داستان انگلیسی باغ ذهن

Garden Of The Mind

We’ve all heard the warnings about having high expectations: don’t get your hopes up; don’t put all your eggs in one basket; hold your horses; don’t get too excited. Then there’s the other camp saying that with belief, all things are possible; faith can move mountains. Is it truly possible for our beliefs to change reality?

In 1964, a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal set out to answer that question. He conducted a study on school children’s academic abilities and found something remarkable. When teachers placed higher expectations on certain students, those kids rose to the occasion and excelled in school.

This is called ‘expectancy’, and it’s an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The higher the expectations that are placed on people to succeed, the better they will perform. Rosenthal’s study demonstrated this effect by giving an IQ test to students at an elementary school in the San Francisco area. He told the teachers of these students that this was a very special test. It could accurately predict which students were going to make major jumps in intelligence in the near future. But in reality, this was just an ordinary IQ test, and Rosenthal didn’t even look at the results. He randomly chose which students were supposedly special and gave this randomly selected list of names to the teachers.

The teachers were told to not tell the students about the test results.

It seems hard to believe, but these students went on to be much more successful in school than their peers. So how does a teacher’s belief about a student shape reality and make that child smarter? Rosenthal says, “It’s not magic; it’s not mental telepathy.” These teachers were most likely communicating their beliefs in very concrete ways.

They gave the supposedly special students more attention and more correction. They made more eye contact. They touched them more. They asked them more questions. They gave them more time to answer questions. And they were usually kinder to these students. These actions were probably unconscious, but they had a very real effect.

According to scientists, other people’s expectations don’t just affect students. They affect people from all walks of life. A teenager’s chance of having alcohol problems is affected by the expectations of the mother. A soldier’s ability to run faster or slower is affected by the expectations of the trainer. An employee’s efficiency can be affected by the expectations of the boss. And that’s not all. The power of expectancy can have extraordinary, almost unbelievable consequences as well. It might even hold the key to helping the blind learn to see.

Daniel Kish is – technically speaking – blind. Daniel was born with reticular cancer, which affects the eyes. At the age of 7 months he had his left eye removed and at the age of 13 months his right eye. He now wears artificial glass eyes, but this hasn’t stopped him from navigating and understanding his environment. In fact, he says the first thing he did after the operation on his eyes was to crawl out of his crib and explore the hospital room.

In his childhood, Daniel taught himself to visualize the world around him by making clicking noises with his tongue. Daniel sends these clicking sounds out into the world hundreds if not thousands of times a day. They bounce off the surfaces of things around him and return to him, allowing him to make mental images of the world.

This is similar to how bats ‘see’ the world. They use sonar to bounce sound waves off of the environment to measure distances and shapes. Daniel’s ability to use clicking sounds to sense the world is why some people call him the batman.

Although using these clicks - also known as echolocation - isn’t what most of us would recognize as seeing, Daniel is forming images in his mind. These images are similar to a normal person’s peripheral vision: they are fuzzy and lack color, but shapes and objects in motion are visible images in the mind.

Daniel’s ability to form mental images of the world around him using his mouth and ears to create images in his mind, allow him to do things he “‘shouldn’t”’ be able to do. He can ride a bike. He goes hiking alone. He has traveled around the world unassisted. He can even go rock climbing.

Daniel says that he can do all of these things because of the positive expectations that were placed on him by his mother while he was growing up. When Daniel first returned from the hospital after having his eyes removed, his grandmother told his mother to wrap him in cotton to protect him from getting hurt. At this moment, Daniel’s mother knew she was at a crossroads. She needed to decide whether she would protect him or let him be free. She chose freedom.

Daniel was an adventurous soul from the beginning, and his mother let him freely explore everything. He learned to climb bookshelves before he could even walk. And once when he was only a toddler, the police picked him up trying to climb an outside fence. They returned Daniel to his mother and warned her that it was dangerous to give Daniel so much freedom, but this didn’t stop her. She was committed to not letting Daniel’s life be controlled by her fears or the fears of others.

Daniel taught himself to sense objects with sound, at a young age. He soon began to explore the world around him, and his mother never tried to hold him back. He learned to climb trees, explore his neighbourhood and at the age of 11, to walk to school alone. He even taught himself to ride a bicycle. It wasn’t always smooth sailing though. Once he broke his teeth when he ran into a pole while riding a friend’s bicycle. While most mothers would have rushed to protect their child from further danger, Daniel’s mother doubled down on her commitment to freedom. The very next day, she bought him a bicycle of his very own.

Not everyone shared Daniel’s mother’s commitment to let him face danger and learn from it.

Daniel was surrounded by people who doubted his abilities. They wanted to force him to fit their expectations of how blind people should live. The police said he needed to be protected. His grandmother said he needed to be protected. The neighbours thought he shouldn’t be riding a bicycle. They said, “How can you let him do that?” “How can I not?” she answered. Even his teachers at school said he should stop clicking because it wasn’t socially acceptable. Luckily, Daniel’s mother was the strongest influence on his life, and she refused to let other people’s fear control her son.

Now, Daniel believes that the only thing that stops blind people from seeing is their beliefs. He now teaches other blind people to use echolocation to make images of the world through sound – all by changing their expectations of what is possible. Daniel’s NGO World Access for the Blind has trained nearly ten thousand people in close to 40 countries.

Learning echolocation is not easy. Daniel says the biggest obstacle to learning is love. The mothers, fathers, sons and daughters of the blind naturally want to protect them. As they approach busy roads or other potentially dangerous situations, they can’t help but step in and guide their loved one to safety. But this outpouring of love has the unintended effect of imprisoning their loved one.

They never learn to trust their echolocation skills and build the confidence that comes from facing and surviving a world of danger. Because of this, much of Daniel’s teaching focuses on educating the families of the blind on how their beliefs are part of the problem.

While Daniel’s NGO demonstrates the extraordinary power of belief for the blind, what does the power of expectancy mean for the rest of us? As children, our parents might have taught us to believe in ourselves, but what about believing in others? If it’s true that success in life is guided by the mental vibrations of others, the responsibility to tend the gardens of our mind become that much more important. It’s been said that we are the composite of the five people we spend the most time with. Do those people believe in you? And do you believe in them?