Emotion only lasts in our bodies for about 90 seconds. After that, the physical reaction dissipates, UNLESS our cognitive brain kicks in and starts connecting our anger with past events.
Jill Bolte TaylorRead
Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.
Interpretation
We must cultivate and control our thoughts to protect our minds from external influences.
Jill Bolte Taylor emphasizes the necessity of teaching children to nurture their mental landscape. When individuals lack the skills to manage their thoughts, they become susceptible to negative influences, including societal opinions and manipulative messaging from advertisers and politicians, highlighting the importance of mental discipline and awareness.
In practice
In a school workshop about mental health and emotional intelligence.
Emotion only lasts in our bodies for about 90 seconds. After that, the physical reaction dissipates, UNLESS our cognitive brain kicks in and starts connecting our anger with past events.
We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.
The better we understand the choices we have been making, either consciously or unconsciously, the more say we will have in the world we create. Neurocircuitry may be neurocircuitry, but we don't have to run on automatic.
Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated.
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
Meek young men grow up in libraries.
Teaching sometimes seems like not one profession, but every profession. We ask them to be doctor and diplomat, calf-herder, map-maker, wizard and watchman, electricians of the mind.
One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.
Surely, we've got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.
Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.
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