concept is an abstract expression obtained by human beings in the process of understanding the world, rising from perceptual understanding to rational understanding, abstracting the common essence of things, and generalizing them.

Concepts are formed on the basis of a clear distinction between themselves and other objects, and are therefore a high expression of self-cognitive awareness.

In layman's terms, concepts are all kinds of words that we usually come into contact with, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other words, all of which belong to the category of concepts. These concepts are the most basic building blocks of human thinking and memory, just like bricks building a wall, without these concepts, human beings cannot pile up thinking and memory.

Different regions and countries in the world, although the language is different, through translation, it is possible to communicate smoothly, and this is because human beings have formed a unified understanding of concepts. For example, tables, stools, cars, trains, houses, rooms, eating, pulling, going to work, getting off work, etc., no matter which nationality, what words and languages are used to communicate, through translation, these concepts are roughly the same, so that human beings all over the world can communicate, and human thinking and memory have building materials.

In addition to the concept of language, human beings have also had the concept of time and a unified time scale through the understanding of nature for thousands of years, such as 3600 days in a year, 0 hours in a day, 0 minutes and 0 seconds in a day, etc., so that communication and thinking can be more organized and sequential, and the thinking and memory are labeled with time.

Just like in a large warehouse full of goods, time is the label on these goods, so that human beings can find the one they need at any time in the mess of items.

The tools of language and time are unique to humans and unmatched by other animals. Only when a person grows up gradually, increases his knowledge and experience of the world, and becomes more and more mature in his language and concept of time, can his self-consciousness become more and more mature and clear, and his thinking and memory can be gradually formed and mature.

Some people always say that animals also have clear memories and thoughts, but after watching these complex processes, do you still think so?

If you don't use language and time tools, you can't think, let alone form memories

Now, each of us can test for ourselves whether we can think and remember without the basic tools of language and time. We will find that it is simply not possible to carry it out.

For example, there is such a passage in our memory: on 60 of the previous year, my friends and I went to the ends of the earth in Hainan once and had a good time, but a friend was sick at that time, and it ended early in order to send him to the hospital.

How many concepts and time markers are in this passage? The year before last, 6 month 0, that time, and very early days are all concepts of time, and the details must be sorted out, as well as the morning, afternoon, and what time it ends, how many hours of play, etc., may need to be marked in memory;

And me, friends, once, Hainan, the ends of the world, play, happy, sick, hospital, end, etc., all belong to the concept, it is these concepts that make the memory from the image into the abstract piled up in the mind, the details of these concepts and the names of friends, etc., when needed, with human experience and then extract them, restore them into the picture of memory.

These memories must be based on the premise of self-awareness and thinking, which is a process of transforming figurative thinking into abstract memory on the basis of distinguishing oneself from other things, and this process is full of people's knowledge and experience of the world.

Before the age of 3, human beings do not have a complete and clear sense of self-awareness, nor a mature concept of language, nor much understanding of the world and life experience, nor can they form abstract thinking, and of course, they cannot form a clear and complete memory.

However, some intelligent babies who form self-consciousness earlier and have an earlier ability to learn language may have some memories before the age of three, but they are also non-logical fragments.

It is generally believed that after the age of 7, you will gradually have a certain understanding of the world, and logical memories can begin to be established.