If your child of 3 years is running downhill on a road the first thing you will tell him is –stop or you will fall down and hurt yourself. You will seldom say slow down or control your speed. We will say the first thing because it is so much programmed in our brain, because the same thing was said to us also when we were a kid. In Australia a widespread study was done and it was found that a child till 16 years of age is told on an average 23 times a day something starting with ‘don’t ‘– don’t do this or don’t do that. This phenomenon is common all around the world.
A child is born with only 3 instinctive thought processes- how to find food, fight to save itself or run away from the threat and procreate. An unpolluted child brain will only think on these lines. For him the act of falling down while running downhill and learning to control the speed will automatically come from experience. Even without the external source of ‘don’ts’ he will ultimately get to know what to do and what not to do.
What happens when we bombard an unpolluted brain with ‘don’ts’, day in and day out. The brain software then codes these and embeds it and it becomes a sort of operating system for the brain as to what to do and most importantly what not to do. Now the primary reason for our so many don’ts for the child is to protect it from hurt or accident or drill in a particular habit in them. But this often impedes its natural instinct to act and react. Now once the brain is coded in a particular way and when the situation arises the brain will present one of the previously coded reactions to a situation. If a new type of situation arises then the brain software won’t be able to come up with a coherent solution. It is as if the natural instinct has been fenced and its ability to go beyond gets diminished.
Our natural ability to think judge act and react is now restricted. Though in later stage in life we may think that we are thinking independently but in many cases we are actually following the instructions of the same code unknowingly. It is just like our beliefs which we think as right but we cannot justify always why it is right.
I think a common example of this particularly pertinent in third world countries like mine is the lifeline- birth, study, job, marriage, children, retire, death. From the childhood this is so much indoctrinated in our brain that very few get out of this cycle and do something different. Even I am doing the same. The initial coding done by our parents is to avoid getting hurt but it gets coded as don’t take risk. So when we are grown up we are seldom ready to take risk and follow the well trodden path.
So a major part or at least a certain part of what we think and who decides what we think is actually not us but the coding that has been written in our childhood and growing age. As parents we can change our way of writing the code in the child’s brain. Now days some schools have started to encourage children to think independently with more focus on self reliance rather than hand holding but they are very few and mostly for the elites. But I believe a lot can be done by parents if they want to inculcate a spirit of free thinking in their children.
For a world which is in the cusp of taking the next major leap it is necessary that the children of next generation are better prepared than what we were.
Thank you Telesfor sir.