Friday, September 10, 2021

Think!

      The human brain is an unbelievably marvelous organ.  It consists of about one billion neurons, each being able to form about 1,000 connections to the other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. (Scientific American)  Neurons combine so that each one helps with the storage of many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).  However, most of the scientific community will admit that the true capacity of the human brain is not fully known.  It would seem that the brain’s capacity is, for all practical purposes, limitless!

     It has been proposed that everything we have experienced in our lives from the moment of birth, the sights, the sounds, the feelings, all responses recorded by our senses, is still stored within the confines of our human brains.  If that is the case, someone may ask: “Why can’t I remember things?”  I feel that the problem is not that we don’t have the information stored within our brains, but we have a problem with recall!  Our retrieval system has been flawed by our human imperfections.

     The saddest part of this topic, in my opinion, is that with this marvelous ability within ourselves to have at our disposal this vast amount of knowledge, we fail to put into use the most fundamental portion of the process and that is to THINK about a situation before we take any actions.  You know what I am talking about.  How many times have you done something or said something and almost immediately knew within yourself that you shouldn’t have done or said that?  It happens to all of us from time to time.  This is because you have not properly trained ourselves to THINK!

     If we look at our present society you can understand what I am talking about.  If you are an older person you will remember in school you had to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic (and probably many other subjects).  Today, kids don’t have to know how to read, they wait for the video or an audio presentation and just watch or listen to what is being said.  And if you have ever seen some of the text messages from kids today, they DON’T need to know how to write.  If you can’t say something by using initials, codes, or emojis, it’s probably not going to be said by a young person! 

     And while we are talking about younger ones, I shouldn’t really get started on the topic of math (arithmetic)!  Many young people today can’t add 2 + 2 without the use of a calculator.  They DON’T know how to make change for a dollar when a purchase is made.  And I’m really surprised that they are able to understand if they are getting paid the proper wages for their job, if they have a job!

     In the overall scheme of things, young people today are not trained on how to THINK!  Everyone says they want to be their own person, make their own decisions, and not have anyone telling them what to do!  However, when we look a bit closer, we see that many people are only waiting for others to tell them what they are to do, where they are supposed to go, how they are supposed to act, and what they are supposed to think, because they don’t want to do it for themselves because they have never learned HOW to do it!

     They simply want to follow the crowd and be lead along with what they have been told is the proper and acceptable thing to do.  When I was growing up my mother used to tell us kids: “If EVERYONE was jumping off the bridge into the river, would you do it too?”  When I was younger, I often thought my parents were not very intelligent people (probably the same as many younger ones today), but as I got older, I realized that they were more intelligent than I gave them credit for.  In looking at my mother’s comment today, I understand she was NOT telling me NOT to jump off a bridge.  There may be times and circumstances when jumping off a bridge could save your life.  She was telling me to THINK before I took action and not simply go along with the crowd.  She wanted me to use the brain ability that I had been given and make good and proper decisions for myself and perhaps others around me.

     When I look at the world scene today, I find that many of the younger ones who have now grown to take prominent positions on the world stage but have still not learned how to use the thinking ability of their brains to make good decisions and they are still making poor ones.  The problem is that the decisions they are making today effect a large amount of people around them and, most often, not for the better.

     We should try more to THINK before we speak or act and hopefully, we’ll do things better.  However, we always have that one stumbling block that we all must face: we’re only human!

QUOTE TO CONSIDER


THOUGHTFUL GEM

"In our own way

we can all be different!"



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