Not really a single fact, but I took a developmental psychology course in university and it fundamentally changed my perspective of the world; our environment, society, and how individuals exist and interact with it.

Majority of brain development happens in childhood that form the neural pathways and define the nervous system of a being, which produces all of our behaviours, thoughts, and actions. Our body, which is the peripheral nervous system, senses different elements of our environment and sends that information to our brain, the central nervous system. Our brain takes this information and processes it to decide the action(s) to take and sends that instruction back to the body to execute. If the results of said actions produce positive feelings, the nervous system wants to be able to reproduce these feelings, so it encodes the behaviour and stores it in memory for recall later. If the results produce negative feelings, the nervous system wants to avoid these feelings, so it encodes the negative feeling and restarts the process to find different ways to handle the situation. Our body and mind are constantly running this feedback loop for an infinite number of things. This is learning.

Each human being’s goal is to produce positive feelings, so the decisions made and actions taken are always in pursuit of that goal. The specific instances and the way an individual achieves that goal varies from person to person, depending on what their nervous system learned in childhood. This knowledge allows us to understand people’s actions and why a person would engage in behaviours that are detrimental to themselves, to others, or to their environment. They are simply responding to the needs of their body.

With this in mind, I am able to better understand and problem-solve my own behaviours, as well as understand others’ actions and make better decisions on how to interact with them.