Q. Is the joy of children or the disciplined acquisition of
knowledge more important?
The American neuroscientist and pharmacologist, Candace
Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion,
made a ground-breaking discovery about a secret located in the prefrontal lobes
of humans. The prefrontals, the latest-to-evolve brain lobes, are the seat of the
profound intelligence that is equal to our greatest challenges. Some examples
of the kind of thinking done by this most human part of the brain are self-reflection,
the pondering of deep meanings, the envisioning of new possibilities; the flashes
of insight that offer a new solution, design or invention; empathy (understanding
+ compassion) for the plight of another.
So what’s the groundbreaking knowledge? Candace Pert
discovered that located in the prefrontal lobes is the largest, densest
abundance of neural receptors and transmitters of bliss inducing chemicals, such
as endorphins, found anywhere in the body. Could it be that we have been
hard-wired to experience spiritual highs when we are doing our best thinking?
So, what might ecstatic flashes of sheer genius look like? Is
the trigger the laborious plodding of the rational mind, or is it something
else?
Nichola Tesla was genius of rare stature, who had spent his
childhood contriving experiments that confounded, amazed and alarmed his
elders. As an adult his discoveries were ahead of his time. When Tesla was a
young man, scientists were discussing the possibility of an AC motor and the
rotational effects associated with alternating currents. Tesla’s musings about
the possibility led to a profound experience:
One afternoon … I was
enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that
age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s
Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:
The glow retreats,
alone is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new
fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift
me from the soil
Upon its track to
follow, follow soaring!
As I uttered these
inspiring words, the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the
truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years
later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. The
images were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal. “See my
motor here; watch me reverse it.”
Pygmalion, on seeing
his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved.
Significantly, Tesla accessed the heart through poetry, even
as he engaged the brain in an elusive design project. You may recall that in a
past blog, we discussed the ongoing heart/brain dialogue. The heart, the organ
of elevated feelings, is also the source of intuitive flashes. The Institute of
HeartMath found that people’s heart beats would either achieve coherence or
become erratic according to whether a scene that was disturbing or inviting
would appear seconds later on a
screen.
The heart intuits future events and energetic blueprints
that elude the rational mind.
In Testla’s case, when the heart and brain communication were
open and flowing, while reciting poetry in a beautiful park, the elevated
feelings served as a conduit for an astonishing breakthrough. Nor did the
solution come as a laborious sequence of logic, but as an instantaneous single
picture and a simple phrase, “See my motor here; watch me reverse it.”
The accounts of the break-throughs of countless geniuses
echo Tesla’s experience. Yet another genius, Albert Einstein made the following
two statements that point to the cultivation of such brilliance:
Imagination is more
important than knowledge.
And …
The intuitive mind is
a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a
society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Poetry! Imagination! Inspiration! What have these to do with
genius? EVERYTHING!
What have these to do with the education of our children?
EVERYTHING!
Apparently nature has hardwired human children to engage in
pursuits that activate human brilliance. Children, who are free to do so, spend
their time initiating activities that sync with the body/heart/mind flow. Our
role as inspirers, i.e. suppliers of evocative stories, compassionate
relationships and compelling indoor and outdoor environments, is to step aside
for the experiments and expressions of genius. When we whole-heartedly nurture each child’s will to imagine,
explore, experiment, design, create and construct, we can slip in academics in
service to the project. Then academics mean something to a child.
Schooling that has lost sight of the gift, oppresses the
spirit of childhood by confining its offspring to a mass monoculture of memorizers
and rational thinkers. This force-feeding of the intellect, bypasses the most
human part of the brain (the prefrontals); silences the heart/brain
communication; and plods forward with the endorphin transmitters and receptors
switched off.
When at last we give credence to avant-garde science and the
wisdom of the world’s geniuses, we will delight in young faces that reflect the
bliss of firing endorphins. Rather than mass-producing rational intellects
propped by megabytes of ROM and RAM, we will free innate geniuses with as many
unique modes of expression as there are children in the world.
