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[sensetoscribe]

There's someone you'd drop everything for. Take the 2am call, defend them in a room they already left. And you're sure you chose them — that it's love, or loyalty, or just good character.

There's someone you'd drop everything for. Take the 2am call, defend them in a room they already left. And you're sure you chose them — that it's love, or loyalty, or just good character.

Here's the unsettling version. In 1971 a Cornell psychologist, Dennis Regan, had an actor hand people a free soda and later ask them to buy raffle tickets. The soda group bought about twice as many — fine. But he'd also measured how much each person liked the actor. For people who got nothing, liking predicted everything. For people who got the soda, liking stopped mattering. The ones who found him annoying repaid him just as much as the ones who liked him.

Whatever made them pay him back went around liking entirely. It never asked.

So go find the first thing your closest friend ever did for you. Small? Years ago? There's a real argument that a lot of what we call loyalty is a debt quietly compounding in the background, and "affection" is the story we write over it afterward.

Made a doodle-animated breakdown of the whole thing if you want to sit in the discomfort for seven minutes:

[sensetoscribe]

your brain deleted your childhood on purpose

ok so infantile amnesia — the reason nobody remembers being a baby — is way weirder than "babies brains aren't developed enough"

babies form memories completely fine. there was a study in the 80s where a psychologist tied a ribbon from a baby's ankle to a mobile over the crib. baby figures out kicking makes it spin. she takes the mobile away, brings it back days later, and the babies remember. immediately start kicking.

so the recording works. the memories were THERE.

what happens is: in your first few years your hippocampus is producing new neurons at an absolutely insane rate. and new neurons don't just politely get added to the existing network. they rewire it. they break the connections that were already there.

and the connections that were already there were holding your memories.

two neuroscientists in toronto proved this in 2014. speed up neuron growth in mice, they forget faster. slow it down, they remember longer. the growing and the forgetting are literally the same process

your brain didn't fail to save your childhood. it paved over it. to build you.

anyway the part that actually messes me up: you can't remember your infancy but your infancy remembers you. how you reach for people or flinch from them. the rhythm of your first language. whether you baseline feel safe in the world. all of it installed by a version of you that you will never meet

that kid in your baby photos isn't you. that kid is the architect