At age seven months in the womb, humans begin language
coordination in response to what they hear through the mother’s
belly wall. Some 52 muscles learn to respond to the various
phonemes (a basic language sound like 'b' in boy and 'm' in man)
of the language surrounding that belly. There are also studies
showing that the emotional state of the parent imprints as do
things like music and other environmental conditions. Nutrition,
drug use and pollution spill right through directly to the fetus
via the placenta and umbilical cord. Parenting begins way before
the bassinet.
At eighteen months, the child has a brain 1/3 the size of an
adult but the same number of neural connections. These
connections are called synapses and relay information – outgoing
from the nerve cell through axons, ingoing by way of dendrites.
It is the number of connections of nerve cells that relates to
intelligence, not the number of neurons.
As the brain
grows, by age 6 we have about five times the neural connections
we do as adults. These trillions upon trillions of connections
are there waiting to be imprinted by the environment, parents
and society. This is probably the reason, some 2000 years ago,
the church started the sacraments at ages 6 or 7. (It is
remarkable how so many 'new' scientific discoveries were
anticipated by the intuitive traditions of, what we believe to
be, unsophisticated minds of the past.) Beginning at about age
12, the fatty myelin sheath covering connecting neuronal
tendrils not used, are literally dissolved, absorbed into the
cerebrospinal fluid. Thus 80% of the neural brain mass present
at age 6 is gone by age 14 as a result of disuse. Further
belittling is the fact that of the remaining 20% of the brain,
we only use 5%. That means, of our full potential, we only use
about 1%! (For evolutionary materialists out there, please
explain to me how something as complex as a brain – infinitely
more complex than anything humans have ever invented – developed
so that 80% of it could dissolve and 95% of what remains go
unused.)
This 'devolution' of the brain applies to the
neocortex, that big part of the brain with all the folds and
grooves that humans are so proud of because that's where all our
smarts (are supposed to) come from. The more 'primitive' parts
of the brain, the 'reptilian' brainstem and limbic systems
responsible for stimulus-response sorts of actions and
emotion-cognition, remain intact and do not experience this
loss. In other words, our ability for 'fight-flight' (running
from predators), self-awareness (me, I, look at me), sex (fun
stuff and children hatching), eating (wouldn't want to miss
that) and road rage (essential in modern living) are never at
risk, just our ability to be intelligent about all that base
reptilian stuff is.
Nothing new here, right? Is it not
clear which parts of the human brain are in full function today?
Just watch a little television, listen to 'with it' music, go to
some movies and pick up some of the tabloids at the grocery
counter and you'll see the human brain stem has suffered no
melt-down. But that 3-pound blob on top of it, the seat of
intelligence, is evidently just filling up space.
What is
primarily responsible for making and holding neural connections
is not what we can beat into our kids with rules, instructions
and performance pressures, but what they experience around them.
At least 95% of the imprinting a child receives, neither the
child nor the parents are aware of. Who we are emotionally,
ethically and intellectually at our core in our day-to-day
routines as parents – not what we pretend or preach – is picked
up by the child as its most important lessons and is then
'neural connected.' So telling a child to be something we are
not doesn't work. If we want better children, then we must be
better people.
This also speaks to the importance of a
loving and nurturing family nest. We learn love, in large part,
by experiencing it. The erosion of the family in our libertine
society thrusts the child into a peer group for imprinting. This
begins with technological births in hospital wards, then
continues with isolating infants in their own bedrooms,
pseudofood in bottles with nipples, television, day-care, broken
homes and on to public schooling…you know, the 'modern' way to
rear kids. The premature unfolding of development is accelerated
through exposure to adult themes pressing in from everywhere in
our society. Menstruation is beginning in 8-year-old girls
(partly the result of hormone-type pollutants in food), there is
an outbreak of pregnancies in 9-year-olds, and violent sex
crimes among children under the age of 10 are becoming common.
Children are being thrust into full operational adult thinking
way before they are capable of handling it properly. That is why
some 70% of teenagers are functionally illiterate: they may be
able to learn, but cannot grant meaning. They have not been
properly imprinted, don't have sufficient life experience for
context and don't have the neural connections.
So yes,
the home, family and parents are responsible for the development
of children. On the other hand, there is a lot of nature
involved too. Any parent raising a child into adulthood will see
that the child at 40 is pretty much identical to the child in
earliest infancy. So don't be too quick to blame yourself for a
child gone bad. Don't spend your fortune in therapy either,
whining about how your parents didn't love you. We can lose
important neural connections in childhood but once you realize
who you are – very early in childhood – the ball is ultimately
in your court. There are people with essentially no brain in
their skull (compressed to a thin membrane from hydrocephalus)
who excel intellectually and ethically. So, as an adult, buck
up, take responsibility for yourself and make good use of the
neural connections remaining. That's in your court. You are not
a victim.
But the present circumstances for children are
a peculiar situation with no historical precedent. There is no
solution other than for the adults to not be distracted by the
veneer of civilization, its glamour of modernity, and its amoral
and libertine pressures. Even though we are left with 1% of our
mental potential, we can make a lot of good use of that. It
means reaching inside for the goodness that is there in our
hearts and extending that to our fellow humans. It means not
following the conscience of others but learning what is already
within and being true to it. Children don't need money, videos,
signature shoes and pressure for grades and sports performance.
The inner needs of children don't care about being raised in a
pigpen so long as there is love. If that critical emotional
relationship is not there, children will seek it in peers,
including the perverted, money grubbing, media models. Then we
have the ethically blind (other children, brainless idols and
profiteering media) leading our blind children. This is the
proper incubator for the adults of the future? What then,
particularly when everyone has been indoctrinated into thinking
they are victims and any failure in life is the fault of
somebody else? What a formula for the collapse of society!
The answer is that greatest of all intelligences, love. That
is not a platitude. Love requires an expansive and wise mind.
Even with the puny 1% of our brain that we use, the capacity for
love is infinite. In the end, what else really matters anyway?
In the process, by being a person of goodness and reaching out
in this way to others, we become the perfect model for the
development of a loving and well-adjusted child. And hardly a
word needs to be spoken in the process.
About the Author:
Dr. Wysong: A former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college
instructor in human anatomy, physiology and the origin of life,
inventor of numerous medical, surgical, nutritional, athletic
and fitness products and devices, research director for the
present company by his name and founder of the philanthropic
Wysong Institute.
http://www.wysong.net
