What is a person but a collection of thoughts?

When I meet somebody new, I assess them on a wide range of variables, and know that at the same time that if they are the least observant, they assess me as well--on physique and fashion, general intelligence, knowledge of the world, particular specialties/interests, personality in terms of  introversion/extroversion, humor, social skills, creativity and openness, fear or boldness, optimism/pessimism, deterministic or carefree... and a billion other dimensions which make up a person. The neurons fire at that unbelievable rate that allows us to recognize a person's face and distinguish his among hundreds of others though we have met for only a moment. Isn't this such a strange an interesting thing, what makes up a person? What is going on in that person's mind that causes them to fear, to long for love, to feel compassion, to become irritated and annoyed? Why are some people very confident of themselves when they have no reason to be, and others lack confidence when they have proved themselves time and time again? How can the psyche be made more resilient and healed?

These are questions I ask, and hope to comment on, in this blog that will be a mass observation on human behavior. Since every view is determined in no small part by the characteristics of its lens, I realize that I will have to analyze myself in this process, and expose my own biases and reactions that flavor every observation... but apart from that I will avoid revealing personal information about myself, because that makes me uncomfortable. This blog is for the millions of others of naive psychologists out there--naive in the spirit of the child as naive scientist, one who makes observations about the world, with no way of proving them and no formal knowledge of Newtonian physics, but who can only say that objects seem to fall when he drops them--these observations become the seeds of thought that propagate deeper understanding.