Lise Eliot - What's going on in there?
p.348
"While language is not required for children to store conscious memories, it does play an important part in making memories last - in overcoming the hurdle of infantile amnesia. Even after the basic hippocampal and cortical circuitry is in place, verbal recall is still not fully developed until children evolve a special kind of linquistic skill: the art of narrative. Only when children begin to see the relationship between events, when they can place their own personal recollections in a framework of time, place, and causality, can their memories survive the transition from childhood to later life."
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By focusing children on the important facts - the who, what, when, where, how, and why issues - parents can teach their children the requisite narrative skills - how to think about events in terms of causality - which is ultimately how we recall facts and events later on.
