Memory

We don’t remember much from when we were babies. That part of our brain wasn’t online.

What was online, though, was the rest of our itty-bitty bodies. Babies are sensory machines. It’s only through their experiences of the world–touching, tasting, smelling, grabbing, moving, crying–that they learn, grow, and develop. But what is “learning?” How does a baby learn?

Through neuronal pathways. Every time a baby tries to crawl, its nervous system attempts the complicated physiological process known as locomotion. In the beginning it doesn’t work. But after trying and trying, the neurons attached to the muscles in the arms and legs get enough practice. Like ski tracks down a fresh bank of snow, the baby’s brain now has the deep grooves of the neuromuscular pathways necessary to crawl. And that’s basically how learning works.

A baby doesn’t make memories because its brain is busy learning how to be alive, and a baby must be entirely present, in all its senses, in order to learn. Meanwhile, its body has to pay very careful attention to its environment so it can figure out how to act against gravity, understand, communicate, move, fight, flight, think, and, eventually, grow up. The visual memories we typically think of as our imagination don’t come until later. First, our body has to learn–then remember–how to live and survive.

As we grow up in our modern, westernized society, we are less in our bodies and more in our minds. As we are less aware and sensing of our bodies, we become less present and more past and future oriented (attention moves away from the brain stem and spinal cord and to the far reaches of the prefrontal cortex, unique in size and intellectual capacity to humans). We lose ourselves in our imagination. While our imagination is real to us, it often pulls us out of the present, the now.

The way a baby comes into the world is almost the same as how the universe came into existence through the Big Bang. In the beginning, everything was one, whole, unified, present, now. Then it expanded and reality was created in less than a second. Ever since then we’ve been moving away from the oneness, the center, the origin. We’ve been soaring away, in the far stretches of the universe, a reality so unbelievable it only seems possible through a rich, divine imagination. Still we long for connection, relationships, presence, and eternity. We desire things as they were in the beginning and always have been, a world without end. A world with unlimited potential. A world where we can become whatever we want.

A world like that of a baby who is loved.

For a baby, memories are embodied so we can learn to live. For us, memories control our bodies so much that we forget to live.