From the Vault: Before You Could Remember, Part 2

Published Apr 13, 2024, 10:00 AM

Our personal memories only extend back so far in life, and before that, there is a void. Why don’t we remember our early childhood and what does it say about human memory, childhood development and cultural ideas about infants? Robert and Joe explore in this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind… (originally published 04/06/2023)

Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We are going into the old Vault to get an episode from April sixth, twenty twenty three. This is part two of our series called Before You Could Remember.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.

Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on childhood amnesia, which is the name for the fact that most adults and even most older children don't really seem to have any memories from before about the age of three or four, and that number is slightly different depending on the culture you grow up in and some other factors that we may continue to explore in this series, but generally, on average, around three or four is when the memories start kicking in, and even then people don't seem to have as many memories as they will for later years in life. That the number of memories people seem to be able to recall sort of goes up each year after that. More from year five more from six. More from seven. Now, if you haven't heard part one yet, you should probably go back and check that one out first. It is where it is where we learned that the rob here was indeed once a very naughty boy and smashed a jar of cherries on the floor or something.

What is it you did? Well, I mean, I guess the naughty part was going into the refrigerator to get them anyway, because I don't think I was supposed to have them.

Yeah, where you explicitly forbidden cherries or I guess it's just a general understanding if you're a child you should not climb into the fridge to serve yourself anything.

Well, you know, I don't know. I guess looking back on it it As a child, you're often sort of testing the boundaries of your world, and part of the a memory like that is when you realize you're not supposed to Apparently I was not supposed to go back and get cherries for a number of reasons, some practical, uh, some may be you know, arguable from from my standpoint, but yeah, that's that's kind of a There's a lot of stuff going on in those early years, which I think is something we we tried to get across in all of this is that the brain of a of an infant or a small child is not inert. It is it is extremely busy, but the brain remembers what it needs to remember. And and so we're going to continue with that in mind in this episode.

That is a scary and kind of thrilling headspace to get back into the moment when you're like a child and you're doing something where you you really don't know if you were allowed to do this or not, and you suspect that you might not be, but you it's never been said outright, you know.

Or you just suspect that you are.

You know.

I mean, there's there's so much that that comes up and raise a child on this end where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't really be mad at him for thinking this or acting in this way because we've never said don't approach whatever the topic is this ways. This is the learning experience.

Yeah, So to start us off today, I just wanted to share something that I got to thinking about after the last episode. So this particular tangent is not something I have like direct scientific evidence for. It's just something I started wondering about after the last part in the series. So I was thinking about childhood amnesia in the context of another subject we covered, I guess sometime last year. It was the Hot Cold Empathy Gap. Do you remember this episode, Rob, I do, Yes. This is an observed psychological phenomenon where we not only sometimes fail to understand, accurately model and predict the thoughts and behaviors of other people. We not only have interpersonal failures of empathy, we also sometimes fail to accurately model ourselves in different affective states, so we have intra personal failures of empathy. So a simple way to put this is that people who are not currently in an affective state, so not currently angry or not currently hungry or not currently sad, are actually somewhat bad at predicting how they themselves would react in a situation if they were actually in one of those states, and vice versa. If you are currently hungry, you're not very good at predicting how you would behave and react if you were not hungry.

Yeah, like the fear area, for example, I mean, it's easy to sort of rehearse what you're going to do in a certain situation, but then when the frightening thing occurs you're in a different frame of mind, and you may behave entirely differently. I'm reminded of there's a great thing in Congo with Ernie Hudson. Do you remember this scene where he's he's a very cool cucumber his character the whole movie, there's a part where he's he's putting up a brave front. But then when the scary thing happens involving a gorilla like you, you turn back to him and he's he's he's moved away and or he's run away just a little bit, and ask him what happened. He's like, I ran away. Yeah.

He had just given us a speech about how you can't run away because that will show. Yeah, then the gorilla will chase you, so you got to stand your ground. But then I run away.

Yes, So when.

We're not in these affective states, we actually can't relate very well to the person we are when we're in them, and vice versa. When we're in them, we can't really relate very well to the person we are when we're not in them, And so the hot cold empathy gap can be demonstrated over a span of only a few minutes, but it got me thinking about a similar self reflective empathy gap that applies not across different affective states, but different stage of life. So what I'm talking about here is when I think back on a memory of doing something, or saying something, or dressing a certain way or liking a certain thing when I was young, and especially if I pick something embarrassing, but not just with embarrassing things, with all kinds of things, I can often find myself totally unable to relate to that person. I say that thing that you've probably heard people say of similar reactions to their own past. What was I thinking? And at least when I say this, I truly often do not know. It's like I cannot internally simulate the mindset that led me to wear that T shirt, even though it was me. I can't relate to that person, and I can't even really remember or imagine what it was like to be them, even though again it was me. From what I gathered, this is a common experience. It's I'm not alone here, right.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, it's like basically comes down to the reality that we are not consistently the same across small lengths of time, much less across the course of a lifetime. And yeah, I mean it's a you know, a turn of phrase, what was I thinking? Sometimes we can piece together some of what our thought processes were. You know, you'd be like, well, I was a teenager and I thought this band was cool, so of course I wore that T shirt, even if I would not be into that band. And now as a as a grown person or what have you, or with you know, you know, it's a certain amount of clarity based on where you are now in life. But other times, yeah, you may genuinely look back and you're like, I just don't know what was going through my mind. I'm not sure what the thought process was. I seem to have a different thought process going on now.

Yeah, And so obviously it's not this way with all memories from different stages of life. Like I have a feeling that I can re experience or relate to lots of memory from childhood but not other ones. And so I don't always know what makes the difference. But I wonder if the proportion of memories for behaviors and experiences we can no longer empathize with tends to increase the farther back you go into childhood. I don't know this is the case. I'm wondering if it does or if, say, it actually doesn't go up in a linear fashion. You could imagine it also like peaking in teenage years or something like that. But so that's one question I was wondering about. And then I was also wondering if there's any kind of relationship between our current ability to empathize with our feelings and behavior in a past event and our tendency to actually remember that event in the first place. So, in other words, are we more likely to remember doing or feeling or saying something when we can empathize with it, like when we can get back in that mind space, and less likely to remember it when we can hand no longer empathize with it. And I asked this specifically because I, uh, Robi, I wonder if you have the same experience. I feel like a lot of these what was I thinking memories are prompted by external intrusions, like seeing a photo of yourself that you didn't expect to see, or having somebody say, hey, do you remember when we did this or when you said that.

Yeah, yeah, And it does make me I was thinking about this in terms of like childhood versus say, like junior high, teen years sort of reflections or even like early or really all of one twenties. I guess, depending on where you are in life how far removed you are from particular time period. But like for very young children, it seems like so much of what you end up doing and wearing, et cetera is almost entirely shaped by your parents. Anyway. Yeah, yeah, so like what was I thinking is not really a question because it's like you weren't thinking, you were just doing or you were just you wore this because it was provided to you, and everyone else in your family liked it, so it seemed like you liked it that sort of thing. Not all the time, but like I feel like maybe like eighty percent of the time that may be the case. But then it's when you're getting into that area where you are willfully setting out on your own, choosing things for yourself, that might be the area where I mean, you're legitimately asking what was I thinking? What was my intention in all of that?

That is a good point, like what role agency or self control has in the event that you're remembering? So, yeah, I don't know if our empathy gap with our past self actually does just increase the farther back you go. I wonder if that could be measured. But if it does, I wonder how does that also relate to the relative paucity of memories from early childhood and the for most people, complete lack of memories from before ages three or four.

Yeah, now, I this is interesting to think about, and one possible answer to this might be, well, the reason that you have trouble knowing or understand what you were thinking about in a particular time might be because you have completely blocked it out because their thought process was so traumatic that you just had to erase it from easy access of the conscious mind.

Ah, speaking of what were we thinking? I guess, as with many topics in psychology, unfortunately, if you want to trace the history of how we understood this over the past one hundred years, really you have to go back to freud not because the Freudian explanations carry any scientific currency today they almost never do. Instead, it's just because you've got to understand how influential Freudian theories were in the history of how people thought about this exactly.

Yeah, yeah, And of course you we're talking about Sigmund Freud here Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, and he too explored the topic of quote unquote infantile amnesia, postulating that these lost memories constitute repressed memories repressed due to their psychosexual nature. Here's a quote from Freud, obviously in translation quote. I believe that the infantile amnesia, which causes the individual to look upon his childhood as if it were a prehistoric time and conceals from him the beginning of his own sexual life. That this amnesia is responsible for the fact that one does not usually attribute any value to the infantile period in the development of the sexual life.

Right, So, I think the common understanding of the Freudian view is that early childhood is a time of strange sexual fixations and realizations that we can't bear to think back about as adults, so we repress those memories as a type of trauma. I don't think there's any good empirical evidence for the Freudian psychosexual view of development today.

It frankly doesn't gel with any of the science we've we've looked at in our research for these episodes, and it's mainly worth mentioning because of its place in the history of the topic and so forth. But it's also it's interesting to think about, like what's going on with this approach to infantile amnesia, to the seeming lack of real, congrete memories from early life, because you can think of them as sort of like blank spots upon which you can focus ideas like this. There's there's no possible memory there to contradict the backward looking explanation. You know.

Well, Yet not only because it's a blank spot you can fill in with your explanations, but because of the particular characteristics of memory as a function of human brains, it's also actually not only possible, but quite trivial to place memories. There are things that feel like memories that do not reflect events that actually happened.

Yeah, it brings to mind that the use of you so called repressed memories not only in psychotherapy, but in the pursuit of paranormal experiences as well, such as alien abductions and ritual satanic abuse.

Right, And this is a really dangerous area because, for one thing, I think it's important to acknowledge that it's impossible to rule out the idea that repressed memories exist, right, it is possible that the brain somehow does retain memories that are not easily retrieved with you know, just regular conscious effort, but that could be retrieved by some other method. But while it's possible, one thing that research makes very clear is that it is incredibly easy to mistake false recovered memories for real ones. And the false memories feel completely convincing, just as real as actual memories. In fact, they are often even stronger and more vivid than real memories. And you can show this with experiments where you know, people will say, like, we we consulted with your family and they they told us a story about a time, you know, that you got lost at the playground, but then you met this person and whatever, and this will be completely made up for the purpose of the experiment, but many people will start to believe that is a real memory they have in their head. Just vividly imagining a scenario proposed by someone else is often enough to make someone totally convinced of it as a memory.

Yeah, these alien abductions and ritual satanic abuses are both the topics we've discussed on the show before. But like very briefly, like just the the the idea is so heartbreaking that you could be manipulated into creating a memory of trauma and the memory would be traumatic like like once it has been sort of created and or augmented in your memory, like it's you know, it's it's a thing that is that is real to you. So yeah, but heartbreaking, is it is? It also just drives home something that is possible in all of our memories and really is going on on a less traumatic level with so many everyday memories in our lives.

Yes, and while I would also point out that it seems especially easy to do this with the idea of early childhood memories, this also works for adults, like you can get adults to remember events that did not take place by causing them to vividly imagine the event or something like that.

All right, well, well, getting away from from even the idea of alien abductions, let's get back into what the actual research seems to illuminate about this topic.

Well, one thing I think we should say at the beginning is that it's still somewhat an open question why childhood amnesia occurs, and there are competing theories that might that are to some degree compete, but they might also be complementary. There might be multiple factors contributing to this overall pattern where most adults can not really remember much of anything from before age about three or four, and then have this gradual accumulation of more memories to about seven or eight. We'll probably explore some hypotheses in this part and then more in the next part in this series, but there was one I wanted to talk about because it seems like a pretty straightforward explanation based on neural development, the development of regions of the brain, especially a region known as the hippocampus, And so this was in a paper I was reading by Christina m. Alberini and Alessio Travaglia published in the Journal of Neuroscience in twenty seventeen called infantile amnesia a critical period of learning to learn and remember. And this paper highlights a seeming paradox. So on one hand, there's this phenomenon we've talked about at length now early speriences seem to be forgotten very rapidly, and yet simultaneously, early experiences seem to be incredibly influential on adult behavior and adult brain development, to the extent that early childhood experience is a very well documented risk factor for various adult psychopathologies and disorders. Just to cite one example, there is extensive evidence that neglect during early childhood development can lead to disorders including depression and anxiety, as well as learning and cognitive disabilities in later life, and there are similar findings about childhood poverty leading to cognitive and learning deficits that persist into later life. A lot of these effects are thought to be at least in part related to chronic stress in early childhood, though the authors of this paper propose that it might not just be the effects of stress leading to these outcomes, but also the absence of what they call enrichment in episodic or declarative experiences in early development. So we know that early childhood experiences have this profound impact on how your brain works later in life, and yet much of what we learn in this period cannot be recalled later in narrative or episodic form. So the authors say, quote, how then can memories that are rapidly forgotten and of which there is virtually no recollection in adulthood exert a lifelong effect on the brain and cognitive function. And the answer that the authors of this paper propose lies in the hippocampus. So the hippocampus is crucial for the formation and maintenance of episodic memories. It's thought to be necessary for certain kinds of learning, for the encoding of long term memory, and related brain functions like spatial memory and navigation of spaces. And an int intersting fact is that this is not true just of humans, but it's true of humans and non human mammals. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, so it is part of the brain that we share with other mammals, and the authors write that in both humans and non human mammals what they call wwww memories, which I guess is more of a shorthand when you type it than you say it out loud, but that stands for who, what, when, and where memories, So these are explicit memories that require conscious recollections. This would have some overlap with the idea of like episodic memories, memories of events that happened that you can recall in detail. The authors say that these memories are processed by the hippocampus dependent learning and memory system, also known as the medial temporal lobe. Dependent learning and memory system. So based on comparing what we know about hippocampal development in humans with the results of studies based on learning and early development in rats, the authors actually argue that quote, the hippocampal memory system, like sensory functions and language, matures through experience and undergoes what they call a developmental critical period. Now, they deal with a couple of pre existing hypotheses about what's going on here. One they identify as the developmental hypothesis, which basically says that these wwww memories they are not stored in the long term quote because the hippocampus is immature and therefore unable to process, consolidate, and store contextual and episodic representation. So it's just functionally not competent to do this yet. And then on the other hand, there's this hypothesis known as the retrieval hypothesis, which quote posits that infantile memories are not gone, but are instead stored in some form that cannot be expressed due to retrieval failure. And they essentially thread the needle. They argue that both of these kind of get something right, but neither one is exactly right, and instead they end up arguing that the hippocampus and the hippocampal learning system are very active in early childhood, and they are very much processing experiences during this early developmental period, but instead of storing memories exactly the same way it will once it is a mature organ it is learning how to learn.

I also have to mention here though, that it is interesting that the developmental hypothesis and the retrieval hypothesis, both of these in their own way reflect different former ideas about the minds of young children. Developmental being, well, that's not a full blown human yet, of course, it's not gonna think the way we think or remember the way we think. And in the retrieval hypothesis, it's kind of in some you know, it's not exactly like Freud, but you know, it gets into that similar like, oh, those memories are there, they're just not in a way in there in a place that we can easily get to them, right.

And I think these authors think that there is an element of truth to both of these views, but that neither one is exactly correct. That instead, it's that the hippocampus is working really hard to process experiences during this time, but the main thing it's doing with those experiences is learning how to learn. So the hippo campus does store memories which can be maintained they say, through frequent recalls, but they say without some form of ongoing recall or subsequent activation or modulation, those memories can tend to decay rather quickly. And so they say, quote the types of experience to which an individual is exposed during development shape learning abilities an important implication that highlights the fundamental roles of developmental environments. So this period is very important, and it does change the brain in a way that will affect the the person throughout the rest of their life. But a lot of that, they argue, is through affecting how the hippocampus develops and thus how the brain learns to learn. And I'm not going to go into great granular detail on what the mechanisms are within this, but basically they propose a process by which there's sort of a sequence of different stages of development within critical periods for development in the brain. And this is true of not just learning and memory. It's true of sensory functions, like certain sensory things come online and the development of one seems to affect the development of the subsequent one, and then the next one and so forth, and they argue that the same thing may well be happening with the maturation of hippocampus dependent learning. So they say, quote, our hypothesis is supported by the observation that complex hippocampal learning takes place only after simple learning has matured. For example, the abilit to learn about a single queue or object seems to mature earlier than episodic learning and memory, which require the more complex function of binding together several objects, sequences and time. Again, this is the four W learning. And then finally they say, thus we speculate the different types of hippocampal learning mature sequentially in order of increasing complexity. So they have like a diagram where they speculate that it might go sort of learning about objects, and then learning about places, and then learning about space more generally, and then finally the four W learning.

But once again kind of goetting back to what we were talking about in the first episode, it's like childhood and chadhood development as a series of gates that you pass through, as a series of phases that you progress through towards full integration into society as an adult.

Yeah, and under this model at least how and when you pass through the pre gate affects how and when you pass through the next gate and the next gate and the next gate. But also too, as I said earlier, that this is one take within this sort of broader genre of explanations of childhood amnesia. This is sort of the structural brain development type argument. Now, there are some other types of explanations, maybe some involving language, interestingly and other things, but maybe we will save that for the next episode. Because I know Rob you today in your heart there's a burning icon on the surface of your heart and it is in the shape of a super baby.

Yeah, we mentioned the possibility of discussing mythic babies, babies of religious significance, and actually we actually heard for at least from a couple of people that were like, yes, bring on the babies. So yeah, to whatever extent it helps us understand this topic, we will give you mythic babies that to some degree each exhibits superior abilities and or cognition or or something else that's worth touching on. So in general, though I think in most, if not all, of these examples, we're going to be touching on a very widespread religious archetype, that of the divine boy. And you know, once you see it, you can recognize it in all its various forms and incarnations. And I suppose, especially in modern media, you also have to consider its opposite in the form of various like damiens and various health children.

Right, yeah, the cursed boy.

Yeah.

Well, I mean I almost think that in the modern era we I'm about to say something I don't really know its true. Okay, well, go with it anyway. What I was going to say is it seems like today we're more likely to interpret a child with like superabilities or super intellect as creepy rather than as something really cool, you know, like yeah, or we're more predisposed to the Damien direction than the than the child uh, you know, the child sage direction.

Yeah, And I think it's very well illustrated in a couple of fictional examples I'll bring up here in a bit too. Yeah, that it's even if you're going for the divine, you end up touching on the uncanny, because it is there is an uncanny aspect to it, for sure. If you're imagining like a baby that has or a small child that has uh, like the rational demeanor of a full blown adult. All right, well, let's let's start with baby Jesus, who we've talked about on the show before. I think we did a whole episode one Christmas about images of the Christ Child from Renaissance art that look like tiny ugly men and why they look like tiny ugly men. Go back and listen to that if you need more weird baby action. But yeah, depictions of the Christ Child in the history of Western art, it varies greatly from believable human infant to tiny mandlings that sometimes exude a philosophic air other times look like vaguely grumpy getting into that, you know what we've talked about in the last episode about babies or like are like old people, and we can't quite get that out of our heads. And we have accounts of the adventures that range from basically nothing, from just like Christ's early life being just a just unrecorded, to other traditions such as the like Christ's roll lowering the chur not just Christ but the Christ infant lowering Christmas gifts from Heaven on a golden string. You know, that is a that is a tradition in parts of Europe. To other even wilder adventures.

Oh well, Rob, I think you're trying to set me up to talk about the the infancy Gospel of Thomas. Is that right, Yes, Okay, this is an ancient text that we have discussed off Mike here.

So.

Uh.

You know, if if you read the four gospels that are canonical to most Christians, the ones that are in the New Testament, there's very little about the baby Jesus. We don't get really many stories of what Jesus did before he was a full grown man. Two of the gospels have a story of his birth, Matthew and Luke do, but he doesn't do anything. He just gets born. There's really only one story in the canonical gospels of the baby Jesus or the boy Jesus, and that is the so called finding at the Temple story in the Gospel of Luke, which is essentially kind of a boy wonder story. It is that Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple and then they leave and then realize that he's not with them anymore, so they go back to the temple and he is there teaching the wise men about the law and about the scripture. So he's showing off just his great learning and intellect even as a child.

Yes, yes, I definitely this one from Sunday School days of old.

But if you go outside of the New Testament canon, there are gospels from the ancient world that do talk about that tell other stories of Jesus as a child, including the frankly hilarious Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This is a text from I think it's generally believed to be from the second century that you can find and read online in an English translation. The translation I found was by M. R. James from Clarendon Press, Oxford, nineteen twenty four, published in a collection called the Apocryphal New Testament. I think the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is sometimes considered a Gnostic text, but I know there are some texts that were previously considered gnostic that now scholars don't so much think of as gnostic, So I'm not sure where this lands on the gnosticism scale of today. But the stories in it are wild and consist of child jes running around, actually Jesus basically in this is Damien from the Omen. He's just running around cursing and killing other children. So there's like a scene where he is playing by a brook, and he at one point he takes these he takes clay and fashions that into twelve little birds made out of clay. And then baby Jesus is accused of having violated the Sabbath because he did this on the Sabbath day. And then he gets mad and rebukes that, and he turns the clay sparrows into living sparrows and they fly away.

I have to say too, this version of it that you shared with me, it's really hard not to read it in your head in the voice of like an ecclesiastical eric Idol from Monty Python and in the Holy Grail, you know, reading about the Holy hand grenade.

Okay, I'm not going to do eric Idle voice, but you can imagine eric Idol as I read from the following.

This is the m R.

James translation. It says, but the son of Annas, the scribe, was standing there with Joseph, and he took a branch of a willow and dispersed the waters which Jesus had gathered together. Oh yeah, Jesus he gathered together waters from the from the brook.

I guess.

So he does this. And when Jesus saw what was done. He was wroth and said unto him, Oh, evil, ungodly and foolish one, what hurt did the pools and the waters? Do thee behold?

Now?

Also, thou shalt be withered like a tree, and shalt not bear leaves, neither root nor fruit. And straightway that lad withered up Holy, But Jesus departed and went unto Joseph's house. But the parents of him that was withered took him up, bewailing his youth, and brought him to Joseph and accused him for that, Thou hast such a child, which doeth such deeds. And then I'm not going to keep reading, but it goes. Jesus gets like mad at the people who were accusing them, and further curses and kills people. It's intense.

So Babe, the kid Jesus straight space vampire. This kid essentially yes, withered him right there on the spot.

It's like, yeah, it's like the movie Life Force. So it's interesting. I don't know. One thing I don't fully understand is how this type of story would have been received by its intended audience. So, if you are one of the people reading this story in the second century, and you think this is an authentic story about the child Jesus, Like what are you supposed to think about it? Like, wow, he did you know? He really did show that kid or I'm not sure.

Yeah, yeah, Like they're different. Way. You can sort of read this and instantly go in the Damien direction like that's dangerous for a child to have those kind of powers, or I can easily imagine someone going in a more sort of theological direction, like what does this say about like the power and authority of Christ and so forth? But yeah, it's it's certainly a head scratcher for us.

Anyway, I think later in the text he does sort of take back or magically undo at least some maybe all of his curses and killings.

So okay, well that would that would sound appropriate? Yeah, all right, well let's move through some other examples from major world religions. First stop, the infant Muhammad, so according to the Prophet Muhammad and Ritual by Marion Holmes Cats published in twenty tens, the Cambridge Companion to Muhammad. There are also miraculous accounts of Muhammad as a child quote as depicted in the most widely circulated moulded texts the infant prophet was a luminous figure whose radiance ignited his mother's room and whose holiness blessed all who approached him. So there are accounts of him as an infant causing the breast of his foster mother, who was also caring for another child, to overflow with sustaining milk. This was in a time of drought and famine, if I remember correctly. And also it said that her emaciated donkey was invigorated simply by being in the presence of the child.

Okay, so one could see this as a legend of the prophets sort of prefiguring the future blessings he would help facilitate bringing even in his childhood or even as a baby.

Yeah, his whole presence is just kind of brilliant and empowering, all right. Up next, baby Krishna or Bala Krishna, which I think just means like the child Krishna or kid Krishna or something to that effect. Is of course, Krishna is the blue skinned avatar of Vishnu who plays a major role in Hinduism. But he was also once a baby, a little blue skinned baby, and there are a lot of tales of him and his exploits, and generally speaking, these tales tend to exhibit a very young child with abilities beyond his years, which is very much a part of the whole divine boy archetype. But there's still also a trickster element to him as well, with the main thing that he does being the stealing of butter, like it's such a big deal. You'll find numerous images and illustrations of this blue skinned Krishna stealing a little butter, And so you have infant Krishna also doing things that are not necessarily or certainly not attributes of the adult Krishna. Like adult Krishna is not going around stealing butter.

Wait a minute, so you attached a picture of Bala Krishna here and does he have his hand in a butter jar?

I believe so, I believe that is what this image represents. And there are numerous images that have this basic this this basic theme going on.

This is his trying to get the Marischino cherries experience exactly.

There's also another tale that I ran across, and this is one of another child accusing child Krishna of eating mud, So basically saying, mom, Krishna is eating mud make him stock right, and so his foster mother says, okay, Krishna, open your mouth, let's see. And then he opens his mouth, but within his mouth she sees herself and then has a cosmic vision of all universal matter within. So that love because it starts out like seeming like a very childhood story, and then takes a sharp turn into more the sort of an ally and become death, the destroyer of worlds, you know, that sort of aspect of the grown Krishna.

Because all of my references are low brow trash, what I'm imagining with this inspiring myth is Tim Curry is penny Wise opening his mouth to show the dead lights.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean kind of a similar vibe, except on the sacred end of the spectrum, as opposed to the horrific. All right, next up, baby Buddha. Yes, And I have to admit I hadn't really thought about this as much of a possibility, because first of all, I wasn't familiar with any stories of the historical Buddha as an infant am I sort of go to understanding of Sidhartagatoma, the man who had become the Buddha, is that of a prince who undergoes an existential crisis and turns his back on riches to instead pursue equanimity, right, I mean, that's that's kind of the standard. But they're all, of course, a lot of different interpretations of and writings about the Buddha, and some of them do discuss the idea of the Buddha as a baby, and in fact, there are traditions depicting the newborn Buddha or Buddha as a divine child in both Chinese and Japanese traditions.

Oh my god, this image of Hercules. Sorry, yes, please do.

The Oh yeah, let's move things back in the mythic direction, because of course we have to mention Hercules. Baby Hercules, famous for strangling the snake that was placed by an assassin in his cradle, and if memory serves, the Luferigno Hercules movie that we watched on Weird House Cinema also has a scene with baby Hercules strangling snakes.

Bam and hold, I'm sorry you attached an image. It's like, I don't know, a mosaic of baby Heracles that does look like it's from the ancient world in which the artist has tried to simultaneously capture like muscles because it's Heracles, so he's muscily, but also give him the little like chubstick legs of a baby.

Yeah, it's a strange image. It's some sort of like mosaic image. I don't know the exact origins of it. But yeah, he has a serpent in each hand, like crushing their necks, strangling them. A very fierce looking baby here.

So he's just got a little like balloon legs like a baby has. But then also some ripples indicating he's ripped underneath that.

Yeah, I mean it's it's uncanny. Now, briefly skipping into more modern ideas of the divine child, I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that in our modern myth making, Anakin Skywalker is a child with abilities to surpass that of other children and even humans human adults. In his midst, at a very young age, he's already a phenomenal pilot, and his ability as a pilot factor into his earliest adventures.

Is he not also a product of parthenogenesis?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, so yeah, Anakin, that's a choice, good George Lucas. It was born out of the force there are various theological treatments of this as well. Then, of course, there are three main examples of exceptional children in Frank Herbert's Dune saga. You have a Leah a Treades who pops up in the second half of the book Dune. So she hasn't appeared in the new movies yet, and due to the exposure to her exposure to the water of life while still in the womb, she's born with the full powers of an adult Benny jesterid reverend Mother. I think people who've seen the David Lynch adaptation are well familiar with this figure, and it certainly comes off. I would say that the Dune saga in general embraces the creepiness of the divine child as well as the you know, the sacred aspects.

I was about to say, can we admit that this character is creepy and maybe is supposed to be creepy?

Certainly Lynch plays. It'll be interesting to see what the new film adaptation how it approaches it. But yeah, I mean, how can she not be because she's a small child talking about like ruthless murder and so forth, and revenge, and it is very unchildlike in the way that she talks to people.

You don't want a child telling you who is and is not the quisat's head.

Rack. Yeah. Now, by the third book, in Children of Doune, we have two more super Dune babies. We have Leto the second and Ganima Treades, who both possess adult consciousness before birth due to their mother's spice consumption, and so a lot of a lot of space in Children of Dune and Children of Dune is a long book, or at least in my experience, it was a long read. There are a lot of scenes of these two like talking to and out talking adults and like burning adults with various insults and reminders that they are in fact of brilliant minds, just sort of encased in the boi of small children. Oh yeah, yeah, plenty of creepy content going on in this book as well well.

Rob, I think we need to wrap up today's episode there, but I'm loving your super baby sidebars, and I think we will have to continue this in the next part of the series as well, So we'll be back next time to talk more about childhood amnesia, this gap in the memory of children, what might cause it, and other interesting facts about it, and yeah, we are certainly not done with super babies and babies with super brains all right.

In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, which you can get wherever you get your podcasts, and will remind you that Mondays that's our listener mail episode. Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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