Ever feel like you're capable of far more than what society expects of you?
I know I do.
Remember being a teenager...
...and school being less about a passion to learn and more about getting good grades?
How many times did you sit in class bored and desperate to just get away?
Every teen's felt that.
Albert Einstein acted on it.
Age just 15: he's sitting in class when all of a sudden he decides...
..."enough is enough", gets up and walks right out the door.
He never goes back.
Remember being a kid and just wanting to play around with stuff...
...pull things apart, not things together...
...and the grown-up saying "No, no, no"?
Or being called "Good" for sitting still...
...or "Naughty" when you couldn't bear to sit still any longer?
It's all completely well-intentioned, of course,
but that doesn't make it any less insane.
Because the fact is our capacity to create and learn knows no bounds...
and the latest research proves it.
The invention of MRI scans, only in the past 25 years,
has allowed scientists to see which parts of the brain are used by different kinds of thinking.
We now know infinitely more than we did about how we learn and what makes up human intelligence.
And it's extraordinary.
So, want to know what you're really capable of?
Let's start at the beginning.
A baby's brain is amazing.
It doesn't take nine months to create.
It's taken seven million years and around 350,000 generations.
All the skills, knowledge and talents cultivated by our ancestors are stored inside it.
These are like numerous software programs...
which can only be activated by the baby engaging with its environment.
Here's the striking thing:
if not activated at the most appropriate time they simply disappear.
Take language:
if a child doesn't hear language by around the age of eight...
...they may never learn to speak.
So you can see just how important our interactions are.
They ignite are dormant intelligence and they reinforce too.
There's something else. We've evolved to learn by looking at things from different perspectives...
and making connections between things, and we do that through play.
So wouldn't it be amazing if we bore all this in mind when raising kids,
Letting them play when they're little and when they're older too?
Charles Darwin's teacher said he'd never amount to much because he spent too much time playing with insects.
So let children play, because it's never just play.
Of course it takes more time and energy to do this,
but when you're deciding where to focus resources for kids learning...
you couldn't do better than focusing on pre puberty.
That's when we learned by copying the people around us.
After 12, or there about, it's all changed.
Say goodbye to pliable easy child and hello to rebellious challenging teenager.
Where did that cute baby go?
Oh, well, let's have another look at that brain.
See what's happening?
Loads of the connections made through childhood are breaking up and reforming.
From around the age of about 12 through 20, the equivalent of an earthquake takes place in a young person's brain.
No more going along with what the grown-ups say. The adolescent brain needs to go its own way.
"Oh, no", say parents. "Oh, yes", say evolutionary scientists.
Because if we hadn't developed this urge to do things differently we would never have made it this far.
Up until about 60 or 70,000 years ago...
...it was fine for children to grow up like their parents,
but then along came the last ice age.
Thank goodness for the handful of our ancestors...
...who chose to break away from their doomed parents freezing to death in the ancestral caves.
They built rafts and set off across the ocean hoping to find a place with a warmer climate.
Critically this made risk-taking the essential feature of adolescence.
We shouldn't belittle adolescence, we should be honoring it for what it really is:
the defining struggle, the moment when the next generation challenges the status quo...
...and pioneers new ways of thinking and being that ensure our survival.
Now, just imagine if we actually gave adolescence the freedom to undertake that struggle...
rather than force them to sit passively in class.
How about trusting that there earlier clone like learning...
...now enables adolescents to spread their wings and work things out for themselves?
If that sounds terrifying, it needn't be.
Because if we allowed their natural curiosity to flourish in childhood...
they'll be bursting with the longing to learn and climb unscaled mountains of the mind,
and that's not scary, that's exhilarating.
This is the way we've evolved to be. It's what makes us fulfilled well-adjusted human beings.
Let's stop trying to live in a way that so goes against how we're hardwired to live.
Let's allow ourselves and the next generation to reclaim the incredible gift of our ancestors.
Adolescence is not a problem, it's an opportunity.