Experts have dismissed claims by celebrities that they can remember incredibly early life experiences, including being in the womb.
Empire actor Terrence Howard stated during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he remembers “the whole nine” months of being in the womb and even “being compressed” and wanting to “freak out” during his own birth.
Actor Nicholas Cage made similar claims earlier this month.
Although there are around 100 people with a condition that gives them a photographic memory of their very early childhood, all four experts DailyMail.com spoke to said it is ‘impossible’ to remember being in the womb found or born.
Human babies are “neurologically quite undeveloped and incapable of memory,” Robert Friedland, professor of neurology at the University of Louisville, told DailyMail.com.
Empire actor Terrence Howard had quite the interview on The Joe Rogan Experience on Saturday – in which he put forward some wild ideas about the universe
“The memory systems in the brain do not work properly until we are several years old,” he added.
Howard claimed he remembered being “in the womb for maybe six months.”
“And I said, ‘Okay, don’t forget I’m here, don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget,’” he told Joe Rogan.
He continued, “You go to sleep. You wake up again. Now something moves in front of you and you think, “Oh, that’s my friend.”
“But I had another name for it, I didn’t know it was my hand.”
“Do you remember coming out?” Rogan asked in surprise.
“I remember being compressed and wanting to panic,” Howard replied.
‘But you’re flooded with some serotonin and dopamine, which makes you feel relaxed and fall right back to sleep.
“And you remember being born,” he added, claiming he also remembers being circumcised.
But the reality is that most of us won’t remember anything before the age of three, Dr. Dung Trinh, an internist in California and chief medical officer of the Health Brain Clinic, told DailyMail.com.
This is due to something called “infantile amnesia,” Dr. Trinh said, in which most memories from before are lost.
“When we are born, the size of our brains is probably a quarter of the size of adults,” Dr Trinh said.
As the brain develops, it rapidly creates new brain cells, disrupting and overwriting previous memories.
Most of our memories are formed and stored in the hippocampus.
“At birth, the hippocampus is still not fully developed,” said Dr. Trinh, meaning it cannot perform the important functions of memory retrieval until years later.
As for the memory of being in the womb, “that’s certainly not a case I’ve encountered or heard of,” he said.
Other brain areas 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 help store and retrieve memories for many years,” he told DailyMail.com.
The brain structure 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 associated with your birth, but again, that is also rare,” he said.
This means that an emotionally significant event such as a traumatic birth can influence the way a child behaves later in life, despite not being able to remember the event itself, Dr Trinh said.
But it’s extremely unlikely you’ll remember anything from the womb, he added.
Actor Nicholas Cage also claimed he could remember seeing “faces in the dark” while still in his mother’s womb when he was asked about his earliest 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 all the way back to the womb and feel like I’m seeing faces in the dark can see or something.
“I know this sounds powerfully abstract, but somehow it seems like it might have happened.”
Dr. Reuben was not convinced.
“Although learning occurs very early, possibly in the womb, 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 he could remember being in his mother’s womb – echoing fellow actor Nicolas Cage’s claims on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month
The 59-year-old Hollywood star explained: ‘Let me think for a moment. 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 all the way back to the womb and feel like I can see faces in the dark or something.
Highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM, is the ability to accurately remember details of everyday experiences that occurred over many previous decades.
The condition was only discovered in 2000 and remains poorly understood.
Becky Sharrock, 34, Australia’s only known case of HSAM, claims she remembers the day she was born and the “intense curiosity” she felt as a newborn.
“I have a memory that I assume was my birth. “I noticed I was just wrapped in a blanket and my ankle was cut off with a tag,” she said 60 minutes Australia.
“Of course, that can’t be proven 100 percent for skeptics,” she said.
‘I had an intense curiosity. As a baby I didn’t know the word curiosity, but I wanted to know everything about everything. I was probably about 5,000 percent more curious than I am now.”
This is “more feasible,” Dr. Trinh said. ‘The brain is clearly more developed after birth than in the womb. I think it’s rare, but probably feasible.”
Another argument for why we cannot remember our births is that autobiographical memories require a sense of self, which we only develop around the age of two.
“We have no idea what’s going on when we’re first born,” Dr. Trinh said.
Dr. Keith Vossel, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, added: “We have not yet developed any language processing skills or any sense of ourselves at that stage where an autobiographical memory can be created.”
Dr. Vossel said Howard and Cage may instead conjure up “false memories” from a “vivid dream.”
“Some false memories can be created by dreaming,” he said. ‘Because sleep is important for creating new memories, it can also be a time when we create new memories that are false.
“He may be remembering a vivid dream he had in the past and creating a reality around it. It has been reported that this can happen,” Dr. Vossel added.
Cage did admit, “I’m not even sure I remember being in the womb.”
Dr. Reuben told DailyMail.com: ‘It is entirely possible and very common for false memories to be ‘implanted’ into our memory system.
‘Essentially, 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 can feel real to Howard and Cage, Dr. Vossel said, because “they’ve experienced it over and over again in their minds, and
“It’s essentially a memory that feels real to them. and so they have experienced that over and over again in their minds. 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 fans with their rare experience.
“(Wanting to sound interesting) could be a motivating factor,” Dr. Vossel said.
Dr. Trinh said that confirmation bias — the tendency to seek or recall information in a way that confirms one’s prior beliefs — is “certainly possible” in Howard and Cage’s memory of their experiences in the womb.
‘We really can’t prove it. Because none of us are present at someone’s birth and we don’t remember our own birth.’