Human Behaviour

Human behavior is the collection of activities performed by human beings and influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, and/or coercion. (courtesy: Wikepedia). We generally tend to take the behavioral patterns of an individual to be the direct result of the harmonized functioning of the brain and the nervous system. But, that concept only looks at the exhibition of the physical behavior. One simple example would be how the body reacts to a very hot object. The feeling of extreme temperature and the pain it would cause due to direct contact has already been embedded in our brain due to first-hand experience of the same or due to the knowledge we have acquired from our society or texts. This would immediately make us wary each time we see a hot object and we will not touch it, at least not with bare hands. But, let’s take another scenario where your dress has caught fire accidentally due to some reason X or Y. If it is a small fire just catching up, we will try to put it off by putting our hands over it and blowing at it. In all probability, we will end up doing both actions. So, even when our brain has been encoded with the knowledge that fire is hot and will burn our body, we will still perform the involuntary action of putting it off with our hands. Here, the mind or what we literally call heart, takes over. The function of the heart or the mind becomes all the more dominant, if the victim is someone close to you.
So, lets analyze the situation better. The brain basically performs the analytical operations for a process and gives a logical solution which transcends into a normal behavioral pattern. The brain relies on the senses mostly, for performing this action. The mind on the other hand relies more on the emotional side of things and logic takes a back seat. It is a good balance between the emotional and mental state of the individual along with the sound logic and perfect analyzing power that contributes to a socially acceptable behavioral pattern. One good example is that of a kid in a public place. When you take a toddler to a cinema hall, where everyone is quiet and still, it is highly unlikely that the kid would follow the behavioral pattern if he is disturbed. At a young age, his brain has not been decoded with the social norms of silence in a place like the cinema hall and the baby is more concerned about his personal issue than the socially accepted behavioral pattern. This is what I would prefer to call raw response. Education actually takes this raw mindset, fine polishes it with rules and other norms and the metamorphosis into a social individual slowly takes place. It is highly unlikely that an adult will cry out aloud, no matter how hungry he is, inside a cinema hall.
To put it precisely, the individual gradually evolves a socially acceptable behavior pattern with age, as a result of education and by observation of his environment. For the sake of discussion, we could consider the case of a mentally challenged person. The brain takes the back seat for them and the mind rules over their actions. In reality, they are very much like small kids. A small kid would drop a glass to see it break and enjoy the sound and the sight of the fragments scattering in different directions. For him, he is experiencing the sensations and actually making a careful observation of the result of the process. This is precisely what a mentally challenged person does. However, just like the kid, I feel that they are just not able to communicate the reason for their actions. Our society labels them as mad individuals, while we sometimes even enjoy a similar behavior pattern from the kid.


Quite contrary to the popular literary coinage, “Where the heart (mind) rules over the brain”, I feel that it should be a proper blend of both, to project a behavioral pattern that would be socially acceptable and personally beneficial.