What is common between the brain activity and car traveling?
Imagine traveling to unfamiliar places. What emotions do you feel? You get excited to see new and unfamiliar lands; you admire nature; you absorb the unknown with all your senses. Yes, these are the emotions of the people who are the passengers. And how does the driver feel – the one who should take you to the chosen destination? Does he have the time and opportunity to enjoy the journey (like you) while driving and thinking about the road?
Driving and traveling are two different states for your brain.
When you are in the driver’s position, you are required to concentrate fully on the road and the way you are driving the car. That involves making quick decisions, assessing situations, looking ahead, spatial vision, high levels of observation and responsibility. Imagine all this being controlled by your command centre – your brain. While driving, your brain is running at full speed. And so it should be.
Now imagine that you are a passenger. You sit comfortably and watch the landscape change through the window. You admire, you observe, your body relaxes, your brain – too. You fall asleep – you go through a state of relaxation, meditation and sleep. All this time, your brain is in a completely different state from that of the driver.
There comes a time when the driver gets tired and wants to rest. Then you switch roles – the passenger becomes the driver and the driver becomes the passenger.
It takes some time for each of you to take on the new role. This is the period of adaptation for your brain. At the beginning, this period is always accompanied by rejection, conflict and contradiction. Why? Because control is no longer in your hands and you are depending on someone else.
Letting go of control and tension is the hardest thing for the modern man who wants to know and can do anything.
Close your eyes and relax. Switch to another mode of brain activity. The brain is a muscle that needs time for active work and active rest. When one of them is missing, brain dysfunction may occur.
Active work without active rest leads to burnout. Its consequences are hyper-emotionality, depression, physical passivity, conflict.
Active rest without active brain work leads to low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, fear, anxiety and panic about the new and unknown, depression, mental passivity.
Now imagine that this is not your brain, but your child’s brain!
What happens to your child who is in school from morning till evening? The position of the body is sitting. The teachers constantly require their attention and concentration. Everything is on schedule, the breaks between classes are short. At the end of the day, they look forward to their parents picking them up from school. Like children are “at work” before their parents and finish “work” after them. The school does not satisfy the wishes and needs of the children, so you enroll them in additional lessons. This creates an imbalance between active work and active rest, and in this match the active work “wins”. The child’s brain “burns out” and in order to balance itself, it becomes hyperactive – as a reaction to excessive brain activity.
And what happens to your child who spends his days lying on the couch in front of the TV or tablet?
A stream of information enters the brain, which is not mature enough to be able to analyze which information is useful and which is manipulative. Watching videos and movies increase the levels of the hormones dopamine and serotonin – they provide a pleasure to which children become addicted.
We live in a world of countless opportunities, but also countless challenges. In order to make the best choices for ourselves, we must be ready to meet the challenges. The priority was the need for skills, not the need for knowledge. Knowledge is just a click away, we are given revolutionary freedom and access to it.
In order to develop, we need provocation – and provocation comes from life situations that require skills.
Skills such as adaptability, prioritization, observation, analytical, strategic and innovative thinking, creativity. The modern world is “hungry” for people who can, do and create. If we take care of our children today and focus them on skills, tomorrow we will have thinking, productive, ambitious personalities.
Everyone can be both a driver and a passenger – both to control and lead, and to relax and be guided. Because it’s normal that we can’t do everything, but it’s great to admit it and welcome support.
All of this also applies to the way we teach and raise our children.
That’s why in our children centres for abacus classes we switch from brain activities to brain rest (physical exercises).
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