"I might be a baby, but I am not so easily fooled." — “Quiet All Along: A Skeptic’s Journey Into the Unexplained”
When I look back at my earliest memory — lying in the arms of someone wearing my mother's robe, catching a strange, smoky aroma, and slowly realizing I was being tricked — I am struck by the sheer amount of ego present in that tiny body. I wasn't simply hungry or tired. I was offended. I was, as best I can describe it now, actively planning a mighty, earth-shattering scream specifically designed to teach the adults around me a lesson.
This memory flies directly in the face of nearly everything we're taught about cognitive development in newborns. Standard textbooks tell us that infants are essentially blank slates, driven by raw biological needs rather than any kind of complex internal narrative. But as science continues to evolve, researchers are starting to ask a far more profound question: do babies have complex thoughts after all?
The Myth of the "Empty" Infant
For decades, the consensus in child psychology and memory research was that babies lived in what William James famously called a "blooming, buzzing confusion." The prevailing assumption was that without language, there simply couldn't be complex thought. We assumed that because a baby couldn't say "I am angry," they weren't actually capable of feeling a sophisticated, textured sense of injustice.
However, there is a growing infant consciousness movement among researchers who suggest that the "lights are on" far earlier than we previously believed. Pre-verbal awareness, it turns out, doesn't necessarily mean a lack of awareness. It may simply mean the awareness is encoded in a different language entirely — one built from sensation, resonance, and a kind of direct, unmediated knowing that adults have largely lost access to.
This shift matters not just for developmental psychology, but for anyone interested in spirituality and the unexplained. If consciousness doesn't require language to exist, that raises uncomfortable and fascinating questions about where consciousness actually comes from, and how much of it we simply forget how to access as we age.
Why Language Was Never the Right Yardstick
Part of the confusion, I'd argue, comes from a fairly narrow assumption baked into a lot of twentieth-century psychology: that thought and language are essentially the same thing, or at least inseparable. If a being can't articulate a feeling in words, the reasoning goes, that feeling must not be especially complex.
But we already know this isn't true even in adults. Dreams, gut instincts, sudden flashes of intuition, the wordless dread you feel walking into a tense room — none of these arrive pre-packaged in sentences, yet none of us would say they're simple. Infant consciousness may simply be an earlier, more concentrated version of that same wordless intelligence: full, textured, and entirely real, just without the vocabulary to narrate itself in real time. Language, on this view, isn't the birthplace of thought. It's closer to a translation layer we build later, mapped onto something that was already there.
The Paradox of Early Childhood Ego Development
In my memory of those unfamiliar, bony arms, I recall a distinct and unmistakable sense of "I." I knew who I was. I knew who my mother was. And I knew, with total clarity, that the person holding me in that moment was an impostor standing in for her.
Standard developmental psychology suggests that early childhood ego development — the ability to distinguish the "Self" from the "Other" — doesn't fully stabilize until a child can recognize themselves in a mirror, typically somewhere between 15 and 24 months of age. This benchmark is widely known as the Mirror Test, and it remains one of the most commonly cited markers of self-awareness in developmental research.
But if you've ever watched a newborn intently studying a face, or noticed the very specific way an infant reacts to their mother's voice compared to a stranger's, you've already witnessed a burgeoning, unmistakable sense of identity. In my own experience, I already knew "ego" in some meaningful sense. I had pride. I had a clear sense of my own importance, however small my body was. This suggests something genuinely radical: that the Self isn't necessarily something we slowly build as we grow. It might be something we already bring with us the moment we arrive.
Baby's First Memories: Procedural vs. Declarative
When parents search online for information about a baby's first memories, they typically encounter a well-established distinction between two categories of memory.
Implicit (procedural) memory is essentially "how-to" memory. A baby remembers how to suck, how to kick a mobile to make it swing and rattle, or the specific scent of home carried on their mother's skin. This type of memory is widely accepted by mainstream developmental science as present from birth.
Explicit (declarative) memory is "what-happened" memory — the ability to recall a specific, discrete event, complete with context and sequence, such as being left with a grandmother wearing an unfamiliar floral robe.
Mainstream science generally claims that babies only possess implicit memory in their earliest months. Researchers argue that a memory like mine, from around two months old, technically shouldn't exist, because the hippocampus — the brain's primary storage system for discrete events — is still considered far too immature at that stage.
And yet my memory wasn't simply a vague feeling or a diffuse sensation. It was a specific narrative, complete with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It even included a calm, distinct internal thought that seemed to explain the situation to me directly: "They are trying to make you comfortable." This kind of structured internal narration implies a form of pre-verbal awareness that may operate somewhat independently of the physical brain's language-processing centers — a genuinely unexplained wrinkle in our current understanding of cognitive development in newborns.
What the Research Actually Says: Are Babies More Aware Than We Think?
Emerging research is slowly beginning to bridge the gap between so-called "impossible" early memories and mainstream scientific understanding.
The power of recognition. We already know that fetuses can recognize their mother's voice, and even the general melody and rhythm of their native language, while still in the womb. This alone requires a level of cognitive development in newborns involving fairly sophisticated pattern recognition and short-term data storage — capacities that were once assumed to be entirely absent before birth.
The "thinking" newborn. Research using EEG caps on infants has shown that newborns exhibit neural signatures associated with "global workspace" activity — the same general category of brain activity researchers associate with conscious thought in adults. This doesn't prove babies think exactly like adults do, but it does suggest the underlying machinery of conscious awareness may be active far earlier than previously assumed.
The problem of infantile amnesia. As many researchers have noted, the real mystery might not be that babies lack thoughts altogether. It may simply be that most of us lose the key to those early thoughts as we grow older, through a well-documented phenomenon known as infantile amnesia — the near-universal inability of adults to recall memories from their first two to four years of life.
The "Night Sky" Consciousness
In Quiet All Along, I describe slipping back into what I call the "wholeness of the night sky" after my anger, as an infant, finally subsided. To me, even at that age, this felt like a place of deep tranquility and safety — a well-known, boundless place I had somehow come from, and could return to whenever the noise of the world grew too loud.
If we look at infants through a spiritual or philosophical lens rather than a purely clinical one, they may be the closest any of us ever come to something like pure consciousness. They haven't yet been told they're a "marketing manager" or a "taxpayer." They haven't been assigned a name, a nationality, or a role to perform. In this light, infants might be best understood not as blank slates, but as vessels of a kind of unfiltered truth — before the world has had any chance to edit it.
Could it be that babies exhibit complex thoughts precisely because they remain, for a brief window, still connected to something larger — a vast, universal intelligence or field of awareness that predates individual identity? Perhaps the reason so many of us "forget" as we age isn't a flaw in the system at all. Perhaps the more we learn about the surface details of the world, the more we quietly forget about the Source underneath it.
Why This Matters for Parents and "Old Souls"
Understanding the real depth of infant consciousness changes how we interact with the children in our lives, in ways both practical and spiritual. If we accept that infants may carry a rich internal ego and a genuinely high level of pre-verbal awareness, we shift from simply "managing" babies toward something closer to honoring them as fully present beings.
For the self-described "old souls" reading this: your earliest memories aren't glitches in the system, and they aren't something to explain away. They are evidence of your enduring, continuous nature. Whether you remember the bony arms of an unfamiliar grandmother, or simply a sense of vastness that arrived before you could speak a single word, those glimpses count as your true "first firsts." They form part of the foundation of your authentic self — long before the world had a chance to tell you who you were supposed to be.
Common Questions About Infant Consciousness
Do babies actually remember being born?
Mainstream science generally holds that explicit memory of birth is highly unlikely given hippocampal immaturity, though some early-memory researchers and spiritual writers report vivid, consistent recollections that challenge this assumption.
Why do most adults have no memories before age three or four?
This is known as infantile amnesia, and researchers still debate its exact cause — leading theories point to rapid brain development, the later emergence of language, and shifting neural architecture during early childhood.
Is there scientific support for babies having a sense of self?
The Mirror Test remains the standard benchmark, typically passed between 15 and 24 months, though newer research into infant behavior and neural activity suggests some form of self-other distinction may begin developing earlier than that milestone implies.
Can early memories like these be verified?
Rarely in a strict scientific sense — declarative memories from infancy fall outside what most researchers consider provable, which is exactly why they tend to be dismissed rather than studied. That doesn't make the reported experiences less real to the person recalling them; it simply means the science hasn't yet caught up to the question.
Final Thoughts: The Courage to Ask
Society is quick to dismiss the inner life of an infant, largely because, by most conventional rules, they don't yet register as full "people" with an internal narrative worth taking seriously. But I'd ask you to consider this: has a baby ever actually said, out loud, "I don't have complex cognitive processes"?
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because a baby cannot yet speak the language of the world doesn't mean they aren't listening, closely and completely, to the language of the soul.
Do you have a "first memory" that seems too early to be real — one that predates what science says should be possible? I'd genuinely love to hear your own impossible stories in the comments below. You may find, as I did, that you're far from the only one.