Why babies forget, and how fear lingers in the brain
Investigating “infantile amnesia,” and how generalized fear after acute stress reflects changes in the brain
This week we have two neuroscience stories. First up, freelance science journalist Sara Reardon looks at why infants’ memories fade. She joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss ongoing experiments that aim to determine when the forgetting stops and why it happens in the first place.
Next on the show, Hui-Quan Li, a senior scientist at Neurocrine Biosciences, talks with Sarah about how the brain encodes generalized fear, a symptom of some anxiety disorders such as social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Sara Reardon
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z9bqkyc