Can some people REALLY remember their own birth? Experts give their verdict ... trends now
Experts have shot down claims by celebrities that they can remember incredibly early life experiences including being in the womb.
Empire actor Terrence Howard declared during an interview on Joe Rogan's podcast that he remembers 'the whole nine' months of being in utero and even 'being compressed' and 'want[ing] to panic' during his own birth.
Actor Nicholas Cage made similar claims earlier this month.
While there are a 100 or so people with a condition that gives them a photographic-like memory of their very early childhood, all four experts DailyMail.com spoke to said remembering being in the womb or being born is 'impossible.'
Human babies are 'quite neurologically undeveloped and not capable 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 Saturday - during which he raised some wild ideas about the universe
'Memory systems in the brain are not working well until several years of age,' he added.
Howard claimed he remembered being 'six months, maybe, inside the womb.'
'And I'm like, "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's moving in front of you and you're like, "Oh, that's my friend."
'But I had a different name for it - I didn't know it was my hand.'
'You remember coming out?' an amazed Rogan went on to ask.
'I remember being compressed and you want to panic,' Howard replied.
'But you're flooded with some serotonin and dopamine, to where you feel relaxed and you go right back to sleep.
'And you remember being born,' he added, claims that he also recalls being circumcised.
But the reality is the majority of us will never remember anything before the age of three, Dr Dung Trinh, an internal medicine physician in California and chief officer of the Health Brain Clinic, told DailyMail.com.
This is due to something called 'infantile amnesia,' Dr Trinh said, where most of the memories before then are lost.
'When we're born, the size of our brain is probably a quarter of the size of an adult brain,' Dr Trinh said.
As the brain develops, it creates new brain cells at a rapid pace, which disrupts earlier memories and overwrites them.
Most of our memories are formed and stored in the hippocampus.
'At birth, the hippocampus is still not fully developed,' Dr Trinh said, meaning it cannot perform the important functions of memory retrieval until years later.
As for remembering being in the womb, 'that's certainly not a case that I've come across or heard of,' he said.
Other brain regions are involved in memory as well, such as the prefrontal cortex, said Dr Aaron Reuben, a neuropsychologist and PhD candidate at Duke University.
Like the hippocampus, 'this is not sufficiently developed to aid in the storage and retrieval of memories for several 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.
'Maybe it's possible to remember certain emotions attached to your birth, but again, that's also rare,' he said.
This means that an emotionally significant event like a traumatic birth may affect the way a child behaves later in life, despite them not being able to remember the event itself, Dr Trinh said.
But it is extremely unlikely that you would remember anything from the womb, he added.
Actor Nicholas Cage also claimed he could recall seeing 'faces in the dark' while he was still in his mom's womb when asked about his earliest childhood memory on The Late Show With Stephen
