The Behaviour Formula: Neuroscience & The Creation of Myth

First I'll go over the findings of this paper, and then I'll talk about how it is relevant for writers. 

Thelonious Monk said "All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians." It might be fair to say that all writers are subconsciously psychologists.

The paper "The ARCH model: a neuroevolutionary framework for behavioral execution" appeared in Frontiers in Psychiatry in October 2025.

The authors propose a grammar of behaviour, rooted in Evolutionary Neuroscience. The ARCH model offers a neurological grounding for what Jung intuited as archetypes. 

The concept of the archetype was first articulated by Carl Jung (1959), who described these structures as innate, universal patterns of instinctual cognition and behavior. Notably, Jung emphasized their manifestation not only in myth and dream but also in animal behavior, anticipating later ethological insights and described them as "guaranteed in every single individual. (Rahman, Zorumski and Meloy, 2025, p. 4)

The authors continue:

Across species, recurrent behavioral patterns—ranging from caregiving to territorial aggression—reflect deeply conserved architectures sculpted by natural selection. (Rahman, Zorumski and Meloy, 2025, p. 1)

The authors of the paper say there needs to be four things in place for behaviour to occur. When an evolutionary instinct (A), is given emotional fuel (D), and an environmental trigger (C) they combine with enough force to overcome a character's internal resistance (Φ).

Behaviour = Φ × (A × D × C).

If any of these elements are zero, behaviour isn't triggered. The writer needs to put their characters in enough of a pressure cooker.

Useful for a writer to know.

The authors of the paper map out what they think are ten evolutionary domains of behaviour:

We define ten canonical archetypal neural systems, each
corresponding to a distinct evolutionary domain of behavior and
instantiated by conserved neurobehavioral circuits. These ten
systems, collectively termed the Systema Behavorum, represent a
provisional grammar of behaviour rather than a definitive taxonomy. (Rahman, Zorumski and Meloy, 2025, p. 5)

They are:

1. Navigia—goal-seeking and exploration
2. Theromata—caregiving and social bonding
3. Phobon—threat detection and defense
4. Agonix—competition and status striving
5. Venex - mating, sexual signalling, reproductive behavior
6. Sacrifex—self-transcendence and symbolic devotion
7. Thumos—recognition, honor, and moral striving
8. Imitati—imitative learning and cultural acquisition
9. Hedonix—pleasure, play, and reward
10. Alligantia—joining, uniting, and developing coalitions

An interesting exercise would be to look at stories through this lens. Let's look at E.T.

It contains numbers 1, 2, 3,4 (competition with authority figures/Government), 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Almost a full house and maybe you could argue 5 relates to the 'coming of age' story.

How about the original Star Wars Trilogy? A full house, I'd say. 

This is interesting, as Lucas took the hero's journey (which he discovered through Joseph Campbell) as the map of his story. Campbell believed that similar myths were found worldwide because they came out of an archetypal structures we all inherit. He was into his Jung. The authors of the paper are explicitly working in this area.

We extend Jung and Barbieri's work by grounding archetypes in neural circuits—archetypal nervous systems—modular architectures specialized for recurrent adaptive problems such as defense, bonding, and competition. (Rahman, Zorumski and Meloy, 2025, p. 5)

I think you could combine looking at these evolutionary domains of behaviour with Thomas Ostermeier's technique of putting people in as difficult a situation as possible. His 'Airport Lounge Exercise' is a perfect example of showing how emotional fuel (D), and an environmental trigger (C) combine to cause behaviour to kick off. 

You can see exactly these elements in Ibsen's writing, A Doll's House, for example. For a deep dive into this, check out Ostermeier's own paper on "Reading and Staging Ibsen".

I mentioned two very important subjects which I found in Ibsen's plays. First of all the overall issue of economic pressure and financial worries. Second, the aspect of family, the pressure on the role of a woman in the time of Ibsen and nowadays, especially in the new conservative spirit we have to face now and which impacts on society, where I see parallels in the difficulties of being a couple, having children and trying to solve the problem of having a family life then and now. (Ostermeier, 2010)

Here is the how the formula plays out in A Doll's House.

Instincts (status/honour/caregiving) × the environmental trigger (Economic pressure) × emotional fuel (family/the role of a woman) = it's all kicks off for Nora.