We encode implicit memory throughout our lives, and in the first eighteen months we encode only implicitly. An infant encodes the smells and tastes and sounds of home and parents, the sensations in her belly when she’s hungry, the bliss of warm milk, the way her mother’s body stiffens in response to a certain relative’s arrival. Implicit memory encodes our perceptions, our emotions, our bodily sensations, and, as we get older, behaviors like learning to crawl and walk and ride a bike and eventually change a diaper.
