My son gave me my birthday present last night. It is a book by Arianna Huffington, Fanatics and Fools. Without an aside to explain my political leanings or Arianna Huffington's writing, this is a book I'll likely read and enjoy. In fact it is one of the more personally appropriate and seemingly thoughtful gifts I've received in a while. My parents or sisters likely would not know me well enough to buy this book, although my wife and a few of my closer friends might. What makes this gift from my son particularly interesting to me is that he is five years old and he picked it out all by himself, in fact he picked it out once and my wife put it back but he found it again and insisted that he wanted to give it to me for my birthday. I have no idea how he chose it but I do have some idea how he convinced my wife to buy it for me on his behalf.
Five year olds are incredibly persuasive; they are shameless and persistent. They have fully functioning brains but relatively tiny skulls. As a result I believe that their synapses must be more tightly packed, making that synaptic gap a little smaller. While in the case of any single synapse this makes little difference but with many synapses the difference becomes significant. This allows them to think very quickly. Their brains also contains very little actual knowledge, there is nothing to bog down its processes (remember how fast your computer was when it was new?). They can make up new reasons and ideas to support their point of view faster than you can begin to get your head around an explanation as to why it is not a good idea to shoot the fish with the paintball gun, and wonder who told them about paintball guns anyway and where did he get that fish. He has already made two chipmunk traps out of laundry baskets by the time paintball fish thought has run through your mind. To him it must seem like my thoughts are standing still while his move like that lady in the Matrix movie. No wonder he gets bored and impatient. He does about a month's worth of thinking everyday. He's so cool.
