Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are considered to be computationally more powerful than conventional NNs. However, the capability of SNNs in solving complex real-world problems remains to be demonstrated. In this paper, we propose a substantial extension of the Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) SNN model, in which the plasticity parameters are regulated by a gene regulatory network (GRN). Meanwhile, the dynamics of the GRN is dependent on the activation levels of the BCM neurons. We term the whole model "GRN-BCM." To demonstrate its computational power, we first compare the GRN-BCM with a standard BCM, a hidden Markov model, and a reservoir computing model on a complex time series classification problem. Simulation results indicate that the GRN-BCM significantly outperforms the compared models. The GRN-BCM is then applied to two widely used datasets for human behavior recognition. Comparative results on the two datasets suggest that the GRN-BCM is very promising for human behavior recognition, although the current experiments are still limited to the scenarios in which only one object is moving in the considered video sequences.