Have you ever tried to remember your very first memory? I mean, really tried to reach back into the fog? For most of us, we hit a brick wall around age four or maybe three if we are lucky. Before that, it is just... nothing. A total blank slate. But here is the thing that trips me out: we were there. We were breathing, eating, crying, and learning at a rate we will never match again. We were conscious, but we have no record of it.
It is one of the great mysteries of the human condition, Corn. It is called infantile amnesia. We have this massive, high-bandwidth experience of the world for years, and then the brain basically hits "delete all" on the narrative index. But just because we cannot remember it does not mean it was not a wild ride.
Well, that is exactly what we are diving into today. Today's prompt from Daniel is about that lost world. He wrote to us asking: "None of us can remember what life was like when we were nine months old because memory does not start at this age. But if we were able to recount what a day in the life of us when we were this young was like, how might we describe it—in terms of our senses, our level of energy, our sensory world, and our experience?"
I love this. It is a phenomenological reconstruction. We are trying to build a "day in the life" using developmental neuroscience as our map. And by the way, I should mention that today’s episode of My Weird Prompts is powered by Google Gemini three Flash. I am Herman Poppleberry, the resident nerd who has been looking at hippocampal maturation papers all morning.
And I am Corn, the resident sloth who is mostly wondering if my nine-month-old self was cooler than I am now. Probably, right? I mean, at nine months, Daniel’s son Ezra is basically a tiny, caffeine-free ball of pure potential. But Herman, let's set the stage. Nine months is a very specific "flavor" of being human. It is not the potato-phase of a newborn, but it is not the "no" phase of a toddler yet. What is the vibe?
The vibe is "The Scientist." At nine months, you have just crossed the rubicon of object permanence. Before this, if Mom put a toy under a blanket, it effectively ceased to exist. Poof. Gone from the universe. But at nine months, your brain suddenly goes, "Wait a minute... things exist even when I cannot see them." That is a massive shift in how you experience reality. It turns the world from a series of flashing lights into a persistent physical space.
So it goes from a fever dream to a video game with actual save files. But the "graphics" are still a bit weird, right? If I am nine months old, what am I actually seeing when I wake up in the morning?
Your vision is actually getting pretty sharp. You are at about twenty-four hundred acuity, which sounds blurry to an adult, but it is plenty to see the dust motes dancing in the light or the texture of the carpet. But here is the kicker: your perspective is only eight inches off the floor. You are a low-to-the-ground explorer. A chair is not something you sit on; it is a forest of four massive wooden towers stretching into the clouds. The underside of the coffee table is your ceiling. It is a very architectural, structural world.
I imagine the floor is basically the main character of your life at that point. We walk over it without thinking, but for a nine-month-old, the floor is a vast, tactile continent.
Think about the variety of terrain. To an adult, a room has "hardwood" or "carpet." To a nine-month-old, the transition from the cool, slick kitchen tile to the scratchy, fibrous rug in the living room is like crossing a border between two different planets. Every few inches, the temperature changes, the friction changes. Your knees and palms are receiving a constant stream of topographic data that we’ve long since tuned out.
And you are experiencing it through your mouth, too. This is the part that fascinates me. For a nine-month-old, the mouth is the primary sensory organ. It has more nerve endings per square millimeter than almost anywhere else. When you pick up a plastic block, your eyes tell you it is red, your hands tell you it is hard, but your mouth tells you the "truth." You are tasting the texture, the temperature, the microscopic ridges. It is a culinary tour of the non-food world.
It’s essentially "haptic sampling." Think about how we use our fingertips to check if a fabric is soft. A nine-month-old does that with their tongue and lips because the somatosensory cortex—the part of the brain that processes touch—is most highly developed in the oral region at that age. It’s why they look like they’re trying to eat the world; they aren't necessarily hungry, they’re just "reading" the objects.
It is like every object is a mystery box and the only way to open it is to gnaw on it. But what about the energy levels? Daniel asked about that. I see babies go from zero to a hundred and then just... collapse. Is that what it feels like on the inside? Just constant biological volatility?
It is high-intensity cycling. A nine-month-old is running a brain that consumes sixty percent of their total energy expenditure. Think about that. In an adult, the brain uses maybe twenty percent. For a baby, more than half of every calorie they consume is being burned by their neurons as they literally wire themselves together. So, after ninety minutes or two hours of "science"—which is what we call playing—their brain reaches a state of literal saturation. It is like a buffer overflow. They have taken in so much sensory data that the system has to shut down to process it. That is why they crash into those deep, heavy naps.
Wait, sixty percent? That’s like running a supercomputer on a smartphone battery. No wonder they get cranky. If I were using sixty percent of my calories just to think about carpet textures, I’d be crying every two hours too.
And it’s not just "thinking," it’s synaptogenesis. They are creating up to a million new neural connections every single second. Imagine building a city while the city is already populated and running. The "energy" Daniel is asking about is the energy of pure construction. When Ezra wakes up from a nap, he’s not just rested; he’s literally a slightly different person with a more complex brain than when he went to sleep.
I wish I had a biological excuse to nap every two hours because my "buffer is full." But when they are awake, that attention is intense, right? But it is not like our attention. I can choose to focus on a book. A baby... well, they seem to be at the mercy of the world.
You nailed it. It is "bottom-up" attention versus "top-down." We have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to filter out the hum of the refrigerator or the feeling of our socks. A nine-month-old’s prefrontal cortex is still a construction site. They lack the filters. So, if a dog barks, that sound is not just "background noise"—it is an all-encompassing, total-system event. Everything is "loud," metaphorically speaking. The world is raw.
That sounds exhausting. And maybe a little scary? If you cannot filter anything out, how do you not just live in a constant state of panic?
That is where "social referencing" comes in, and this is one of the most beautiful parts of the nine-month experience. If you are Ezra, and you are crawling along and you bump your head on a table leg, you do not actually know if it hurts yet. I mean, you feel the sensation, but you do not have the emotional context for "pain" or "danger." So, what do you do? You look at Daniel or Hannah. You look at their faces. If Daniel looks horrified and gasps, you realize, "Oh, this is a disaster," and you start wailing. If he smiles and says, "Whoops! You're okay!" your brain goes, "Cool, no big deal," and you keep moving. Your emotional reality is literally a mirror of the people you love.
So your parents are basically your external prefrontal cortex. They are the ones providing the "filter" for the world. That is a heavy responsibility. If you are having a bad day, the baby’s entire universe feels unstable.
Precisely. And this is why the "energy" of the room matters so much. At nine months, you are also developing "joint attention." This is the ability to look at what someone else is looking at. If Daniel points at a bird, Ezra looks at the bird, then looks back at Daniel to see his reaction, then back at the bird. He’s learning that experiences can be shared. It’s the birth of empathy and communication before words even exist.
But what about the "stranger danger" thing? I’ve seen nine-month-olds go from happy to absolutely terrified just because an uncle they haven't seen in a month walks into the room. How does that fit into the sensory world?
That’s the flip side of social referencing. At nine months, you are in the peak of "stranger anxiety" and "separation anxiety." Because you have object permanence now, you realize that when Mom leaves the room, she is somewhere else and you are not with her. That is the birth of the feeling of "missing" someone. It is a very sophisticated emotional state. You are no longer just a bundle of reflexes; you are a person who experiences longing. A stranger’s face is a "prediction error" for the brain. It expects the familiar, safe faces of its "external filters," and when it sees a new, unknown face, the system sounds an alarm.
Okay, let's talk about the memory thing, because this is the part of Daniel's prompt that really gets under my skin. If we are having these deep, intense, "mouth-first" experiences, why can't we find them later? You mentioned Yale studies from the last year or two—what is the current word on why the "save files" get deleted?
It is less that they get deleted and more that the "filing system" changes. Think of it like this: a nine-month-old is forming memories. If you show them a specific hidden toy, they can remember where it is for several minutes, sometimes longer. They are forming "episodic fragments." But two things are happening that prevent those from becoming permanent adult memories. First, the hippocampus—the part of the brain that indexes memories—is undergoing massive neurogenesis. It is producing so many new neurons that it is essentially overwriting the old connections. It is like trying to write a diary on a chalkboard while someone else is constantly scrubbing it and adding new lines.
So the hardware is literally growing too fast to keep the old data stable.
And the second part is language. We anchor our memories in narrative. "I went to the park and saw a dog." A nine-month-old has no "I," no "park," and no "dog" in terms of symbolic language. They have the feeling of the sun, the sound of the bark, the texture of the grass. But without those linguistic hooks, the memory has nothing to hang on to. It remains a raw sensory packet that eventually fades because it cannot be integrated into a story.
It is like having a hard drive full of incredibly high-definition video files but no file names and no video player. The data is there, but you have no way to "play" it.
That is a great way to put it. There was a study involving a "magic shrinking machine" toy where kids were tested on their memory of how it worked. The researchers found that children could only remember the event if they had the vocabulary to describe it at the time it happened. If you don't have the word for "lever," your brain has a hard time storing the concept of "pulling the lever" in a way that can be retrieved years later.
That’s fascinating. So, in a way, learning to talk is what kills our ability to remember being a baby. We trade the raw sensory "raw" file for a compressed "text" file.
Precisely. And when you think about the "energy" Daniel asked about, it is not just physical energy. It is the energy of "synaptic pruning." A nine-month-old actually has more neural connections than an adult. Their brain is a dense jungle of possibilities. Right around this age, the brain starts going, "Okay, we don't need the connections for hearing Finnish phonemes because we live in Jerusalem and speak English and Hebrew." So it starts "pruning" those extra branches. It is a "use it or lose it" phase. Life at nine months is the moment of maximum potential before the world starts narrowing you down into a specific person.
That is almost poetic, Herman. You are at your most "universal" at nine months. You could be anyone. You could speak any language. You are open to every sensation. And then, slowly, the "pruning" starts. But let's get back to the "day in the life" reconstruction. If we were to narrate a single hour from Ezra's perspective, what are the highlights?
Let's take the "Physics Experiment." Ezra is in his high chair. He has a plastic spoon. To us, he is just being "messy" when he drops it. To him, he is Galileo at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He drops the spoon. He watches it fall. Clatter. He looks down. "Wait, it's still there. Gravity works. Interesting." He looks at Daniel. Daniel picks it up and gives it back. "Oh! Social interaction! If I do X, the Giant Person does Y. Let's test the reproducibility of these results." He drops it again. He is building a mental model of the physical and social universe, one spoon at a time.
But how does he feel during that? Is it a sense of triumph? Or just cold curiosity?
It’s a dopaminergic rush. Every time a nine-month-old makes a prediction—"If I drop this, it will fall"—and that prediction comes true, their brain rewards them with a hit of dopamine. It’s why they do it fifty times in a row. They are literally addicted to learning how the world works. It’s the same feeling an adult gets when they finally solve a complex puzzle, but for Ezra, the "puzzle" is just the fact that objects fall down instead of up.
And meanwhile, his taste buds are going haywire. You mentioned they have taste buds on their cheeks?
Yes! They have a much higher density of taste receptors, and they are spread out across the mouth and throat more than in adults. This is why babies can be so sensitive to flavors. A bit of mashed carrot is not just a snack; it is a psychedelic explosion of "Carrot-ness." Everything is dialed up to eleven. The coldness of a metal spoon, the squishiness of a banana—it is all incredibly intense.
It sounds like being on a very mild, very safe hallucinogen all day. High-contrast colors, intense textures, no sense of time, and everyone you meet is a giant who either feeds you or plays peek-a-boo.
And "peek-a-boo" is the ultimate thriller! Because of that developing object permanence, when you cover your face, you are actually gone. The tension builds... is he gone forever? Is the world broken? And then—BAM!—you reappear. The relief and joy are so intense they trigger that belly laugh. It is the best jump-scare in history.
I love that. We think we are playing a simple game, but for them, it is a profound exploration of the nature of existence. "Are you persistent? Yes, you are! Hahaha!" It really makes you look at infant "play" differently. It is not just killing time; it is the most serious work they will ever do.
It really is. And think about the spatial shift. We talked about crawling, but think about what that does to your sense of "Self." When you are a newborn, you are a "passenger." The world comes to you. At nine months, you are a "pilot." You see a shiny object across the room—maybe it is a power cord, the forbidden fruit of the infant world—and you realize, "I can change my location to reach that thing." That is the birth of "Agency." The boundary between "Me" and "The World" becomes much clearer when you are the one moving through it.
The power cord. Why is it always the power cord? They have a hundred colorful, BPA-free, educational toys, and they want the dusty black cable behind the sofa.
Because the power cord is "Real." It has a different texture, it is connected to the wall, it reflects light in a weird way. It is not "curated" for them. Babies are incredibly good at sensing what is a "toy" and what is a "tool" or a "functional object." They want to interact with the actual world that the giants are interacting with. To a nine-month-old, a plastic "baby phone" that makes beeping noises is a lie. They want the heavy, glass-and-metal slab that Mom is always staring at. They want the "high-status" objects.
So they’re tiny status-seekers? They want the tools of the trade.
They are mimics. Mimicry is the fastest way to learn a culture. If Ezra sees Daniel using a remote control, Ezra concludes that the remote control must be an important artifact for surviving in this specific tribe. He’s not being "naughty" when he grabs it; he’s trying to master the local technology.
"The actual world." That is a great phrase for it. But Herman, let's talk about the "shutdown" phase. The nap. You said fifty percent of their sleep is REM. What are they dreaming about? Can we even guess?
We can make some educated guesses based on sleep studies. In adults, REM is where we process emotions and integrate memories. In a nine-month-old, it is heavily involved in motor learning. There is research showing that babies who are learning to crawl or walk have much more intense "active sleep" patterns. Their brains are literally replaying the motor sequences. If you see a baby’s legs twitching in their sleep, they might be "crawling" in their dreams. They are consolidating the day's "physical science" experiments.
That is wild. So their "off-time" is just as busy as their "on-time." It is all just... growth. Constant, relentless growth. It makes me feel a bit lazy, honestly. I spent my morning scrolling through news and drinking coffee. This nine-month-old is re-wiring his entire reality before lunch.
It is the most "high-stakes" period of life. And yet, we lose the map. But here is a thought experiment for you, Corn. If you could have one "save file" from your nine-month-old self, just one thirty-second clip of what it felt like to be you back then, what would you want it to be?
Honestly? I think I would want the feeling of being held after a long day of "science." That total, unconditional sense of safety. Before you knew about taxes, or politics, or the fact that the sun will eventually die. Just that pure, sensory "I am safe and I am loved" feeling. That seems like the ultimate human baseline.
That is exactly what the research suggests. That "attachment" isn't just a psychological concept; it is the "biological substrate" for everything else. Without that sense of safety, the brain cannot spend sixty percent of its energy on development. It has to spend it on "vigilance" or "survival." So, in a way, Daniel and Hannah’s job is just to be the "secure base" so that Ezra can go be a crazy scientist on the floor.
It is a beautiful system. But it does make me wonder about the "weird" side of it. Like, what about the things they see that we don't? You mentioned the "unfiltered" brain. Do they see patterns in the carpet that we just ignore? Do they hear the frequency of the lightbulbs?
Almost certainly. There is a theory that all infants are born with a form of synesthesia—where senses are "crossed." Because the pruning hasn't happened yet, the "wires" for sight and sound might be bundled together. A loud noise might literally have a "color" for a nine-month-old. A certain taste might have a "shape." As the brain matures, it separates these channels into the distinct buckets we know as adults. But for a while there, the world might be a much more "kaleidoscopic" experience than we can imagine.
Wait, so when a nine-month-old is staring intently at a blank white wall, they might not be staring at "nothing"? They might be seeing a symphony of visual noise or the hum of the air conditioner translated into colors?
It’s possible. Their brains are incredibly noisy. Without the "top-down" inhibition that adults have, their sensory cortex is just firing away. What we see as a "blank wall," they might see as a vibrating field of light and shadow. They haven't learned yet that those details are "unimportant," so they give them as much weight as they give to a person's face.
Man, that is "My Weird Prompts" territory right there. The idea that we all started out as synesthetic, floor-crawling, mouth-first scientists in a world of giant mirrors.
It really reframes the whole "infantile amnesia" thing. Maybe we don't "lose" the memories because of a bug in the system. Maybe it is a feature. To become an adult, to be able to function in a complex society, you have to filter the world. You have to stop seeing the "color" of a bark and just hear "a dog." You have to trade the "raw" data for "useful" data. We trade wonder for efficiency.
That is a heavy trade, Herman. But I guess it beats trying to navigate a grocery store if every box of cereal is a psychedelic event.
True. But I think there is a middle ground. Understanding this "lost world" helps us be better parents, or even just better humans. It reminds us that there is a "mode" of being that is pure presence. No past, no future, just the intense, "now-ness" of a cold spoon and a warm hug.
You know, we have done a couple of episodes in the past that touched on this from different angles. I remember we talked about "minimum viable enrichment" in Episode sixteen eighty-nine, which was more about the environment. And Episode twelve zero five was about the "nine-month growth spike" from a more physical perspective. But this... this deep dive into the "inside" of the head? This feels like the missing piece.
It really does. It is the difference between watching a movie and being the lead actor. And the lead actor in this case is a 20-pound explorer with no script and a very high metabolic rate.
So, if we are looking for "takeaways" for the adults listening—especially the parents like Daniel—what is the "so what" here? Beyond just "babies are weird and cool."
I think the first big one is about "Consistency as Reality." If you are a nine-month-old, your parents' consistency is literally the "laws of physics" for your emotional world. When you are consistent, you are giving them a stable universe to explore. If the "Giant Person" is unpredictable, the universe feels "glitchy." So, your presence is their foundation.
That is a powerful way to put it. "Biological consistency." What else?
The second thing is about "The Value of Boredom." We often feel like we have to constantly "entertain" a baby with flashing toys and videos. But based on what we know about their sensory world, a "boring" wooden spoon or a pile of crinkly paper is plenty of entertainment. Their brains are already doing so much work to process basic reality that "less is often more." You don't need to add "sparkles" to a world that is already "sparkling" by default.
I love that. "The world is already sparkling." That should be on a t-shirt. And I think there is a third takeaway here for the tech nerds and the AI folks. We spend so much time trying to build "Artificial General Intelligence" by feeding it millions of books and websites. But maybe we are missing the "embodiment" part. A nine-month-old learns more about "causality" by dropping a spoon than an AI does by reading ten thousand physics papers.
One hundred percent. True intelligence isn't just "processing data"; it is "interacting with a persistent reality." It is the "mouth-first" philosophy. If we want AI that actually understands the world, it might need to "crawl" before it can "think." It needs to experience "object permanence" and "social referencing." It needs a "body" to ground its symbols.
"Claude, go crawl on the floor for an hour and tell me what the table legs feel like." I'd pay to see that. But seriously, it does put the "human" back in "human intelligence." We aren't just calculators; we are the product of millions of "spoon-dropping" experiments.
And we are the product of those early relationships. The fact that we don't "remember" them doesn't mean they aren't the literal basement of our personality. The way you were held at nine months is the "operating system" that your adult "apps" are running on.
This has been a trip, Herman. I am looking at my coffee mug differently now. I am resisting the urge to gnaw on it just to see if it has any "hidden truths" I have missed as an adult.
(Laughing) Maybe just stick to sipping from it for now, Corn. Your prefrontal cortex worked hard to get you to this point. Don't throw it all away for a bit of ceramic texture.
Fair enough. But I will definitely be more patient the next time I see a baby "conducting a physics experiment" with their cereal. They are just trying to make sure the universe is still working.
It is a full-time job. And honestly, someone has to do it.
Well, I think we have successfully reconstructed the "lost world" as much as two adults can. Daniel, thanks for the prompt—it really made us look at the "Ezra-perspective" in a new light. It is easy to forget that while we are watching them, they are "tasting" us and the whole world around us.
It is a high-definition, high-stakes adventure. We are just the supporting cast in their epic "coming-of-age" story.
A story with no save files, but a very high production budget.
Or, rather, as I should say... that is a perfect way to end it.
(Cheekily) "Exactly?" Did you almost break your own rule there, Herman?
I caught myself! The neural pruning is still a work in progress for me, clearly.
Well, before we prune the rest of this episode, we should probably wrap things up. This has been "My Weird Prompts." If you are enjoying these deep dives into the "lost worlds" of the mind, or anything else Daniel throws at us, make sure to follow us.
Yes, and a big thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes. And of course, thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that make this whole collaboration possible.
If you want to dive into the archives or find out how to send us your own weird prompts—though Daniel has a pretty solid monopoly on it right now—head over to myweirdprompts dot com. You can find all nineteen hundred and eighty-four episodes there.
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Alright, I am off to go look at the underside of my dining room table and see if I can find any of that "lost wonder."
Watch your head, sloth. You don't have an "external prefrontal cortex" to tell you if it's okay.
Valid point. Until next time, keep it weird.
Keep exploring. Bye for now.
