Eventually you get comfortable and you don’t want a house. You start believing that the house is unnecessary because it is cumbersome and large and has sooo many needs….
The exact same thing happens when you limit your mind. The mind has reach and breadth we have yet to uncover or discover, and yet we are often caught sitting in a box. By nature we process old information daily, using known knowledge to make decisions about new experiences. Like any muscle or organ within the human body if you neglect to use the full extent of your brain, certain chambers will rest and eventually collapse.
Elasticity in the human mind is about creating new paths for cognitive development. Going into facets of your mind that are yet to be explored so that you increase the resources you have within you to resolve problems arising. The thing very few people acknowledge is that you usually have to be suffocating in your existing box to consider options outside your developed neurological patterns. You need to be ready to accept new answers to old questions.
Elasticity does not only deal with opening up the creative mind as is often commercialised, but more the need to disrupt the rote learning thinking that has been taught to us in our first 20 years of learning. These neurology patterns have set us on a course to making decisions in the same manner repeatedly. So how do you beat the slump? If indeed you are programmed to fail at self-disruption. First and foremost, the minute you mark yourself as a failure at anything you have failed. How about we don’t mark ourselves at all. Just acknowledge that an action has taken place and it may have good and/or bad consequences. But neither good or bad makes you a failure, it makes you a work in progress.
There are measures of success that we have been taught that are not genuine at all in their measurement. And as such letting go of the finite state of things is essential if we are to learn something new.
Teaching has been heavily disrupted by the evolving elements of cognitive skills development and technology in education. The first, cognitive thinking; is absolutely essential to education development, the latter technology; is a passing fad like the typewriter, we will all soon get the hang of it.
Cognitive thinking is the development of knowledge, skills and problem-solving techniques, which help children to connect logically with the world around them. The investment required to reach for an ‘enquiring mind’ needs new teaching techniques. For parents it helps to answer those why questions with gusto! The sooner children learn that change is a healthy construct, and that there is more than one way to address a multitude of daily tasks the easier life becomes. Allowing for more room to engage with alternatives creates opportunities for more varied neurological patterns, thus decreasing anxiety when change is the only answer.
The rate at which the human mind is able to process new information and embrace environmental change has yet to reach its limit.
