Jim Mason
Understanding our behavioral cycle can help us to lead more satisfying and productive lives.
All living organisms monitor their environments for threats and opportunities. Threats are events that may damage the integrity or well-being of the organism. Opportunities are events that may help the organism to prolong its existence, increase the complexity of its structure, or reproduce to create offspring. Organisms respond to threats and opportunities by taking actions to avoid threats and to take advantage of opportunities.
The cycle of monitoring the environment and taking actions in it constitutes the behavior of an organism.
The human behavioral cycle
Like all other organisms, we humans operate on a behavioral cycle. Although many parts of our bodies — our brains especially — operate in parallel, there are some parts that have to operate serially — one thing or a few things at a time. Those parts include our limbs (arms, hands, legs, feet) our mouth and throat parts, our eye directions and focus, and the highest-level cognitive attention mechanisms in our brains. One important consequence of those serial constraints is that our communication using language is also constrained to be essentially serial.
