A hypothesis regarding human behavior

This idea is first raised when I was writing the article questioning the construct of Curiosity Reflex. My main thrust in that article is although Reflex are built-it neurological mechanism, it is inadequate to use that to explain all human behavior, which one of the particular case is the phenomena of curiosity.

Now there is analogous term of human behavior known as habit, it is perhaps what closest resemble the idea of reflex. Reflex is a set of pre-programmed and inflexible set of behavior which doesn’t change according to the input of stimulus. i.e. Just like Reflex with encountering the fire, the body part in contact with the fire will retard without regarding to other stimulate existed in the environment. Even if withdrawing the hand from the fire would cause the injury to the hand, there is no halting of the reflex. Habit do share similar characteristic of reflex in terms of its inflexibility.

So my hypothesis here is that neurologically, when the brain first encounter a set of stimulates, it would build a cognitive map to understand the relationship between the stimulates with regard to the interest of itself. After some deliberation, the brain would arrive at the conclusion though careful analysis of the situation, then a suitable reaction behavior set would formed. Presumably for the sake of saving neurological resource, this set of behavior would gradually be written into the neurological network in the brain. So as time goes by, that behavior pattern become less inflexible since it begin to resemble reflex neurologically. I suppose there is a threshold which it would pass to almost completely lost its receptivity to change. However, that would never be what an innate reflex is like since it is not written in DNA. So we should see a range of behavior in-between Reflex-like-habit and new set of behavior pattern.