Know your nature: aggressor, nurturer or both? | Dexter Dias

Our contradictory impulses present one of the human race's oldest conundrums. Dexter Dias takes a more balanced look

Why do we do the things we do? What choice do we have? Who or what does the choosing? My research into these questions revealed 10 recurring and highly characteristic forms of human behaviour. From the Aggressor to the Nurturer and the Ostraciser to the Rescuer" you may well recognise some of these tropes. If they are familiar, it's because you carry elements of all of them inside you. In a sense, they are you. Only they're not - not entirely. Aspects of them inform and shape the most important decisions in your life. But you're almost certainly unaware of their intervention. They are the essence and instinct of the people you meet.

For years our brain was thought to function like a general-purpose computer, an old-fashioned telephone system in those black-and-white movies, with everything going through a central switchboard. This view is being challenged. New findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology indicate that the brain may be more intriguingly fragmented than that.