Kids aren’t the only ones whose memories can intrude on their
lives when they don’t even know it. It happens, of course, to
parents as well. Implicit memories inɻuence our behaviors,
emotions, perceptions, and even physical sensations, and we
can remain completely ignorant of the past’s inɻuence on us in
the present moment. Dan experienced this ɹrsthand as a new
parent:
When my son was ɹrst born I would come unglued when
he cried inconsolably. I know a baby’s cry is hard for
anyone to hear, but I just couldn’t take it. Panic would
set in, and I’d become ɹlled with dread and terror. I
explored theory after theory for my intense and
seemingly unwarranted reaction, but none of them rang
true.
Then one day my son began to cry and an image came
to my mind. It was a small boy on an examining table,
screaming, with a look of terror on his scrunched-up,
reddened face. I was next to him, and my job, as a young
pediatric intern at the UCLA Medical Center, was to
draw blood from him so we could ɹgure out why he had
such a high fever. My pediatric partner and I had to
relive this horror with child after child, one of us holding
the syringe, the other holding down the screaming child.
I hadn’t thought about my pediatrics internship in
years. I remembered it as a good year overall, and I
recalled being glad when it was over. But the middle-of-
the-night cries of my six-month-old son triggered my
ɻashback to this scene, and over the days that followed,
I began to understand the connection. I thought a lot