How many people are you?

I'm not talking schitzo or split personality here. I'm talking about the people influences that make us what we are.

Scientists love to bash home that we are all unique and individual but are we really that different from each other?

Take five and in quiet contemplation look back over your life and think of all the people you have known. Have any influenced you? Do you carry around someone else's habits or mannerisms without realising?

I think the human race is a massive collective of influences. Don't get me wrong, we are not photocopiers endlessly duplicating ourselves. It seems that there is a little selection processing going on when we decide to take on part of someone elses persona.

Often than not when we do inherit part of someone it always tends to be a good friend or somebody you look up to. Whether or not this is a conscious or unconscious decision I cannot tell.

Could this be the reason why so many of us ultimately grow up to be like our parent? Ye gods!

There is some truth in sayings such as 'Look at your wife's mother because thats what she will be like in her later years'. I'm not referring to the physical appearance here but rather the attitiude and mannerisms that get copied.

I never met my mother in law because sadly she passed away long before I came on the scene. I do know however that from relative's descriptions of her my wife has indeed inherited some of her mother's personality traits.

I won't say which ones or whether they are good or bad as it may be dangerous to my health if I did.

The strange thing about inheriting personality traits is that over time they seem to fade, or get replaced by new ones. Its like a constant layering process but underneath they all merge together to produce the person everyone sees.

Pyschologists have a field day with this sort of thing as they believe they can get to the root of somones problems by peeling back the layers.

It reminds of that film 'The Boys from Brazil' in which a Nazi doctor tries to recreate Hitler by exposing his clones to similar traumatic life situations,

The reality is that our influences are far too complex to be able to reproduce them in order to come up with a replica personality. We all meet different people under different circumstances at different times under different conditions.

For a pyschologist to really know whats going on in that head they would have to know every single individual that may have ever had an influence on you.