It is a source of frustration, coupled with a puzzling mystery. Where did the earliest years of our life go? The events we experienced during our first three years seem to evaporate from our brains.

This great void in our adult memory was named "infantile amnesia" by Sigmund Freud. But where does this apparent forgetting of our early childhood come from? Was our brain too immature to encode memory traces, even rudimentary ones? Were these traces formed in the brain of the young child we once were, only to be erased due to a lack of reinforcement? Or do they persist in a latent state, inaccessible to recall? The answer is not simple, as studying the infant brain poses a technical challenge.

An American team has risen to this challenge. Their work, published in the journal Science on March 21, reveals a surprise. By the age of 12 months, the human hippocampus seems capable of encoding rudimentary "episodic memories," the foundations of our autobiographical memory – well before the age of the first memories we can recount as adults.

The researchers, coordinated by Nicholas Turk-Browne from Yale University, accomplished a small feat: placing 26 young children, aged 4.2 months to 24.9 months, in the tunnel of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and then studying their brain responses to the images presented to them.

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