In the opening chapters of this theory, I have alluded to two concepts of great importance.
They are the almost absolute immutability of the innate tendencies that will characterize a person during his life, once they have been established, and the other is the extreme variability in the intensity that each tendency can have when we compare one person to another.
We must specify what we understand by innate tendencies, differentiating them from the most basic survival instincts, which are the base of simpler primary responses, and are a lot more similar in everybody.
The tendencies to which we want to refer here are those inclinations (drives), or rejections that a person feels towards any idea or stimulus , which can have quite precise discriminatory features.
They are depicted in detail in chapter 4 of this work.
As characteristic examples, I can mention here: the tendency to exert violence and/or threat to obtain certain goals, the tendency to use deception and/or trickery, also to gain specific benefits. The tendency to obtain and maintain great power and dominance over others, the tendency to posses great wealth, be it in money, territories, goods, etc. The tendency to homosexuality, hypersexuality, bisexuality, among many other sexual drives. The tendency towards religiosity, etc. etc., to mention just a few examples of those many that have been described previously.
What is remarkable about these tendencies, (with the exception of very exceptional cases, after catastrophic or very traumatic events) is how permanently they characterize people, as they maintain their "own nature", their way of being and feeling, throughout their lives.
We have also said that these trends are not matter of free choice for each person, since they are originated in our primary brain, and are simply "felt or experienced" as they come, in such an important degree that they play a very decisive role as they participate in behavioral decisions.
Many people believe that they are "freely deciding" when they follow these tendencies, and feel totally subjugated when they are encouraged or forced to change their conduct.
From this point of view, it is a paradox that a person would act in a more free and rational way if he/she was able to decide against what he/she "really wants at that moment".
We have also said that the development and consolidation of these trends in the primary brain follow a pattern that is more quantitative than qualitative. In other words, it is not that people can have some but not other, trends. Instead, they are all always present, but with bigger or lesser intensities, that can go from a maximum to a minimum, that in this last case can appear as absence of that tendency.
With all the previous elements characterized, we can say that each person has his/her own specific profile of tendencies, defined by the intensity of each of them. In other words, each person has his/her own Trends Spectrum Profile.
Thus, we can analyse and distribute people according to their profiles. Given that all combinations are possible, distributed statistically, we might find similar profiles, opposite profiles, or others in which comparisons or differentiations can not be easily made.
As we have said before, it is this profile, characteristic of each person, the real and fundamental origin of their preferences and opinions (which are not necessarily confessed or publicly stated), and therefore, the origin of their vocations. This why this is the key for people to be more or less happy or fulfilled in their lives, as they confront their achievements against those innate goals that are most precious to them.
When and how are these trends established in each person?
In chapter 2, I wrote: "it is as if each one of us was born with a filter that makes us perceive and analyse reality in a particular way, different and impossible to compare with that of others".
This "filter" to which I allude is made up by the set of trends that characterize each person, and makes him/her appreciate in his/her own way each stimulus, each situation, each person with whom he/her makes contact, among many others instances that the "world" may present.
Of the currently available scientific evidence on the origin and determination of each trend, not much can be stated with complete certainty.
It is known that both the genetic information that each human being has, as well as the epigenetic mechanisms that regulate the expression of those genes, participate in embryogenesis and cell differentiation, in the conformation of organs and structures of the new being, and the neural circuits of the brain are also participants of this process.
However, stimuli from the external environment, through the senses, also may begin to intervene during the child´s first years of life.
There are probably, apart from the above, some limited genetic expressions that could be produced by more or less random combinations of the aforementioned factors, being this very useful from the point of view of the necessary variability of the genetic expression, indispensable for the concretion of mechanisms of natural selection that allow the evolution of species.
However, even without being able to specify up to now the exact participation of each factor in the generation of the trends that will characterize each person´s primary brain, we can argue that this occurs fundamentally from the fetal period to the fourth of fifth years of age, and that when established , they constitute strong behavioral constrains that have arrived to stay.
How much of the final result was genetically predetermined, and how much and how is it determined along the development course, is a question that will need more time to be answered with sufficient scientific base.
However, the advance of knowledge is unstoppable, so, sooner rather than later, we will have new lights to continue delving into these fascinating topics.
Jorge Lizama León
Originally published in june 2011.
