Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Rom 12:2 (MSG)
Patterns of Thinking – Part 2
Go to PART 1
We pick up patterns and learned behaviours long before we can ever really start to guide ourselves physically around in this life.
Between the ages of 0-5 a child can learn and understand up to 4 languages simultaneously and quite easily. After that age, and this goes for most humans, it’s harder to master the art of learning just one extra language.
When the brain patterns of children at this age are measured, scientists have discovered that they are essentially in “record mode” most of the time. It’s the same state our adult brains are in in the moments before we drift off to sleep and just after we wake. This ‘brain state’ accounts for much of our subconscious programming.
Up to the age of 6, a child is getting many of the patterns she’ll keep for life from her parental figures. One of the first things infants learn is to recognise their parents, especially their faces. It’s the most fundamental form of communication they have since they are not developed enough for verbal feedback response.
So next time you see a new infant that’s starting to move around and encounter something new, notice that their first reaction is to find mummy or daddy’s face. “What’s their reaction? Is this new thing I’ve found dangerous or safe? Should I back away or stay and play?”
Then watch the parent’s face. If there’s shock, the baby will recoil. If there’s smiles and laughter, it’s all clear!
It’s an external feedback mechanism (in the form of a parent) that helps program the child for life in the environment they have been born into and will grow up in.
In Japan, some scientists were training a monkey to respond to and select various colours on the touch screen of a computer. If she selected the right colour, a treat was dispensed from a machine just behind her. During this time, which took several months, she gave birth but continued on with her training with the infant under one arm.
One day, after getting the colour right and heading for the machine for her treat, she placed the infant down – who was at this time, starting to move independently. While mum was at the machine, baby monkey reached up and pressed the touch-screen for a new quiz and picked the correct colour. The scientists were floored that this infant, only a month or two old, could achieve what had taken the mother the best part of a year to learn. Of course, she was just absorbing the patterns her mother had set.
As humans, we are pattern recognition machines. Our brains are constantly forming models of the world and then slightly reshaping them. Even now, as you read what I’ve written, you are comparing it to what you already know and what you’ve experienced in the past. A combination of your conscious and subconscious brain will compare notes and then you either discard the new information or add it to your model of the world, which will then continue to compare all new evidence. Almost like a consistently morphing lens that shapes how you view the world, moment-to-moment.
With all this pattern-making, our conscious mind often spends time racing off into the wilderness of the future, or the safety of the past, rarely taking in the full breadth of the beauty and abundance of this current moment. Although our worldview is constantly morphing – our past having direct influence over our future – there is a miraculous window that happens every moment, where those patterns have no power. Where they are held at bay by the infinite love that can only be found in the “right now.”
When you fix your attention on the Divine, that kind of love will change everything from the inside out.
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. – Rom 12:2 (MSG)
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