Not exactly breaking news, but this story is too cool not to share with our Grailer audience.
In 2022 Jo Nagai, an eight-year-old student from Japan, had a seemingly simple question: do butterflies remember they were once caterpillars? It’s the kind of question a child or a genius (in this case, both) would come up with, so he set up an experiment to find out.
Not only did he spend the next couple of years to prove butterflies do retain somehow the memories of their former pre-metamorphosized self, but (and this is in fact his greatest scientific contribution) they also somehow pass on those memories to their offspring, turning them into a form of genetic memory; which might help explain why almost all humans have an inherent fear of snakes from birth, even though barely anyone of us gets bitten by one nowadays.
This amazing story reminded me of an older experiment which showed that flatworms—invertebrate organisms endowed with the capacity to regrow huge sections of their body—are capable of retaining memories even after their heads have been severed off, and they’ve re-grown new ones. Yet another instance that puts into question the role of the brain as being the sole ‘storage center’ of our memories. Remember that during the ‘pupa’ stage of Jo’s beloved butterflies, all their internal organs are broken down and reassembled into their final form.
And speaking of ‘final forms’, Jo’s butterfly study also reminded me of Frederic Myers (philosopher and founder of the Society for Psychical Research) and how he borrowed the entomological term ‘imago’ and applied it to his parapsychological speculations. According to Myers, our current human form might just be the ‘larval’ stage of a more evolved imaginal metamorphosis, in which latent emerging abilities such a telepathy or precognition would fully manifest, just like the wings of the butterfly finally spread out from the chrysalis and lift it out of the former dimension it once inhabited as a caterpillar.
But now, like Jo, I also wonder: will our future imaginal descendants remember our larval memories?
