Surely you noticed that if an adult is given a modern gadget of the latest model - a smartphone or something similar - to an adult, he will take a very, very long time to understand it without instructions or detailed explanations.
And if the same "toy" falls into the hands of a child, then no explanation is required - the child will understand where and how to press, and even independently discover a bunch of functions unfamiliar to the owner of the gadget. This paradox can be explained by the theory of British biology doctor Rupert Sheldrake.
Rat telepathy
To begin with, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake completely dismissed fabrications like these: "Our children learn a computer from birth, but we just …" - and so on. It's not about computers - that's always been the case. In the late XIX - early XX century, when adults shied away from the "pig-iron" and "demonic" electricity, teenagers instantly mastered the novelties of technical progress.
Why? Dr. Sheldrake tried to find the answer to this question, using ordinary laboratory rats as experimental ones.
The essence of the experience, which lasted no less than 20 years, was as follows. Generation after generation, rats have been trained to navigate a fairly complex maze. The first test subjects coped with the task for a long time, the next ones ran the maze more actively, the third generation knew all the obstacles like their own paws.
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It would seem, what's mysterious? The old men taught the young to go through the labyrinth, and the young, in turn, perfectly mastered the science and passed it on - no wonder, the continuity of generations … In addition, rats have always been distinguished by their intelligence and ingenuity, so there seems to be no sensation here.
In fact, everything was much more interesting. After all, behind an absolutely blank wall separating the aviary with the experimental rats from the rest of the world, there was another aviary. There also lived rats, recruited literally from the street and for a short time.
They did not have any contacts with the "pioneers" in the maze and the main contingent of subjects, but, surprisingly, young "street" rats learned to overcome obstacles just as quickly as those who sat with experienced "old men", and sometimes even surpassed them … Where did they get their knowledge from? After all, there was no one to teach them.
Life science
Based on this experience, Rupert Sheldrake wrote The New Science of Life, which was met with hostility by academics. This is not surprising: after all, Sheldrake encroached on the sacred, with his book he tried to "push" telepathy - pseudoscience - into the world of official science.
Sheldrake explained the high learning ability of young rats by the fact that brain vibrations carrying information about the acquired experience are transmitted to their peers through a special mechanism of biological resonance.
That is, young people (we are already talking about our children) master something new not at all due to their perseverance or thirst for knowledge (which, by the way, has never been observed in adolescents in the entire history of mankind), but precisely due to biological resonance. Every child who learns something new, unconsciously telepathically transfers this knowledge to his comrades living nearby.
It sounds absurd (that's why Sheldrake's book was declared pseudoscientific, and it was banned), but this theory explains another moment in our life: what we call "getting into good or bad company." After all, it is known that among street hooligans and alcoholics, children very quickly become hooligans and alcoholics themselves, and surrounded by smart and advanced peers, they themselves grow wiser before our eyes.
This means that it is not a matter of heredity, but of the environment, and not only in the desire to imitate, but also in the influence on the brain level. In any case, experiments with rats confirm this theory, but what is really going on in our brain - the answer to this question has not yet been found.
Igor NIKITIN