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Can some people REALLY remember their own birth? Experts give their verdict after Terrence Howard made astonishing claim on Joe Rogan's podcast
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 Colbert earlier this month.
The Hollywood star explained: 'I know this sounds really far out and I don’t know if it’s real or not, but sometimes I think I can go all the way back to in-utero and feeling like I could see faces in the dark or something.
'I know that sounds powerfully abstract, but that somehow seems like maybe it happened.'
Dr Reuben was not convinced.
'While learning does happen very early, potentially in the womb, the ability to consciously recall sights, sounds, and experiences later in life relies on a mature hippocampus,' he said, which newborn babies do not have.
At one point, Howard claimed being able to remember being in his mother's womb - echoing assertions made by fellow actor Nicolas Cage on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month
The 59-year-old Hollywood star explained: 'Let me think. Listen, I know this sounds really far out and I don’t know if it’s real or not, but sometimes I think I can go all the way back to in-utero and feeling like I could see faces in the dark or something'
Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM, is the ability to accurately remember details of daily experiences that took place over many previous decades.
The condition was only discovered in 2000 and is still poorly understood.
Becky Sharrock, 34, Australia's only know case of HSAM, claims to remember the day she was born, and the 'intense curiosity' she felt as a newborn baby.
'There is a recollection I have which I'm assuming was my birth. I found myself just wrapped in a blanket and then having my ankle clipped with a tag,' she told 60 Minutes Australia.
'Of course that can't be 100 percent proven to skeptics,' she said.
'I had intense curiosity. I didn't know the word curiosity as a baby but I wanted to know everything about everything. I was probably about 5,000 percent more curious than I am now.'
This is 'more feasible', Dr Trinh said. 'The brain is obviously more developed after birth than being in the womb. I think it's rare, but probably feasible.'
Another argument for why we cannot remember our births is because autobiographical memories require a sense of self, which we don't develop until around age two.
'We have no clue what's going on when we're first born,' Dr Trinh said.
Dr Keith Vossel, neurologist at the University of California Los Angeles, added: 'We haven't developed any kind of language processing skills or any kind of sense of ourselves at that stage where there's autobiographical memory that can be created.'
Dr Vossel said that Howard and Cage may instead be recalling 'false memories' from a 'vivid dream.'
'Some false memories can be created through dreaming,' he said. 'Because sleep is important for making new consolidating new memories, it can also be a time in which we create new memories that are false.
'It may be that he is remembering a vivid dream that he had had in the past and has created a reality around that. It's been reported that that can occur,' Dr Vossel added.
Cage did admit, 'I don't even know if I remember being in utero.'
Dr Reuben told DailyMail.com: 'It is perfectly possible and quite common for fake memories to be "implanted" in our memory system.
'In essence, we can have quite vivid memories of things that never happened – all we have to do is imagine it often enough.'
The memory of being in the womb may feel real to Howard and Cage, Dr Vossel said, because 'they've experienced it over and over in their mind, and
'It is essentially a memory that feels real to them. and so they've experienced that over and over in their mind. And so it becomes a reality and a truth to that person.'
Howard and Cage may want to believe they can remember their own births, and may want to impress an interviewer or fans with their rare experience.
'[Wanting to sound interesting] could be a motivating factor,' Dr Vossel said.
Dr Trinh said confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or recall information in a way that confirms one's prior beliefs - is 'certainly possible' in Howard and Cage's remembering of their in utero experiences.
'We really can't prove either way. Because none of us is around at anyone's birth and we don't remember own own.'