My son was approximately 3 when I realized that object permanence was a skill you have to learn.

There are two types of object permanence. First is basic and primal. You are a parent, you will feed me, change me, etc. I can trust your existence and willingness to help me. The second is much more nuanced.

I was driving my kids to school and a full moon was bright and low in the sky. As we drove, any time we’d make a set of turns where the moon would go out of view then reappear my son would loudly exclaim “there’s another moon!”

After chuckling to myself, it got me thinking, is he wrong? I’m not sure.

In a scientific sense there is only one moon, but how we perceive and remember an object is going to be different every time. The clouds move, the scenery changes, the change in amount of light, etc. all of these things mean you’re experiencing a different scene every time you look at an object. Although I’m sure that memory is much fuzzier than a series of pictures, it still categorizes an object into different settings. A moon during the day is much different than looking at the moon at night, a crescent moon does not match a full moon, etc.

No I don’t really think that in 10 minute car ride my son was seeing the different moon. But at the same time how his brain cataloged each sighting could have been so different that each reveal was a new moon.