Video Summary
‘They haven’t even got the brain’s they were born with’. It’s an old expression and a put-down, not really spoken much today but none-the-less, as with all old wives tales, it holds a lot of truth. The remark raises two immediate questions as well. If we were born with brains, how come? And secondly, where did our brains go?
Many people in the world of science realise that we have two brains. Our first brain in our skull, that digests and processes information, and our second brain in our stomach, that digests and processes nutrition. More and more people are realising that optimum psychological health requires that we look after both of our brains and pay attention to what we ingest.
The brains we are born with, however, refers to our level of innate or born with knowledge. In psychology the term Tabula Rasa describes a theory that we are all born with a blank or clean slate in our mind, that over time becomes imprinted with our experiences.
Being one to question everything, as I encourage everyone to do, I remember the first time I was told about the Tabula Rasa theory I turned immediately to my trusty dictionary that provides both the origin and the route stem of the word in old English, French or Latin. ‘Rasa’, according to my research did not mean blank. It was a derivative of the word erase, which means rubbed out. And that is a very different interpretation of the term, perhaps accounting for why people feel more dissociated as they grow?