Many creatures when born have genetically programmed into them nearly all the behaviours they will ever need. In fact, such creatures are left to fend for themselves right from the moment they are born. They already know how to feed themselves, how to find food and how to reproduce. There are no periods of helplessness when they are totally dependent upon their parents, or decades of attending school to learn what they need in life. They just know what to do as they follow their genetic programming.
It is a boost for a creatures’ chance of survival to have all these behaviours programmed in, but there is a downside to this. The more behaviours a creature has programmed, the less potential there is to learn new ones. Such creatures find adapting to change in the environment around them very difficult if not impossible, their minds and patterns of thinking are set and learning new behaviours is unlikely or at best a very slow process.
When humans are born, we have very few behaviours already programmed in. Compared to many creatures at birth, the human baby is remarkably helpless, ignorant and ill prepared. Left alone, it could not fend for itself and it remains dependent upon the adults around it to ensure its survival for many years until it can become capable of surviving without such support.
So, what is the advantage of being born with little genetic instruction and few inbuilt behaviours? It is the capacity to learn. Neuroscience is now clear in its understanding that the human brain remains plastic and capable of learning right throughout our life. In fact, the thing we are programmed to do is to learn, and what a wonderful skill this is. You don’t have to coerce a human being to learn, we do this every day without any prodding.
This capacity means we are capable of changing behaviours which are not working for us whenever we need to. You may have heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, it’s not true of an old dog and even less true of a human being. When someone next says this about themselves, know that it means they don’t want to change.
Change may take some effort, particularly if we have engaged in a behaviour for so long it has become a habit but being able to change when we really want to is a truly wonderful thing.