the.com/imprint
the first thing you see can decide who you'll spend your life following.
means To stamp or press a mark onto a surface, or, in animals and people, to fix an early, lasting attachment or memory that shapes later behavior.
from From Latin 'imprimere' — 'im-' (into) plus 'premere' (to press), the same 'premere' that gives us 'press' and 'pressure.' It came into English through Old French 'empreinter,' carrying the literal sense of pressing a die into wax or paper. The biological meaning — a duckling fixing on the first moving thing it sees — was a much later borrowing, an early-20th-century scientific stretch of that same image: experience pressed permanently into a young mind.
- ducklings
- Konrad Lorenz raised goslings that followed him everywhere
- critical window
- birds bond in hours, then never again
- publishing
- a label's imprint signals taste before the cover does
- sexual imprinting
- some animals choose mates resembling early caretakers
konrad lorenz goslings — goslings followed lorenz instead of their mother after hatching, austria 1935
henry harlow monkeys — infant rhesus monkeys imprinted on cloth surrogate mothers, wisconsin 1958