The Mechanism of the Mind
Why Understanding Human Behavior Requires a New Framework
To understand human beings, we must first identify the mental forces that drive them and examine how these forces interact. Although humans are widely celebrated for their intellect, the human mind is not governed by intellect alone. It is bipolar in nature, composed of two fundamentally different forces: instinct and intellect. While intellect has been extensively examined across philosophy, psychology, and science, instinct despite its dominant influence on behavior has been largely neglected. Yet instincts shape conduct more immediately and more powerfully than conscious reasoning. Each of these forces serves a distinct function, and recognizing this distinction is essential to understanding humanity.
Instinct and Intellect: Two Forces, Two Natures
A small number of instincts such as maternal instinct, sexuality, and aggression are universally acknowledged. This study introduces fourteen additional instincts, each responsible for a specific pattern of human behavior.
Instincts are: Primitive, Unconscious, Static and unchanging
Intellect, by contrast, is: Reflective, Cumulative, Continuously evolving
Instinct alone governs the lives of non-human animals and defines animal existence. Intellect, which is unique to humans, defines human existence. The coexistence of these two radically different forces within a single mind produces an internal divide that widens as intellect progresses over time.
The Bipolar Mind and Human Duality
Because instinct and intellect coexist in the human mind, they inevitably operate together even though they frequently come into conflict. All human behavior, and all human contradictions, emerge from this joint operation. One force reflects the primitive, instinctual dimension of our nature; the other represents our rational and reflective capacity.
This bipolar structure explains a phenomenon unique to humans: extreme behavioral variability. In species governed by a single-pole mind, members behave in largely uniform ways. Humans, however, display remarkable differences in behavior, judgment, creativity, and destructiveness. Understanding this variability requires understanding the interaction between instinct and intellect.
The Growing Divideand a Dangerous Paradox
As intellect advances while instinct remains unchanged, the gap between them grows. This widening divide enables extraordinary intelligence, creativity, and technological power capable of both constructive and destructive outcomes.
Here lies a troubling paradox: primitive instincts often overpower intellect, reducing it from a guiding force to a servant. Rather than restraining instinct, intellect is frequently commandeered by it. Judgment becomes distorted, reasoning is compromised, and vast portions of human intelligence are neutralized. The result is intelligence increasingly detached from wisdom a condition that poses serious risks to both individuals and civilization as a whole.
Why Instinct So Often Prevails
Instincts are evolutionarily older and inherently stronger than intellect. When the two come into conflict, instinct commonly silences intellect and directs it to employ all its capabilities in service of instinctual goals. Intellect, paradoxically, often complies. Thus, the very growth of intelligence so often equated with progress through science and technology can unintentionally magnify the animal aspect of humanity. Each of the seventeen instinctive forces drives a particular dimension of behavior, while intellect acts as the executor of instinctive objectives.
A Modern Illustration
It is not difficult to imagine that a global conflict comparable to the Second World War, fought today with modern weaponry, could threaten civilization itself. This is not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of wisdom one rooted in the unchecked alliance between advancing intellect and primitive instinct.
Toward Awareness and Balance
Recognizing this imbalance imposes a responsibility on modern humanity: to develop ways of interrupting the automatic dominance of instinct over intellect. Only by understanding the true mechanism of the mind can intelligence be redirected toward wisdom rather than destruction. This understanding makes possible new tools for awareness tools designed to help individuals identify the instinctive forces influencing their behavior and restore balance within the mind. Such awareness, once achieved, allows people to access far more intelligence and wisdom than they typically employ in daily life.
Applying These Principles
Comparing Behavior and Personality Tests
To know what it is to be human, we must find our place in the mix of other beings. From this stance, instinct alone governs all animals; thus, their mind is a single polar entity. Only the human mind consists of instincts and intellect that renders our mind bipolar, and that separates humans from animals.
The MeetYourMind Personality and Behavior Test, alone, is structured on this exclusive study by Mark Abraham, The Interactions Between Instincts and Intellect, and Their Impact on Human Behavior. It will become clear why this precept alone provides an accurate and holistic reading of the human mind.
This study reveals that the human mind consists of 17 different instincts, and the intellect portion divides into the Utilitarian Intellect and Moral Intellect, a total of 19 different mental forces, each with a different function. The same forces drive all people with varying intensity, and that distinguishes people from one another.
Why Other Systems Fail to Produce Holistic and Accurate Reports
Instincts and intellect and all their components are locked continuously together and mutually affect each other’s function. Together they govern all human deeds at all levels. You study one without the other, and you will grasp neither. The mental dynamics they create together, such as our love of arts, sports, religion, the paradoxes of human sexuality that lead to sexual harassment in the workplace, are explained through this system. Tribalism, as another mental force, fragments humans into hostile groups based on race, religions, language, gender, age, and wealth.
Know Thyself
People always debate what consciousness is and how we can access and manage it. Our heart, respiratory system, kidneys, hormonal glands, and so on work in the absence of our will. Just the same way, those mentioned above 19 mental forces also frequently interact with one another in the absence of our will, commonly known as the subconscious. Becoming fully aware of the existence of these forces that this study introduces, and learning the function of each, and how they interact brings the subconscious mind to the conscious levels and lays it naked before you. Up until then, they managed you, but from that point on, you manage your mind and take control of your life.
The factorial mathematic formula shows that these 19 mental variables present themselves in astronomical settings, each of which represents the personality of one person. If the world population were 16,200,000 times more, each person would still get a unique personality. Hence, the personality and fingerprints of each person are unique to that person.
Yet these three most popular personality tests claim the personality of the entire living world population, and over the 100 billion who lived before us had only one of four, five, or sixteen different personalities. This assertion alone proves their utter inaccuracies. The reports our test produces for each person is one of this vast number unique to that person.
Copyright © Mark Abraham