Video evidence of PL talents carried over?
I haven't been on this site in quite some time but thought of it after seeing this blog page:
http://onemansblog.com/2007/03/26/top-10-kids-who-prove-were-all-pathetic/
It's a page of embedded videos (mostly from YouTube and similar sites) about kids who have talents far in excess of what would be expected given their age. Some are better than others (two have no sound) but I'd say that at least five out of the ten will make you drop your jaw in amazement, IF you can bear waiting for them to load (the curse of low-bandwidth connections...).
If I may offer an opinion, there are a couple of conclusions/theories that one could draw from kids like this.
First, kids are capable of learning things at a much earlier age than many people give them credit for, and more to the point, by the time most people think they are "ready" to learn skills, they've actually started to lose that ability. Our crappy education system hasn't figured this out - as an example, they usually don't even offer foreign languages to kids until LONG after kids have hit their mental peak for language development. Even people who have studied the science of education and young child development would probably concede that point, but trying to get the entrenched educational community (read: public schools and unionized teachers) to make any significant course change is probably akin to trying to turn the Titanic before it hit the iceberg.
Second, there is a real possibility (I would think even a probability) that some of these talents are carried over from previous lives (any other explanation would still likely involve something that society as a whole isn't ready to accept). However, and I think this is a key point, if a kid is born with a "carryover" previous life talent but has no means to integrate it into his current life (for example, a classical pianist who in the next incarnation is born into a home too poor to afford any musical instruments), they probably lose those past life talents at about the time other kids lose their past life memories. But if they have a chance to practice those remembered skills in the new life, while they are very young, then the past talents can be integrated into their current lifetime, and improved upon. I would bet that at least some of the kids in those videos started practicing whatever skill they excel at when they were still very young.
I can still remember as a kid being absolutely fascinated with anything having to do with space or astronomy (and I started reading at a relatively early age). I could name every planet and probably tell you facts about each one. But my family never encouraged that interest at all (not that they had the means to), and I lived in a small, rural community far from any observatories or any way at all to further that interest (beyond staring at the stars at night). We didn't even really have a decent library in our town. About the time I was seven or eight I just lost all interest in astronomy, and although I've enjoyed science fiction to some degree all my life, I always wondered what might have happened if I'd had more opportunity as a young child to pursue that. In fact that was one of several science related-interests I had that just all seemed to disappear (or at least, any early talent or serious interest I might have had did) after an early age.
If I may editorialize just a bit more, it's just plain nuts that our educational system teaches kids meaningless drivel (for the most part) at an early age, and makes no attempt to encourage individual children to excel in whatever might truly interest them. Then in high school and college, when the pathways in the brain are already fairly well formed, they attempt to introduce all manner of new knowledge and concepts, thinking that kids can't handle them earlier. And of course, some kids probably cannot, but our one-size-fits-all system of education pretty well assures that all students will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
So I guess what I'm saying is that my theory is that whatever past life knowledge and experience we may be born with comes with a sell-by date, and once that date is past it spoils rather quickly. If kids can integrate that knowledge and experience into their present life, it gives them a head start over everyone who's just trying to pick up a talent in this life. If they can't integrate it, or it is left to die on the vine by parents and educators that can't see the value of encouraging a child to pursue their interests and talents, the child may lose whatever they had and in the end excel at nothing (don't ask how I know that can happen, please).
What do you think, does my theory make any sense or am I imagining things?
