Surely some friend has explained that they remember things that happened to them when they were barely one year old. Others may go further and talk about previous experiences, even from the first few days after birth. Science has long said that all of this is false: the consensus is that the human mind doesn't form memories until two or three years old (in some exceptional cases, it could be a little earlier). Any image prior to that date has surely been constructed from what other people have told us, but it can't come from our own experiences. Or can it? A new study, recently published in the journal Science, questions this dogma and proposes that the brain is prepared to memorize earlier than we thought.

There is great history, the kind that appears in books, the kind that shapes common life. Now, these days, with the death of Pope Francis, the conclave, and the election of Leo XIV, we have experienced an important chapter. But it is not that history I want to talk about. Newspapers, radio stations, and television stations—what they call the media—have already spoken about it at length. No, I want to talk about a kind of history that, for me, is as interesting as, or more so than, any other. I like to call it small history, the kind that considerably enriches the larger history, the kind that tells us about the lives of people, more than about the facts. And if it tells us about the facts, it does so to add human nuances, to preserve places and customs, to bring us closer to everyday life.