What does the title suggest to you? Hustle and bustle at the humongous train station in NYC? Trains rumbling in and out? Crisply dressed, informative and polite conductors? Taxis waiting to hustle you away? Not to me. Because I have the inside track, so to speak, "Grand Central Station" to me symbolizes our human brain. How so? The intent of this short piece is to answer that question humorously but also accurately.
Evolution of the Human Brain
I was stunned to learn that initially the human brain was smaller than our predecessors. Not to worry! The correlation between brain size and IQ means nothing since correlations do not reveal causes. Thus, you cannot tell by the size of their head people who are members of the sky-high IQ club, the Mensa Society. A late friend of mine was. He could type 600 words per minute. He could walk into any cathedral and play lickety-split a huge pipe organ. He and I were graduate student pals. He breezed through to his PhD. I huffed and puffed my way through.
The Brain's Synapses
Loosely speaking, the synapses symbolize Grand Central Station comprising billions of neural train tracks connecting with each other. No connections, no thinking. No "human equation."
The Brain and the Human Equation
Person + Context = Behavior + Results
The Person
The brain lives in the person, who is a treasure trove of good and bad characteristics. There are no saints. We are imperfect creatures with some of us less so than others. As for our morals, our behavior would have to abide consistently by many universal moral values (e.g., honesty, fairness, etc.) to be saintly. Anyone who consistently flouts all of them is inherently evil. Values obviously refer also to whatever we like.
We are also a bundle of mental and physical abilities. They obviously affect our choices and behavior.
The Context
No person ever behaves in isolation, not in solitaire or wherever else. We always face a context of circumstances and conditions, some of our own choosing or making, many not. When I play golf, for instance, I pick an easier golf course.
The Person's Behavior
The left side meets the road running with the person's behavior, e.g., my swinging at my golf ball. There are two kinds of behavior, tacit and overt. The former is called thinking, believe it or not. The latter is what is seen.
Generally, a bad person plus a bad context yields bad behavior. Simple as that. Bad behavior ranges from trivial to heinous. such as, for example, the US killing of millions of people during the Vietnam War, a war foisted on humanity by US war mongers and profiteers.
Results
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