When my wife was pregnant with each of our two children, I
used to sing to them in the womb. It was an old Russian song
that my grandmother had sung to me, a child’s song about her
love for life and for her mother—“May there always be
sunshine, may there always be good times, may there always
be Mama, and may there always be me.” I sang it—in Russian
and in English—during the last trimester of pregnancy, when I
knew the auditory system was wired up enough to register
sound coming through the amniotic fluid.
Then in the ɹrst week after each child was born, I invited a
colleague over for a “research study.” (I know, it wasn’t
controlled, but it was fun.) Without revealing the prenatal
song, I sang three diʃerent songs in turn. No doubt about it—
when the babies heard the familiar song, their eyes opened
wider and they became more alert, so that my colleague
could easily identify the change in their attention level. A
perceptual memory had been encoded. (Now my kids won’t
let me sing; I probably sounded better underwater.)Dan’s newborn children recognized his voice and the Russian
song because that information had been encoded in their brain as
implicit memories. We encode implicit memory throughout our
lives, and in the ɹrst eighteen months we encode only implicitly.
An infant encodes the smells and tastes and sounds of home and
parents, the sensations in her belly when she’s hungry, the bliss of
warm milk, the way her mother’s body stiʃens in response to a
certain relative’s arrival. Implicit memory encodes our perceptions,
our emotions, our bodily sensations, and, as we get older,
behaviors like learning to crawl and walk and ride a bike and
eventually change a diaper.
What’s crucial to understand about implicit memory—especially
when it comes to our kids and their fears and frustrations—is that