Kids have more fun surprising us and themselves. They have youthful enthusiasm deriving from newness, the first time experience. Children wonder about everything and are questioning all the time. And when hormones kick in, young love waxes hot. Nothing trumps the depth of feeling of a childhood crush. Never mind that you are more likely to consummate your relationship as an adult. The more relations you have, the staler it all gets; new affairs come eventually to resemble old ones. As you habituate reward centers cease to activate. That will happen when nothing is a surprise anymore. I yearn for the pristine feelings that welled up when I was naive. I’ve contrived to make myself now as I was then. Longing for that sense of wonder I have devised means to bring it back into my life. That is a discussion for another time.

Consequent to newness is slow passage of time. A one year old baby a day is but one 365th of their existence, but a thirty year old has had 30 X 365 days. No wonder time seems to speed up as you age. Each day is not only more important. When you are young a day is a significant part of your life. For a normal child each new day is a source of delight.

Everyone’s in an all fired rush to accelerate maturity of the juvenile to the adult brain, citing youthful lack of judgement and incomplete myelination, blamed for things like fatal auto accidents or tendency for youth to jump to suicide. I would argue for just the opposite. I wish I could turn my adult brain to something new. I wish for the time and inclination to play, to get excited about the impractical and useless. Having had so many conversations, seen paintings, heard enough music, felt all the emotions you could possibly feel, nothing seems all that new and I so crave that pristine sensation of a first time exposure, or something truly surprising is foreign to me. All is ho-hum, ennui. For my money, I just want the feelings of years ago. As we age there is less activation by any stimulus of the dopamine reward center or nucleus accumbens that mediates the sense of reward and excitement. Many turn to more potent and frequent stimuli just to stay engaged. They are jumping on bungy cords or out of planes. Some turn to drugs for intensity of feelings. The explanation given is the same for ADHD, caused some say, by deficient Dopamine receptors. Thereby there is much less reward from regular stimuli. Hence attention deficit is explained by rapid habituation and need to solicit reward from more intense or constantly changing stimuli. But ADHD is known to diminish as we age. We tend to settle, I guess, and slowly accommodate to what’s boring.

What are the characteristics of the Juvenile mind? One factor separating the immature from the mature mind is the novelty and desire for superficially useless play. But openness and willingness to experiment with pure fantasy is how children learn. The fantasy world inside our heads gives a means of acting out, experimenting without having to bear the consequences of the real world. Play and fantasy are usually seen as applying to children. Acting out, the theatre inside of every head, is a major tool for learning to deal with the real world.

The second difference is that the juvenile mind isn’t calcified and closed off. The adult has learned through experience what is true, what is acceptable, what works. As such we tend to find solutions utilizing our heuristic rules of thumb. This includes real and imagined scenarios. Everyone knows how the old are set in their habits and have settled on formulas that work for them. They dismiss other points of view. Behavior becomes automatic, not considered. If every act is accomplished below the conscious level, we are automatons, zombies. With advancing age, What I call The Editor predominates. It’s The Editor’s job to reject anything out of the ordinary. Before you know it you are living unwittingly, either as automaton or dismissive of any other way to act. The child’s mind is different. She doesn’t know (or is more willing to admit she does not know) and is willing to admit just about any question. Nothing is rejected in the mind of a child. It is ok to have elaborate fantasies that don’t comport with the ordinary when you have only a rudimentary idea of what’s expected. I believe you’re a thousand times better admitting possibilities that seem unlikely on the surface to be untrue or ineffectual rather than rejecting alternatives that sometimes prove to be right. That is why young people are better at many tasks than the old, particularly in endeavors like math, music, the arts, and invention that require creativity.

Deciding to resurrect my childhood then, means bringing back these dual elements, replacing mundane work with play, and re-infusing my life with considered as opposed to automatic action. Also I shall have to get rid of The Editor, which only serves to close off my mind. Better yet, I can keep the editor, leaving it as the boss of mundane things, like brushing my teeth, not challenging issues.

I saw a PBS Nova episode on the lost Flight 447 from Rio to Paris. This was an aircraft that went down in the Atlantic about 2AM while flying on automatic. No one knows for sure but the super-modern Airbus 330 seems to have had supercooled water turn to ice in its three thin pitot tubes that sense velocity and automatic pilot suddenly failed, setting off a bunch of alarms. The pilots would have had to understand the problem and perform a specific maneuver within seconds, where tolerances are only within +/-10%, otherwise the aircraft will nosedive which it did. Medical practice is very similar. Politicians and accountants make it wooden. Everyone is to act according to protocols. Advanced computer programs run everything in the hospital and dictate care. Doctors practicing in such regimes order from preset menus. Young trainees are taught not think on their own. Many times this means nothing is missed, but at the price of doctor’s input being relatively unnecessary. He or she will lose ability to take a corrective course. Besides, the skill of practice, piloting or medicine, becomes robotic and joyless.