Is it possible to remember being in the womb

Of the seven-year-olds, 60 percent could still remember them. But of another set of kids, aged nine only 36 percent could remember. In short, childhood is its own little ice age, in which the memories most distant are being ploughed into the dirt to make way for fresh ones.

This has to do with changes in parts of the brain's structure. The hippocampus — the section of the brain most responsible for memory — has a large growth spurt around our third birthday.

There's also something called "synaptic pruning": the theory that we are born with way more neurones than we could ever need, and that, some time around the age of seven, the brain starts to trim all the neurones we're not using — meaning these poorly-formed memories are ripe for the cut.

The hippocampus undergoes a period of rapid development between three and five. The memories being encoded at that time are not being encoded terribly well.

But evolutionarily, that's OK — there's not much that happens to you that's beneficial to remember. Dr Shah doesn't believe that people can remember their own births. For many people, they have been told things that they then go on to remember as them actually experiencing this.

Your parents telling you specific details about your birth — that might lead you to fill in the rest. I trust my mind, but who's to say if it's real or not? Being born does sound dramatic. Freezing even.

Bright lights, lots of discombobulation," says Aaron. Very abrupt, very painful. Couldn't see or make sense of what was really happening… but the main emotion I felt was scared: taken from what I knew, into a whole new world. Though scientists have discounted Freud's year-old idea on the matter, there is still no consensus about the origin of childhood amnesia.

But theories abound. For a time, scientists believed that infants simply didn't have the mental capacity for declarative memories their brains are "immature". But 2- andyear-olds can remember and talk about events that happened months, or even more than a year, before, according to a study published in the journal Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Some scientists have proposed that our earliest memories remained blocked from us, because we had no language when they formed.

I just thought in pure feeling and senses. It was much quicker to think that way. I've tried retraining myself to think that quickly now and I can't. I can't not use words when I think now," she explained.

From learning how to talk to deciding she "might try walking now" to what it felt like to be held by her mother as a baby, Rebecca remembers it all. I woke up crying and thinking where am I. But not in words, in feelings. When Rebecca was three and had developed the vocabulary, she asked her mother why every night she was taken away from home. Her mum explained that she was dreaming and it was "in her mind". For the next year when Rebecca dreamt she'd ask the people in her dreams, "where's mind?

I want mind to wake me up and take me back home. Rebecca can recall every single school lesson she's ever had. So you'd assume she was a straight A student, but that's not how it works. It takes three months for Rebecca's memory to 'encode' so to speak. So her short term memory isn't that amazing, it's her long term memory that's crystal clear. If you ask her what kindergarten was like, it's too hard for her say.

There's too many memories to harness in her mind. But if you ask her what she did on her first day of kindergarten, she can focus her mind in an instant. She'll tell you what she was wearing, thinking and doing from the moment she woke up and excitedly put on her new school uniform to when she lay down her head on her pillow that night.

Hell, she can even tell you exactly what her bedroom looked like at that point in time and what the weather was like outside. Crucially, Ebbinghaus discovered that the way we forget is entirely predictable.

When they did the maths in the s, scientists discovered we recall far fewer memories between birth and the age of six or seven than you would expect.

Clearly something very different was going on. Intriguingly, the veil lifts earlier for some than for others. Some people can remember events from when they were just two years old , while others may have no recollection of anything that has happened to them for seven or eight years. On average, patchy footage appears from about three-and-a-half. More intriguingly still, discrepancies in forgetting have also been observed from country to country, where the average onset of our earliest memories can vary by up to two years.

Could this offer some clues to explain the blank beforehand? To find out, psychologist Qi Wang at Cornell University collected hundreds of memories from Chinese and American college students. As the national stereotypes would predict, American stories were longer, more elaborate and conspicuously egocentric.

Chinese stories, on the other hand, were briefer and more factual; on average, they also began six months later. Those with more detailed, self-focused memories seem to find them easier to recall. In other words, those with hazy memories: blame your parents.

She was about six.