Why do we retain so few memories for what happened when we were young? The development of language in our brains corresponds with our ability to consolidate, store, and retrieve episodic memories. We need the anatomical structures and circuitry of language to tell the story of what happened, to organize the details of our experiences into a coherent narrative that can then be revisited and shared later. So as adults, we only have access to memories of what happened when we owned the language skills to describe them.
