"Many people claim to remember events or impressions from as young as two or even into babyhood. But how much can we trust our memories, especially those of early childhood? Do you really remember going to the seaside as a toddler that summer day and grazing your knee, or do those vivid images derive from what your aunt has often told you? " "In this book, Karl Sabbagh looks at the growing scientific understanding of the nature of memories from early childhood. Memory isn't a bank of recordings to be replayed, but rather something dynamic, in which scenes and events are reconstructed, and continually prone to shaping by other information. For young children, memory is a tool for learning, and memories from before the age of two are discarded. Whatever we may think, we simply cannot remember back to such early times. The experiments of Elizabeth Loftus and other psychologists show how unreliable our memories are, particularly those of childhood, and how easy it is for false memories to become planted in our minds. " "Yet, Sabbagh points out, the implications of this work do not seem to have reached the courts. The scientific study of childhood memory was stimulated by several high-profile cases in the US and UK in the 1990s, in which individuals were imprisoned on the basis of the victim's alleged 'recovered memories' of being abused in childhood. Several of these cases subsequently collapsed, leaving families devastated and struggling to heal the wounds. Using extracts from court records and interviews with psychologists involved in the 'memory wars', Sabbagh argues passionately against forms of 'recovered memory therapy' in what has become a heated debate in psychotherapy. Above all, he pleads that when it comes to claims based on memory, the results of objective scientific enquiry must form the foundation for judgement. "--Jacket.