The word "instinct" is usually associated with the basest, evil deeds of a person. In fact, according to biology, this word denotes innate programs of behavior. People are born with a huge number of instincts, the best of which are passed down from generation to generation.
Each person has a love for the Motherland - his country, in which there are hundreds of cities, thousands of villages, millions of people. For the sake of her prosperity, everyone works and endures adversity. We feel conscious feelings for this Motherland, consciously strive to instill in it the love of all those around us.
But each person has another homeland, to which no one consciously instilled love. And you don't need to. This homeland is a tiny dot on the map of the country, the place where everyone was born and began to grow up. Although this place, perhaps, practically does not differ from thousands and thousands of others, it is the one and only.
A person carries the image of this homeland with him all his life, not forgetting for a second. Is love for the motherland an instinct? Yes. Exactly. This was found out with the help of migratory birds: the chicks were taken away from the parental nest, and were not detained until autumn, before migrating to warmer regions. After winter, birds were waited at both addresses. The result is striking: matured birds in most cases returned “home” (to a new place), except for those that reached a certain critical age - these birds returned to the places from where they were originally taken away.
Consequently, birds become attached to a specific place on earth in childhood … This is called "imprinting", which means "imprinting" information into the brain. The instinctive homeland is not a place of birth, but a place where the most emotional period of childhood passed. In modern people, the most vivid imprinting is carried out from 2 to 12 years old, therefore, the greatest experiences and joys are best remembered precisely during this period of a person's life.
Everyone has such acquaintances who have been engaged in intellectual work all their lives, fiddled with papers, went on business trips, but did not like to work with their hands, and did not know how. At home, not just fixing a shelf - nailing a hook is a problem. We retired … and changed. Trees are planted and replanted, the beds are in perfect order, and what compotes have begun to turn out - a delicious taste. They say about such: the craving for the ground has woken up. In this case, if you say: instinct, they will not be surprised, it is too obvious.
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So why did a person have the gardener's instinct, and even more so, has survived to this day? The fact is that it took tens of thousands of years to develop the whole process of turning the land that does not bring food into a fertile field. About nine thousand years ago, slash farming appeared, which in fact is a product of the human mind. The forest was burned out, cut down, sown; the land bore fruit for several years, and then the fields were again burnt, chopped, sowed … "Burn and chop" is the name of this method.
Several tens of thousands of years of farming could not disappear without a trace, which is why even modern people can see this instinct, this incomprehensible, but only at first glance, craving for the earth.
Love for dogs is also an instinct that appeared in humans in primitive society. The dog was needed for survival - a mutually beneficial alliance of two weakly armed predators. A person goes on a hunt - dogs look for prey, and a person kills it and leaves his "helpers" not completely gnawed bones, so that these animals have a craving for a kind of cooperation. For long thousands, or maybe tens of thousands of years, a person had only one friend - a dog, therefore modern people (not all, of course) have an unconscious attraction to dogs.
Dogs and people were practically not at enmity, but in antiquity there were enough leopards and tigers - the enemies of man; modern people are actively paying attention to yellow-black stripes, regardless of where they are applied. It's an instinct … What if a tiger ?! We must run!
There are no such dangerous animals on the streets, but the yellow-black coloring is used in many places where it would be worth focusing on, for example, “speed bumps” and other artificial irregularities. The Beeline mobile telephone network operates on the territory of Russia. Her logo is black and yellow horizontal stripes. The instinct forces us to focus attention on this … And since there is attention, there is also interest. This is how a large company “played” on “human feelings”.
Instinct works well with reason. The ancient master of behavior does not require blind obedience, but directs desires and thoughts, allowing the mind complete freedom of choice. Life changes, the instinct is ancient, and therefore the mind is given to us in order to find guidelines in various unexpected situations.
People have a feeling that they act the way they were brought up, but the thought never comes that something ancient, alien to reason, is the motivator for action. It's so hard to believe that instincts are involved in motivating behavior. You know and know more - you live and survive more satisfying, an ancient instinct that is currently in great demand.
We humans have almost stopped fighting instincts. Instincts don't muffle the mind. It's better to collaborate, right?