How do we think? What are emotions? What makes my personality different from yours? How is it that I am an individual with particular tastes, particular beliefs, and particular obsessions? Why are mine different than yours when you, like me, are flesh and blood, skin and bones, mind, body and heart?
The other day, my co-worker brought up the topic of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. She related a story of a friend who she thought had it. I thought it strange. She thought it strange, too. All I could come up with is the physical imbalance of chemicals in her friend’s cranium causing a short circuit in the way this person thinks. This imbalance causes the friend to think obsessively on one thing even though they know it too be a curious way to behave. I found my self saying that it is inexplicable to understand what makes this imbalance of chemicals manifest itself as a thought to keep obsessing about a particular thing.
Pointing out the chemical imbalance is something my mom, a psychiatrist, would say. I don’t think that is all there is too it.
Our body takes in nutrients: protein, electrolytes, amino acids, and uses it to make our bodies function properly. Not only our muscles, but our mind and nervous system of which the brain is the primary organ. We all get them. Our brains and body convert them in a similar fashion. Yet, we turn up as individual personalities. How does this happen? And is it a matter of the difference amongst us at the quantum level?
I’m sure scientists have been searching for the answer. I’m also sure that this is a philosophical question too.
We are all human, but we are all different.
