What are the reasons behind our behavior?

What controls our emotions? How we can control our behavior?

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Key Issues

• Can science demonstrate and scrutinize human emotions?
• Why do we do what we do?
• What factors influence our behavior and emotions?

Suppose you are walking on the road with your friend. She sees an attractive man, walking across the street. The man gives her a smile. That sweet smiles excited her, she started running and crossing the road. And suddenly BOOM. She did not see the car coming, and maybe that driver did not see her as well. You did not have time to stop her. It was sudden.

“Understanding the biology of human behavior is obviously important. But unfortunately, it is hellishly complicated.”(1) So, how are we supposed to make sense of that? We should use a certain cognitive strategy when dealing with complex, multifaceted phenomena, in that we break down those separate facets into categories, into buckets of explanation.

How We Should Analyze Human Behaviors and Emotions?

Robert Sapolsky in his extraordinary book “Behave” explains in detail about this phenomenon. The short story above is a twisted version of Sapolsky’s example in his book. Let’s go back and look at it from different perspectives by using multiple tools from different disciplines. It’s time to dive in.

“Behavioral-biological question: Why did she cross the road?

• If you are a psychoneurologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in your friend worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling.”
• If you are a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in her leg forms in a way allowing her to move forward rapidly and run to survive.”
• If you are an evolutionary biologist, you would say, “Because over the course of millions of years, women that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile, left more copies of their genes; thus this has become an innate behavior in women.”

Let’s look at the same example through one of those disciplines in a different approach, from Micro to Macro perspective. I choose the neurobiological one.

• What happened in her brain a second before the response (running cross the road)?

Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time:

• What sight, sound or smell in the last minutes triggered her nervous system to produce that behavior?
• What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive she was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behavior?

by David Leasure from Head4Knowledge

Moreover:

• What features of the environment in the last two years have changed the structure and function of her brain, affected its responses to those hormones and environmental stimuli.
• Then go further back to her childhood.
• Another step back to her fetal environment and her genetic makeup.

And then you expand the view to see the encompass factors more than she individually:

• How her community’s culture has affected her behavior?
• How has the culture shaped the behavior of people in her friends group?
• What ecological factors shaped that culture?

Expanding and expanding until considering events zillions of millennia ago and the evolution of that behavior.

This time let us see through the neurochemistry perspective.

If you are a neurochemist, you would say:

• “Because of the releasing of neurochemical Y in the brain.”
• “The behavior occurred because the heavy secretion of hormone X this morning increased the levels of neurochemical Y.”
• “The behavior occurred because the environment in which that person was raised made her brain more likely to release neurochemical Y in response to certain types of stimuli.” Or you might say:
• “Because of the gene that codes for the particular version of neurochemical Y.”

And if you have so much as whispered the word “gene”, you may also say:

• “Because of the millennia of factors that shaped the evolution of that particular gene.”

And so on.(2)

As you see there are many perspectives that we can look through and analyze an event, a person or a behavior. What Sapolsky tries to say in “Behave” and I emphasized here is that we should not try to explain a complex phenomenon with a narrow perspective. Soon I talk about what factors have an affect on our emotions and behaviors.

If you like this article, follow me here and discover more topics. Also you might like these articles to take a look at:

Do your emotions control you? How to handle your feelings.

Psychologists Explain How Emotions, Not logic, Drive Human Behaviour

Welcome to Robert Sapolsky Rocks

References

1. “Mapping of neural and signal transduction pathways”
2. “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst ….”