The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [71]
There’s a young student at this university (Sheffield Uni-versity) who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain … When we did a brain scan on him, we saw that instead of the normal 4.5 centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.
Lorber’s provocative findings suggest that we need to reconsider our long-held beliefs about how the brain works and the physical foundation of human intelligence. I submit in the Epilogue of this book that human intelligence can only be fully understood when we include spirit (“energy”) or what quantum physics–savvy psychologists call the “superconscious” mind. But for the moment, I’d like to stick to the conscious and subconscious minds, concepts that psychologists and psychiatrists have long grappled with. I’m grappling with it here to provide the biological foundation for conscious parenting as well as energy-based psychological healing methods.
Human Programming: When Good Mechanisms Go Bad
Let’s go back to the evolutionary challenge for human beings, who have to learn so much so quickly to survive and become a part of their social community. Evolution has endowed our brains with the ability to rapidly download an unimaginable number of behaviors and beliefs into our memory. Ongoing research suggests that a key to understanding how this rapid downloading of information works is the brain’s fluctuating electrical activity as measured by electroencephalograms. The literal definition of electroencephalograms (EEGs) is “electric head pictures.” These increasingly sophisticated head pictures reveal a graded range of brain activity in human beings. Both adults and children display EEG variations that range from low frequency delta waves through high frequency beta waves. However, researchers have noted that EEG activity in children reveals, at every developmental stage, the predominance of a specific brain wave.
Dr. Rima Laibow in Quantitative EEG and Neurofeedback describes the progression of these developmental stages in brain activity. (Laibow 1999 and 2002) Between birth and two years of age, the human brain predominantly operates at the lowest EEG frequency, 0.5 to 4 cycles per second (Hz), known as delta waves. Though delta is their predominant wave activity, babies can exhibit periodic short bursts of higher EEG activity. A child begins to spend more time at a higher level of EEG activity characterized as theta (4-8 Hz) between two and six years of age. Hypnotherapists drop their patients’ brain activity into delta and theta because these low frequency brain waves put them into a more suggestible, programmable state.
This gives us an important clue as to how children, whose brains are mostly operating at these same frequencies between birth and six years of age, can download the incredible volume of information they need to thrive in their environment. The ability to process this vast quantity of information is an important neurologic adaptation to facilitate this information-intense process of enculturation. Human environments and social mores change so rapidly that it would not be an advantage to transmit cultural behaviors via genetically programmed instincts. Young children carefully observe their environment and download the worldly wisdom offered by parents directly into their subconscious memory. As a result, their parents’ behavior and beliefs become their own.
Researchers at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute have found that baby chimps also learn by simply observing their mothers. In a series of experiments, a mother was taught to identify the Japanese characters for a variety of colors. When the Japanese character for a specific color was flashed on a computer screen, the chimp learned to choose the right color swatch. Upon selecting the right color, the chimp received a coin that she could then