Psycho-Sociobiology 101: Is that all there is?

Here’s what it boils down to:

1. Each of us has a unique experience of life because each of us has a singular genetic structure, including our brain and other organs and, to some degree, because of our particular life circumstances.
2. We share some similarities with one another, most noticeably within families, but on a broader scale as well, within discernible ethnic and racial groups. These similarities can include physical, perceptual, emotional and behavioral traits.
3. There are other broad groupings of similarities and differences in these traits, among them:
1. Gender
2. Culture
3. Social group assimilation, i.e., group vs. individual
4. Sexual preferences
5. Age
6. Societal interests, concerns and goals, e.g., liberal or conservative, etc.
4. Our physical traits, including our brains and the way each unique brain perceives, processes, stores and dispatches, cause our behaviors, including emotions to which we respond.
5. To the degree that our brain (and body) is similar to or different from others will largely define similarities or differences in behavior among individuals and groups.
6. Changing these differences and similarities is as simple as changing your brain structure.
7. Think about it.

Psychobiology 101: It is what it is.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder if everyone saw colors the same way. Was the color blue seen the same by everyone? How would we know if it wasn’t?

Much later, I had a sweater. It was woven from multi-color yarn and it was loose and comfortable; it became my favorite. Typical of favorite garments, after a few years it began to show its age.

One evening we were getting ready to go out to some friends’ house for dinner and my wife asked me what I was going to wear. I told her I planned to wear my favorite blue sweater.

She asked, “What blue sweater?”

I said, “You know, the blue pullover, the crew neck that I like.”

She said, “You mean that green one?”

I said, “No, the blue one.”

“What blue one? Show me.”

I pulled the sweater on and said, “Ta-Da!”

She said, “That’s a green sweater and you’re not wearing that ratty old thing out of the house.”

I was immediately interested in our differing descriptions of the sweater—the color, that is; it was definitely ratty.

I went into the bathroom and looked at the sweater in the mirror. Multi-color it was, but it seemed predominantly blue to me.

I wanted to get to the bottom of this blue-green controversy so, to further my research, I went to our teenage daughter’s room. I asked her, if she had to use just one color to describe the sweater, what would it be.

She pondered a few seconds and said, “I suppose brown, or maybe rust. You’re not going to wear that tonight, are you?”

The only thing I was sure of was that I was not going to wear that sweater to go out that evening.

Some years later, though, I became certain of this: to a greater or lesser degree, we all experience existence—life—each in our own unique way.

Absent with outleave.

Excuses posted at Uncle Genie.

Biology 101: We are what we are.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that family members usually, though not always, tend to bear some physical resemblance to one another. Skin tone, eye and hair color, facial features, height, and even more abstract characteristics such as personal interests or intelligence can contribute to recognizable family traits.

 

A close friend had chuckled when she saw a home movie of my father, whom she had never met, walking on the beach in his swim trunks. My friend found it amusing that I walked with the same rolling, slightly bowlegged gait that my father had. As it was, I was pleased by this connection to my Dad, who had died while I was still a teenager.

Thinking about this link made me realize something else. Since my father had never insisted that I should specifically imitate his walk, I recognized that my body structure—bones and muscles, their particular lengths, shapes and placement—were traits that I’d inherited from my father and caused me to move in a similar fashion.

What I learned from all this was that my resemblance to and variation from other people were due to very definite physical attributes, inherited, not learned. For example, one can not teach a child to change his or her eye color. While this may appear mundane and obvious, there are more subtle applications with much greater relevance that I’ll demonstrate as we go along.

Years later, when I was working in mental health, I had occasion to study brain trauma and its effects. I learned that certain behavioral patterns, called “risk-taking” behaviors, were associated with a higher incidence of brain trauma. In other words, folks who, for instance, liked to drive fast, more often found themselves in head-crashing accidents.

I also read that researchers had identified a genetic marker that is associated with such risk-taking behavior.

That information, coupled with some reading from the extraordinary amount of brain research that had been done world-wide in the 1990s, helped me understand that human brains are as subject to physical and functional similarities and differences as any other body part. Moreover, it was obvious these differences and similarities are largely responsible for normal or anomalous behavior as well.

More specifically, people feel and behave in different ways for the most part because their brains are different.

That has some very significant ramifications. Think about it.

Easy for you to say

Call it global warming, or climate change or a big hoax. It really doesn’t matter.

But two things are absolutely certain:

1

No matter how much it costs to deal with it now, the cost is only going up—exponentially.

2

We are betting the quality of life—and many actual lives—of our children and grandchildren on the outcome.