I just had a neat thought. I'd been pondering the whole idea of socialization (the process whereby individuals learn to behave willingly in accordance with the prevailing standards of their culture) and identity. I also had a database schema in my mind for something I am working on, so naturally...I am thinking about primary keys (a primary key is an attribute whose value is unique across all occurrences of a relation).

My idea is that what our parents (or whoever is present in the developmental stage) give is is our primary key, and that key determines how we consume all of the data that passes by us. Of course, it is possible in computer science to develop a database driven system without primary keys, but often the system operates slowly and is hard to adapt (dysfunctional?). This is probably possible in the human case as well, and perhaps would explain why stimuli is consumed and processed in significantly different ways from person to person.

Just a thought.