Aristotle famously stated, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man”. This is certainly a catchy phrase, but what is meant by it? Well, Aristotle must have recognized that we, as humans, are highly impressionable during the first seven years of life and that many of the opinions, attitudes, and dispositions that define us as adults were actually shaped during these years. It was not a “one-off” idea from the time of the ancient Greeks. The Jesuit priests also recognized and applied this truth back in the 1500s. To understand the underpinnings of the statement, we must step back and examine the functioning of the mind and how it develops after birth.
During the first seven years of life, information that comes to us flows “unfiltered” into our brains and becomes “hard coded” into our subconsciousness because, at this age, we have not yet developed the faculties for rational thought that allows us to discriminate between fact and opinion. With no filters in place, we receive and store information somewhat like a sponge takes up water. This method of learning is highly efficient and allows us to quickly absorb vast amounts of information. To get a better handle on this, we should explore some fundamentals of brain activity
It is recognized that the brain operates in one of four basic states. These states are distinguished according to their corresponding frequency ranges as recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). In essence, the electrical activity in the neurons of our brains follows a cyclic pattern characterized by a certain frequency. The four basic brain states can be briefly summarized as follows:
- Beta: Associated with normal waking consciousness and a heightened state of alertness, logic, and critical reasoning.
- Alpha: Dominant during quietly flowing thoughts, while you are in deep relaxation, or when you are slipping into a lovely daydream, or during light meditation.
- Theta: Occur most often in sleep but are also dominant during deep meditation. In theta, we are in a dream; vivid imagery, intuition, and information beyond normal consciousness awareness.
- Delta: Experienced in a deep, dreamless sleep and in very deep, transcendental meditation.
Actually, there is a fifth state called Gamma, which we will not discuss here.
During the first two years of life (0 – 2 years of age) our brains are primarily in a delta state. We spend much of our lives sleeping. For the next four years (2 – 6 years of age) we go into the theta state. During this time our imaginations are highly active. For the proceeding six years (6 – 12 years of age) our brains are primarily in an alpha state. It is during this period that we begin honing our cognitive skills. Thereafter, we spend much of our waking hours in the beta state.
As mentioned above, this unfiltered learning during the first seven years of life is highly efficient, and allows us to quickly absorb vast amounts of information; however, it can also have unintended consequences. As you can imagine, not all of the unfiltered information (conditioning) that comes to us necessarily serves our greater interests.
Consequently, while in this highly receptive state as children, we receive information that can unwittingly promote within us a belief that we are not good enough, that we are not capable of achieving our goals, that we are unworthy, or even unloveable. In a sense, we become victims of the false beliefs that are programmed into us, and we may carry these beliefs with us well into adulthood.
The message that I want to share is that we have the capacity to overcome our subconscious thoughts and to transcend our victim mentality. It is important to recognize that our brain and nervous system exhibit neuroplasticity. That is, they are malleable and can be reorganized both physically and functionally. However, this process is not necessarily easy. Through a better understanding of the relationship between our conscious and subconscious states and how we interact with our environment, we can arrive at the realization that we need not simply be the product of our past experiences.
We will explore some of the methodologies of reconditioning our minds in subsequent posts.
