The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [78]
Devlin, on the other hand, found that conditions during prenatal development significantly impact IQ. He reveals that up to fifty-one percent of a child’s potential intelligence is controlled by environmental factors. Previous studies had already found that drinking or smoking during pregnancy can cause decreased IQ in children, as can exposure to lead in the womb. The lesson for people who want to be parents is that you can radically shortchange the intelligence of your child simply by the way you approach pregnancy. These IQ changes are not accidents; they are directly linked to altered blood flow in a stressed brain.
In my lectures on conscious parenting, I cite research, but I also show a video from an Italian conscious parenting organization, Associazione Nazionale Educazione Prenatale, which graphically illustrates the interdependent relationship between parents and their unborn child. In this video, a mother and father engage in a loud argument while the woman is undergoing a sonogram. You can vividly see the fetus jump when the argument starts. The startled fetus arches its body and jumps up, as if it were on a trampoline when the argument is punctuated with the shattering of glass. The power of modern technology, in the form of a sonogram, helps to lay to rest the myth that the unborn child is not a sophisticated enough organism to react to anything other than its nutritional environment.
Nature’s Head Start Program
You may be wondering why evolution would provide such a system for fetal development that seems so fraught with peril and is so dependent on the environment of the parents. Actually, it’s an ingenious system that helps ensure the survival of your offspring. Eventually, the child is going to find itself in the same environment as its parents. Information acquired from the parents’ perception of their environment transits the placenta and primes the prenate’s physiology, preparing it to more effectively deal with future exigencies that will be encountered after birth. Nature is simply preparing that child to best survive in that environment. However, armed with the latest science, parents now have a choice. They can carefully reprogram their limiting beliefs about life before they bring a child into their world.
The importance of parental programming undermines the notion that our traits, both positive and negative, are fully determined by our genes. As we have seen, genes are shaped, guided, and tailored by environmental learning experiences. We have all been led to believe that artistic, athletic, and intellectual prowess are traits simply passed on by genes. But no matter how “good” one’s genes may be, if an individual’s nurture experiences are fraught with abuse, neglect, or misperceptions, the realization of the genes’ potentials will be sabotaged. Liza Minnelli acquired her genes from her superstar mother Judy Garland and her father filmmaker Vincent Minnelli. Liza’s career, the heights of her stardom, and the lows of her personal life are scripts that were played out by her parents and downloaded into her subconscious mind. If Liza had the same genes but was raised by a nurturing Pennsylvania Dutch farming family, that environment would have epigenetically triggered a different selection of genes. The genes that enabled her to pursue a successful entertainment career would have likely been masked or inhibited by the cultural demands of her agrarian community.
A wonderful example of the effectiveness of conscious parenting programming is superstar golfer Tiger Woods. Although his father was not an accomplished golfer, he made every effort to immerse Tiger in an environment that was rich with opportunities to develop and enhance the