Childhood beliefs...

To follow up the post from yesterday, i came across this article which looks at the development of wishes in children and how they believe them. Although of course I'm not focusing on children for the project it is interesting to see how we come to believe what we do and how we develop them. Too often it's easy to forget what we believed when we were 10 and I'm sure it also varies to today's 10 year olds as children are definitely growing up faster.
























The part i find particularly interesting is where it talks about why we are led to say 'I wish...' or hope that wishes could come true. "For example, our desires lead us to perform certain actions on the world that, in many cases, result in our obtaining the objects we desire. Similarly, our beliefs about things in the world guide our actions upon these things. We spend many a waking hour attempting to alter the world to bring it in line with our beliefs, desires and opinions. Importantly, however, the relation between our mental states and objects in the world is mediated by our actions - just wanting something does not cause it to appear; we have to undertake some physical action (whether it be going and getting it ourselves or simply asking someone to get it for us) in service of obtaining it."

That quote had me wondering how many people that submitted wishes to my blog will actually go through with the actions that would make their wishes a possibility or whether they'd even try. For example, some of the wishes are rather big (for example, the cure for cancer one) and taking action on them might not be possible and is utterly out of reach. But the amount of ones I'm getting related to relationships make you wonder why people are spending time writing the wish on a blog to someone they don't know instead of taking action and changing things. After all, actions usually speak louder tha words. It's just that they're rarely done first.