The words to a corny love song, the moves to the Macarena, even the boring, everyday stuff—if it was part of our adolescence, we’re more likely to remember it 20, 30 or even 40 years later. A number of studies have shown that adults over the age of about 30 have more memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from any other time of their lives, before or after—a phenomenon known as the ‘reminiscence bump’.

It’s thought that this is because, when we form a new self-image, we encode robust and lasting memories that are relevant to that self. In other words, we are most likely to favour memories that reinforce our ideas of who we are. Since adolescence is a key time for the emergence of a stable and enduring self, it’s also the period we tend to remember most strongly.

Read more: https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/learning-memory/why-you-cant-remember-being-baby