There are approximately 7.046 billion in the world right now according to Google, and if the common notion that everyone is unique holds true, isn't it crazy? To think that there are 7 billion human beings that process information differently, perceive the world differently, and grow and develop differently. Would it be possible to have two people who behave, act, and think exactly the same? Even individual animals in the same species act differently! Puppies from the same litter can differ and vary in temperament.
In a nutshell, there are more than 7 billion living things (I'm factoring in animals) running around on earth with their own modus operandi. Even if we scale it down to just humankind, there are no two people who can be the same. MINDBLOWING. We can have all the scientific formulas in the world but can there be a formula to develop an exact personality within two people?
personalitypəːsəˈnalɪti/noun the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character.
There is always the argument of nature vs nurture, for example: can you be genetically predisposed to be smarter than average or can you train yourself to be smarter than average? Another example, my favourite — and also very similar to what I'm talking about today, would be: are serial killers born or made? Going along with this train of thought; are our actions, thoughts, and how we feel products of our genetic material or our environment?
Let's say we have a family of four, with one set of biological parents and a pair of siblings. The father and one sibling are meek and mild-mannered, while the mother and the other sibling are fiery and hot tempered. Could it be that one child was born with a gene that made it more susceptible being angry? Or if we look towards how the environment shapes an individual; assuming they all spent equal amounts of time with each other, how is it that one sibling has followed more in the mother's footsteps while the other vice versa?
Additionally, are the parents temperaments products or nature or environment? And if we trace it all the way back to the very first ancestors and let's not talk about Adam and Eve right now, was it a product of nature or environment?
Moving along from this hypothetical scenario, let's look at real life. If we look at ourselves and our family, we do not follow exactly the traits of one parent, or even both. We may take on some traits from each parent, but what made us choose to do so? We are also constantly surrounded by external influences that cause us to form our own opinions and views such as friends, mentors, strangers, our culture and even the media. But what makes us pick and choose the things we want to incorporate into our selves?
selfsɛlf/noun
a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.
To put it into another hypothetical scenario, let's have a typical classroom with a 40:1 ratio of students to a teacher. Assuming the teacher does not pay special attention to any particular student and just teaches from the textbook (don't we all know that teacher), this means that all 40 students are getting the exact same information the teacher is disseminating. Does it mean that all 40 of them absorb and process the information the same way and manner?
If we look at our own experiences in the classroom, the answer is a definite no. There are the students who sit in the front, dutifully taking notes and making reminders to themselves to revise when they get home. There are the students sitting at the back of the class who got bored after 5 minutes and are either fooling around or daydreaming. And there are the students in the middle who could be a mixture of both, or they could be the asshole geniuses who don't have to study hard to get good grades and they know it. So going back to the topic on hand, why did you act the way you did when you were in school?
We can scale it down more, and just have two people who read the same book, watch the same movie, or heck, even listen to the same song. You know the drill. Both of them will walk away with a different set of opinions and feelings on what they were just presented with. What is the exact thing that made them differ in their thoughts?
Of course, there isn't quite an experiment we can perform to understand why we all have this intrinsic mechanism that just sets us apart from each other as there would be too many variables to take note of. Even twins are not genetically identical. Which makes everything more puzzling.
It's all very fascinating isn't it? The world is a big mystery in itself and yet if we look towards ourselves we could have an even bigger mystery on our hands. Literally.
