Nature never ceases to amaze me. I love going for walks and seeing new mushrooms sprout up where there were none a week ago, or hearing birds call out to each other. I love watching ants carry things twice their size and marvelling at the stunning colours of the autumn leaves.
However, what I find most incredible about nature is the way most things run on instinct.
Sea turtles hatch and waddle straight out to the sea, returning to the same beach they were hatched on to lay their own eggs years later. How do freshly hatched turtles even know why they need to get to the ocean? And when they come back to the beach years later, how do they know how deep to bury their eggs? How do they even know that it’s time to go back to the beach?
Cuckoo birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, and the freshly hatched babies often push the eggs of the other bird out of the nest before they can hatch. Then despite being raised by birds of another species, each generation knows to lay their eggs in this way. How does an infant cuckoo know to push out the other eggs? Why don’t the cuckoos follow the lead of their adoptive bird parents and build their own nests?
Eels somehow have this inbuilt tracking device that leads them from their homes in freshwater creeks in Victoria, all the way up to the Coral sea to breed, a place where they haven’t been since they were larvae drifting on ocean currents. How do they know where to go? Why do they know that they need to travel across land to get from one waterway to another along their migration route?
What amazes me in each of these examples is that there is no transfer of knowledge from one generation to another. All of these animals are driven by their instincts. Their instincts drive amazingly complex behaviour, and I’m confident that these animals aren’t conscious of exactly why they feel compelled to engage in these behaviours. Yet they do it anyway.
We have instincts too, but in some ways we’ve gotten too smart for them. We still have the hardware in our brains that directs us to engage in certain instinctual behaviours, but we also have these huge prefrontal cortices that allow us to reason and use logic. In many ways, that’s a very good thing. Our reasoning brains have allowed us to develop tools, build complex social structures, and develop language and art. Our reasoning brains stop us from acting on instinct at times that would impede our greater goals – such as by stopping us from acting out in violent aggression anytime someone wrongs us.
Yet for all its advantages, having a big logical thinking brain that can override our instincts can also cause us some problems.
It means that when it comes to raising our children, many of us feel lost.
We prepare for months to birth our babies, during which time many of us read books, listen to podcasts, and watch YouTube videos so that we know what to expect. We don’t feel capable of just trusting our instincts when it comes to birth, we want to be informed. Even if we hope to follow our instincts and plan for a natural, unmedicated, intervention-free birth, we often have to work really hard to shut down our thinking brains through meditations, hypnosis, and focusing on our breathing.
Then once we bring our babies home from the hospital, we sadly realise that our maternal instincts don’t kick in as automatically as we thought they would. Breastfeeding doesn’t come as naturally as we had hoped, and we don’t often know what our baby needs when they cry. There’s no instinct telling us how to swaddle a baby, or how to install a car seat.
Interestingly, we’re not the only species that has dealt with this suppression of parenting instincts.
Despite being the champion of breastfeeding in the wild, with mothers often breastfeeding their children past the age of seven, there’s a story of a captive orangutan who needed a bit of guidance in knowing what to do with her new baby. Zoe the orangutan had to give up her first baby after not knowing how to breastfeed, so when she had a second baby a few years later one of the zookeepers brought her 4 month old son to work and taught Zoe the basics of breastfeeding. Fortunately, this time Zoe was able to establish breastfeeding with her baby. Similarly, there was a gorilla who had been raised in captivity in another zoo who was taught how to breastfeed by the local La Leche League breastfeeding support group.
It seems that, for most primates, breastfeeding is more of a learnt behaviour than an instinctual one. It has been suggested that we have traded instincts for the flexibility that comes with a learning, reasoning brain.
So what can we do when it seems like our instincts aren’t kicking in?
This is when reading parenting books, listening to podcasts, and getting into support groups can be so helpful! It helps to point us in the right direction. It gives our reasoning brains the information that it needs to make decisions about how to rear our children.
HOWEVER we shouldn’t come to overly rely on these sources. As I mentioned in last week’s article (which you can read here if you missed it), a lot of parenting advice is driven more by societal standards rather than what the science actually says on a topic. Furthermore, we do still have instincts, even if they’re buried under the heavy weight of our big logical brains. So if you receive a piece of advice that doesn’t sit well with you, don’t push yourself to do it just because someone is telling you to. This is when that big prefrontal cortex comes in handy.
Use it to analyse the advice given to you. Use it to question your instincts. And then find a path that walks the best of both worlds.
Beck xx