I was sitting on a bus this morning watching a child. This little girl was wearing a hat that almost swallowed her little head, and sunglasses which covered up the otherwise visible parts. She seemed to be whirling around and around, staring out the window, looking around the bus, getting out of her seat. She looked like she was observing. But was she? Is she likely to remember that particular bus trip in ten years time? No. So I believe that children are on auto-pilot.
Of course, a lot of adults tend to be on auto-pilot as well. Some adults never switch out of this mode and as a result can never recall what they have seen. They look like they are scanning their surroundings, but instead the auto-pilot is turning their head for them to survey the information before instructing the body to do whatever actions are necessary.
I go into auto-pilot at times. I may get asked about what I thought of the dress that so-and-so we just ran into was wearing, and quite honestly I haven’t a clue. Auto-pilot can make people talk, walk, dance, sleep. And each person’s auto-pilot is seperately trained to different levels of intelligence which can sometimes differ from the person’s actual level of intelligence. This can be particularly visible when people allow auto-pilot to kick in when drunk – some people conduct them selves in the same manner as always, some become even more polite, and some seem to lose the ability to do simple tasks.
It seems that the majority of young children live in auto-pilot. Perhaps this is the stage when auto-pilot gains it’s intelligence for later years – the more the child is exposed to, the greater the chance of an intelligent auto-pilot. The auto-pilot is the child, and perhaps then when an adult lets the auto-pilot take the wheel, the adult is again the child.