Mentality by Rhea

Mentality by Rhea - February 2025 Scholarship Essay

What makes a human, human? What characteristics do a human have that set them above their predecessors, above all the other animals in the animal kingdom? While I had never thought about this question before, something last year changed that; Psychology. Taking a course in psychology, I was expecting a lot, and the course changed a lot about how I think about the world and the people who surrounded me.
The thing that sparked my curiosity the most was learning about the brain; almost all animals have one, and I wondered how humans were different. I soon found out that there are 3 layers to the brain; the lizard brain, the mammalian brain, and the human brain. The human brain is what I focused on; it’s the last part of the brain to fully develop, and it’s what sets humans aside from other animals. I wasn’t very interested in the biology of it all; I was more curious about why it came to be.
It made me even more curious about what exactly led a human to being human; and if being humane was a part of human nature. A human doesn’t have to be humane to be a human, even though the word human is in the word humane. After my curiosity had peaked, there was no turning back for me. I wanted, needed, to know. Granted, I would learn the rest in class, but I was more interested than I had been before. I asked questions frequently during which we learnt about the brain, and even after that unit was done I was still persistent. I found a newfound interest in psychology, more than I had before.
Sure enough, I had begun to listen to the world around me; I read articles on the most random topics that had to do with how people think, how they work together, how they socialise, how they form a society. I never used to do this; I never paid attention to the news apart from what I was told by my parents, my friends. So I was shocked when I realised that I had begun doing these things; I was even doing them subconsciously! So this one question led me on this wild chase for more information; and even after obtaining said information, I continued to satiate my curiosity with other sources, even if I was going out of my way to do so. When I realised this, I decided that I would try to keep this same curiosity for other subjects throughout high school, and past it, into college and my adult life. I didn’t know, nor do I know now how my life is going to go, but I know that I’ll hold myself to staying curious, even if it fluctuates over the course of years.