Why can't we remember being babies?

Infantile amnesia describes the near-total absence of memories from the first few years of life. One major factor is that the hippocampus — the brain region that encodes and files long-term episodic memories — is immature in infancy and undergoes rapid neuron growth that may overwrite early memories. Language also plays a role: before children can narrate experiences in words, those experiences are harder to store and retrieve. Research suggests babies do form memories, but most fade as the brain reorganizes. The average earliest memory people can recall dates to around age 3.5.