4 min readAug 20, 2020 10:16 AM IST
First published on: Aug 20, 2020 at 10:16 AM IST
By Raghav Himatsingka
Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds that ever lived on planet Earth. While we best know him for painting the Mona Lisa, he’s also among history’s top engineers, inventors, mathematicians, anatomists and botanists with hundreds of inventions to his credit. He is someone who would be regarded as a polymathic genius – someone who excels in several fields all at once.
Every healthy baby is born with potential intelligence higher than even da Vinci. However, as babies grow older, they start losing their abilities at a rapid pace, ultimately fitting into the mould of the “average”.
You see, a baby’s brain is biologically different from an adult brain. When we adults think, our thoughts flow in some language – whether it’s English, Hindi, or any other – and the thoughts flow sequentially, one sentence after another. However, babies don’t know any language at birth, so how do they think? Their thought process is completely abstract. They are able to process thousands of thoughts all at the same time – something that adults can’t even comprehend. It’s because of this ability that a baby’s brain is exponentially superior to an adult brain. They are able to learn things that an adult can never learn – for eg., an adult would find it nearly impossible to learn a foreign language, whereas a baby does it so easily.
Read| 10 ways to increase creativity in preschoolers
So at what point does a baby lose their incredible brain abilities?
When a baby turns two years old, their brain becomes 75 per cent weight of an adult brain – disproportionate to the size of their small physical body. The brain thus seeks to become efficient, and starts a process called “synaptic pruning” whereby it rapidly starts pruning neural connections in the brain that it deems unnecessary. This is essentially like the brain shedding off abilities that it was born with because it thinks that the body doesn’t need it anymore, and thus the baby starts losing their genius abilities.
So is there anything that parents can do about this? Absolutely! Parents can use techniques to unlock all the incredible abilities in their baby to develop fundamentally strong athleticism, creativity and intelligence. With just five to 10 minutes of daily efforts, parents can help their babies develop near photographic memory, superior mental math abilities, reading skills, first principles thinking, pitch perfect music skills, prolific oratory skills, among many others. All of this can be achieved with simple home-based programmes that parents can do on their own, without exposing their baby to the damaging effects of showing them a mobile app or computer screen.
Babies who undergo such learnings in their early years have superior abilities for life. Remember that one person in school who was always good in sports? Or the other person who always topped the class without much effort? It’s not because of their genes. It’s because these kids, knowingly or unknowingly, developed their skills before “synaptic pruning” in their brain destroyed their abilities forever. This pandemic has shown us the dangers of being uni-dimensional and the importance of being nimble, agile and confident in multiple areas of expertise. With just a little bit of conscious parenting, parents today have the opportunity to help their babies become polymaths for life without putting any pressure on their child.
(The writer is Founder, The Prodigy Baby by Raising Superstars.)
A baby’s brain is biologically different from an adult brain. (Source: getty images) 
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