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If Infant Memories Disappear, Why Do We Say Attitudes Remain?
Infant Memories Are Very Short
We remember very little from immediately after we are born.
Yet developmental theory often says this:“Learning attitudes and values formed in infancy remain for life.”
At first glance, this sounds contradictory.
Do not attitudes and values continue to change throughout life?
Do not our thoughts shift, our standards of judgment change, and our life goals transform?
So what does this statement actually mean?
Attitudes and Values Do Change
First, something must be made clear.
People’s attitudes and values do in fact change.
Political positions, moral judgments, and relational priorities are continuously revised through experience and learning.So if we take the phrase “values formed in infancy last a lifetime” literally, it would be incorrect.
The problem arises when we fail to distinguish precisely what is said to “remain.”
Infancy Does Not Form “Content”
Infancy is not the period in which the content of values is learned.
Infants cannot conceptually understand “this is right” or “this is important.”
Instead, what is formed in this period are bodily answers to questions like:Is this situation safe or threatening?
Is it okay to try, or better to stop?
If I ask for help, will someone respond?
If I fail, will the relationship remain?In other words, infancy is not the time for learning what to believe,
but for learning how to believe.
What Remains Is Not Values, but “Grammar”
Once this distinction is understood, the statement becomes clear.
What remains from infancy is not ideology or belief,
but the basic grammar through which the world is interpreted.By analogy:
what is installed in infancy is an operating system (OS),
and the values and beliefs learned in adulthood are more like apps installed on top of it.Apps can be changed easily.
But while the OS can be updated, its fundamental structure is not easily altered.This is why people often say,
“My thoughts have changed, but my body remains the same.”
The Precise Meaning of “Lasts a Lifetime”
This statement should be understood like this:
Infant memories disappear.
But the neural response rules formed through those memories remain for a long time.
These rules operate before we are even consciously aware of them:Do I tense up first when learning something new?
Does asking for help feel safe?
When I fail, do I shrink back—or try again?
In relationships, do I always become the one who adjusts first?These are closer to reflexes than to choices.
That is why similar reactions are repeatedly triggered in similar situations,
no matter how much our conscious thinking changes.
So Does It Really Never Change?
Not exactly.
It simply changes in a different way.This basic grammar does not shift easily through explanation or persuasion alone—
because “understanding” and “the body changing” are not the same thing.Change usually occurs very slowly through:
repeated relational experiences,
environments where failure is safe,
and emotional–somatic re-learning.This is why recovery feels slow,
and why people become frustrated with themselves.
What This Statement Ultimately Means
What “lasts a lifetime” is not a fixed set of values.
What remains is the posture through which we receive values,
the bodily attitude with which we stand before learning,
and the fundamental way we trust the world.Understanding this is not meant to say “it is already too late,”
but to explain fairly why change is slow
and why effort alone is often insufficient.The memories have disappeared,
but the grammar formed then is still operating within us.
And it, too, is something that can be relearned—
through time and experience.
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[Netflix When Life Gives You Tangerines Review #12] A Day with Nothing to Sulk About
There Is Nothing I Want Enough to Sulk Over
These days, things are just… that way.
There is nothing to get angry about,
nothing to feel hurt over,
nothing I desperately long for.The day simply passes,
and time moves through me.People ask,
“So what do you want to do most these days?”I pause, and then fail to answer.
At some point, the very sensation of wanting something disappeared inside me.Having nothing to sulk about does not mean desire has vanished—
it means the capacity to feel desire has worn thin.
I Do Not Feel Emotions, but the Absence of Them
Before, I did not even know that.
I simply said, “I’m fine.”
Only now do I realize it was a lie.“Fine” was not comfort—
it was another name for an extinguished emotional state.Now it is different.
I can feel the emptiness.Even in an empty room,
my senses have returned enough to feel the air move.
That may be the first sign of recovery.
A Day with Nothing to Sulk About Is Still a Living Day
Sulking is an emotion born from having room to feel.
It is the sound that bursts out
when there is still a wish in the heart,
and that wish is frustrated.But I folded my wishes away for too long.
I want to believe that emotions, like water,
may stagnate—but one day begin to flow again.Today is just… that way.
But being able to say “just that way”
feels, somehow, like a small mercy.
When I Want Something Again, Someday
Then perhaps the road toward it will not feel frightening.
Then I might even be able to sulk again.
When emotions begin to flow,
the world will start touching me again.For now, I am simply enduring a day with nothing happening.
Not that nothing is happening—
but that I am quietly coming back to life.On a day with nothing to sulk about,
I let my emotions rest again today.
And softly, I tell myself that it is okay.
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The Human Genome Sequencing Project and the Objectification of the Human
When Did Humans First Become “Read” Beings?
For a long time, we have understood humans
through consciousness, emotion, narrative, faith, and philosophy.Humans were always “subjects who create meaning,”
not “objects to be analyzed.”But only a few decades ago,
humanity began, for the first time, to dismantle and read itself as strings.From 1990 to 2003, the Human Genome Project.
This project was not merely an event of biologically understanding the human being—
it was the first event that transformed the human into a data structure.
Humans Were Not Read in Laboratories, but in Computers
DNA is not a sentence opened like a book.
It is a mass of material coiled, folded, and tangled inside cells.Thus the human genome was not “read” by observation.
It was completely shattered and then reconstructed by computation.DNA is broken into hundreds of thousands of fragments.
The A, T, G, C sequences of each fragment are converted into numbers.
Supercomputers reassemble those fragments like a puzzle.At this moment, humans became
not bodies but bundles of text files,
not beings but strings,
and destiny became not a narrative but a probability distribution.
From This Moment On, Humans Became Not “Patients” but “Managed Objects”
This was not merely an advancement in life science.
It was the moment when humans first became “designable structures.”What became possible afterward:
Genetic disease prediction
Personalized medicine
Gene editing
Life patents
Probabilistic inheritance of traits
Biological stratification of humansFrom this point on, recovery became not care but patching,
treatment became not relationship but debugging,
and dignity became not essence but a default option.
When Did We Become Not “People” but “Programs”?
After this project,
humans began to be born not simply as beings,
but as structures that are “loaded.”Biological entities with defects to be fixed,
algorithms to be optimized,
gradable biological specifications.Even now, without being asked,
we are being calculated within countless systems:health scores, risk levels, genetic probabilities, trait predictions, mental health indices.
This world uses the language of care,
but in truth handles humans in the language of design.
This Is Now a Question Not of Technology, but of Dignity
The problem is not technology.
The problem is who designs the default values of the human.And more importantly,
when did we begin to ask more often
whether we are being “adjusted to systems”
than whether we are being “treated as people”?The Human Genome Project did not understand humans—
it produced the first official document that turned humans into objects.And we are still living
in the world that followed.
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