# The nueroscience of personality and Dario Nardi



## Bardo

oxygen forest said:


> I haven't watched the video, but how did he isolate for one function at a time? I would think that just reading the screen when having them solve problems and such would mean usage of multiple functions.


There was a range of different activities from staring at a point for a long time to role play speed dating. They were asked to interpret news articles, play computer games, listen to music, remember childhood scenes, all kinds of stuff.

Sometimes answering a question or solving a simple problem might mean a quick flash of regions, sometimes an easily noticeable whole brain state that lasts for a long time, maybe 10 minutes...patterns emerged.

I imagine a sufficiently complex task would require multiple functions.


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## Inveniet

Yay I have gotten the book now. =D
Sitting and browsing trough it now.
Looks great! roud:


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## Cosmicsense

For all you fellow lefties who can't seem to figure out your MBTI. . . you may not have one. 

WTF? Well, Dario Nardi explains in the video that roughly half of left-handers have arbitrary brain organizations. 

That means that their brain regions are scrambled at random compared to the rest ~95% of the population. 

So all these brain activation patterns which are common amongst the same types of MBTI. .. don't really apply to the funky lefties.


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## Bardo

Cosmicsense said:


> For all you fellow lefties who can't seem to figure out your MBTI. . . you may not have one.
> 
> WTF? Well, Dario Nardi explains in the video that roughly half of left-handers have arbitrary brain organizations.
> 
> That means that their brain regions are scrambled at random compared to the rest ~95% of the population.
> 
> So all these brain activation patterns which are common amongst the same types of MBTI. .. don't really apply to the funky lefties.



I wonder what would happen if you got a whole bunch of irregular lefties, not the mirror lefties, and looked for patterns in their brain activity based on mbti.

Rather than think of them as irregular examples in a test group they could be the focus of their own tests.

They might have their own version of the functions or some other system as deep as mbti, it's mind boggling.


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## Cosmicsense

@Bardo

I'm not sure of that. The key to remember is that their organization is entirely random. Apparently it's a natural risk which is an overall benefit for the species. Perhaps the majority don't turn out too well, but the few who do may actually push the species forward. 

I can meet you halfway, though. I recall reading a while back that lefties had, on average, an 11% larger corpus callosum. My thought is that the mirrored lefties had the same sized one, while the funkies had greater than 11% larger CC, maybe upwards of 20% or so. 

I think this may be more an indirect result of the funky organization. As in, in order to adapt to a right-handed world, they must work across more brain regions to make the same connections as the "norm" and fit in. If they are successful, they will have their own highly efficient pathways which are unique, while having a strengthened interhemisphere link to work around the less-efficient (compared to norm) neural networks. 

I think that's the common link you could find with these lefties. Structural differences which lead to structural similarities. 

As far as functions are concerned, I can only speak of my specific circumstance, and say that it seems I utilize ALL functions to various degrees depending on the situation and my current mood. A recent comment from someone who knows me was that I was always different each time he saw me. He couldn't find a stable image to see me as. I get that same, "you're hard to read" from people who make good monies, in part, from reading people. 

So I don't think this system works all too well for some of us funky lefties.


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## Mammon

This is really interesting. First I didn't think there was a real big difference between say an ENFP and an INFP since both use Ne and Fi. But now it seems like Fi-Ne would make blue and Ne-Fi would be orange, you know? Like, though the same, they work _completely_ different if first or not.


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## emerald sea

interesting! now i want to read this book!!! thanks for posting......


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## aestrivex

people in this thread should take a science class or two

http://personalitycafe.com/myers-br...ical-proof-mbti-aka-how-not-neuroimaging.html


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## Dyidia

aestrivex said:


> people in this thread should take a science class or two
> 
> http://personalitycafe.com/myers-br...ical-proof-mbti-aka-how-not-neuroimaging.html


I don't see the problem? There's a lot more to be done, for sure, but no one said anything about it being fully finished research.

Nardi's work looks like some preliminary exploration of how brain activity correlates to MBTI cognitive functions. The second post in that thread you gave criticizing his brain map simply depicts the function of the brain activity correlated to the given EEG electrode positions. He didn't say anything about this being all the brain does, just basic correlations. I'd imagine more funding would lead to more thorough/sophisticated data, but I'm still missing what part of his methodology invalidates the findings he has so far.


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## aestrivex

Vincent said:


> I don't see the problem? There's a lot more to be done, for sure, but no one said anything about it being fully finished research.
> 
> Nardi's work looks like some preliminary exploration of how brain activity correlates to MBTI cognitive functions. The second post in that thread you gave criticizing his brain map simply depicts the function of the brain activity correlated to the given EEG electrode positions. He didn't say anything about this being all the brain does, just basic correlations. I'd imagine more funding would lead to more thorough/sophisticated data, but I'm still missing what part of his methodology invalidates the findings he has so far.


It is replete with methodological errors which essentially make it useless. I have been writing this page about it. It isn't very well written yet and it only focuses on the most basic errors, but there are many others.

User:Aestrivex/essays/dario nardi - WSWiki



> The second post in that thread you gave criticizing his brain map simply depicts the function of the brain activity correlated to the given EEG electrode positions. He didn't say anything about this being all the brain does, just basic correlations.


If you compare the kinds of things that are interpreted about "regions" of the brain within the neuroscience literature, they are not nearly so abstract as the kinds of functions nardi claims to have found.


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## Teybo

aestrivex said:


> It is replete with methodological errors which essentially make it useless. I have been writing this page about it. It isn't very well written yet and it only focuses on the most basic errors, but there are many others.
> 
> User:Aestrivex/essays/dario nardi - WSWiki
> 
> 
> 
> If you compare the kinds of things that are interpreted about "regions" of the brain within the neuroscience literature, they are not nearly so abstract as the kinds of functions nardi claims to have found.


I don't mean to poo-poo further research in psychological type, but I've always believed that if Dario had really found remarkable correlations with Jungian type, he would have published that data. Instead, he's been not much more than a hired instructor for UCLA.

I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, and I _really _am not judging Nardi, but in stark terms, he's not a scientist, and his CV reflects this.


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## aestrivex

Teybo said:


> I don't mean to poo-poo further research in psychological type, but I've always believed that if Dario had really found remarkable correlations with Jungian type, he would have published that data. Instead, he's been not much more than a hired instructor for UCLA.
> 
> I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, and I _really _am not judging Nardi, but in stark terms, he's not a scientist, and his CV reflects this.


a) I most definitely *am* judging Nardi. He is a complete idiot.

b) I am not opposed to the idea of doing real research into psychological types -- actually quite the opposite; I believe typology provides a window into thinking about personality that is novel and has something to add to the predominant trait-based and social-cognitive approaches, but that thus far has been ignored, scoffed at, and essentially unexplored within the mainstream. Nardi's work doesn't count as real work. Most of the work in e.g. the Journal of Psychological Types is garbage and doesn't count either. None of this precludes the possibility of doing real work. But, real work has to start by motivating the clinical significance of our typology, and not the biological basis of it.


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## Bardo

aestrivex said:


> It is replete with methodological errors which essentially make it useless. I have been writing this page about it. It isn't very well written yet and it only focuses on the most basic errors, but there are many others.
> 
> User:Aestrivex/essays/dario nardi - WSWiki
> 
> If you compare the kinds of things that are interpreted about "regions" of the brain within the neuroscience literature, they are not nearly so abstract as the kinds of functions nardi claims to have found.




Your wiki page is extremely hard to follow. I'm having to question the meaning of simple concepts like 'more' and 'place' in order to try and extract meaning from your writing.

You say outright that Dario Nardi is a fraud or very stupid, and you say that this information is worthless.

You say, when talking about the brain region map, that none of these highly abstract activities map onto brain regions in any way.

So...the activities of the brain...can't be mapped onto the brain in any way? You are saying that the activities of the brain do not actually come from the brain and that an EEG machine will show nothing, absolutely nothing, when someone does anything of any kind when wearing an EEG helmet?

Or are you saying that patterns of activity cannot be measured at all, that all activities are always generated randomly from anywhere in the neocortex?

He said the use of 16 regions is basic, that another EEG may have over 200 electrodes. It seems sensible to use 16 when taking this into account, to keep things digestible. Is his use of just 16 regions part of your problem? Are you calling his simplification the absurdity of absurdities? 




You said Nardi claims that amplitude = "focusedness" of activity, when he says in the book that amplitude is just the size of the waves, he says in the slide you refer to that amplitude is represented by brightness. He says that when a region increases in activity it is when frequency and amplitude increase. 

When using the word focus in the slide he is clearly referring to the focus of the person in a task, not the focus of electrical activity of a region. 
This did not seem like something relating to the entirety of the foundation of his work and the very basic concepts that his understanding of neuroscience is founded on. That is quite a leap to take from misunderstanding an individual slide.


He also says that when looking at an individual electrode region that it displays a mass of different waveforms, he then selects the predominating one.
Your part regarding this is also very hard to follow. You say that activity happens at a mixture of different frequencies, but Nardi fully acknowledges this.

You say 10hz means a nueral assembly is firing ten times a second and that another may fire at 20, ok.

So you have neural assemblies firing at various frequencies in a particular region, lets say at 3, 10, 15 and 20hz.
If it is clear that that the 15hz frequency is predominant in this region, during a particular task, why can't Nardi say this particular region is mainly showing 15hz for this task, in this region, which he will represent with a color, in this region, on a map?

Why is more hz not more active? If you have assemblies at 20 hz predominating in a region that seems to me that more stuff is happening than in a region with assemblies of 3hz predominating. If you were to measure the amount of electrons physically in this area there would be more in the region with mainly 20hz activity surely? 

You said it isn't understood what the meaning of information is carried at the different frequencies, but Nardi isn't claiming to know this.

How does the scientific community not knowing the meaning of information at different frequencies disrupt this - more hz and more amplitude > less hz and lower amplitude?



If the brain states and functions are utter fabrication then how come they, and the people using those functions, operate exactly as he describes? 

If the region usage is fabrication how come it describes the lesser skills of the types perfectly - precise speech, mimic ability etc?


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## Figure

People have read this article many times, and nobody, myself included, seems to appreciate what it's trying to say, because it doesn't match with objective findings from the study. I think it's because it is poorly-worded, fails to objectively state why Nardi's research is "fraudulent" with respect to what it says it is trying to do, and doesn't explain why there were clear patterns between type and the electrodes lighting up, regardless of what frequency, etc. measure despite the study meaning "nothing." 

I agree that Nardi needs to publish results and clear up his methodology, but until whatever case this article is trying to make is stated clearly, it simply adds complexity to the study instead of disproving it.


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## tanstaafl28

Dammit! Can't get it for Kindle!


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## tanstaafl28

I am concerned that Dario Nardi's sample rate was/is too low, but I must admit I am intrigued.


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## Inveniet

tanstaafl28 said:


> I am concerned that Dario Nardi's sample rate was/is too low, but I must admit I am intrigued.


He addressed this and said that since he got raw EEG data there was no need to have so many in the sample.
He also said that he wouldn't scale this up further until he had managed to get portable EEG devices, 
so that he could get samples from thousands over much longer time frames.
Basically he wants to usher in an EEG revolution if he gets his way.
We will have to wait and see what happens, either way I've found his book very helpful.


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## aestrivex

Thank you for asking these questions, they are mostly all genuine and intended to gain more knowledge, possibly with the exception of the two at the end.



Bardo said:


> You say, when talking about the brain region map, that none of these highly abstract activities map onto brain regions in any way.
> 
> So...the activities of the brain...can't be mapped onto the brain in any way?


No. The activities of the brain can be mapped onto the brain. However, one must understand fairly precisely the nature of those activities being measured.

In neuroscience the idea that is widely implemented is the subtraction method. For instance, if we were interested in the parts of the brain that process object motion, we might show subjects videos of objects in motion and see what parts of the brain are activated. However, the areas that are most highly activated might not be the areas that process objects in motion; rather they might merely process visual stimuli of any kind. So, we need a control condition which has videos of objects not in motion, and what we are really interested in is the areas that are activated in the videos with motion, *minus* what is activated in the videos with no motion.

And then, we need to be very careful about the nature of the task even so. Because maybe our videos in motion are all of cats, and our videos of objects are all of parked cars. Maybe the region of the brain is not specific to motion, but to cats. All of this is to say, we need to design our tasks very carefully with all of these variables in mind in order to make sure there are no such confounds. And Nardi does none of this; he decides that say region P3 is involved with "holistic reasoning" because he makes his subjects do something like write essays (this data is not all fully available from his powerpoint presentation), sees brain activation in an area, and then decides "oh this activation is due to holistic thinking" because I gave subjects a holistic task.

Which, obviously, isn't very convincing since even if his methods were correct, his task design is such that the activation could be from any number of other things.



> You are saying that the activities of the brain do not actually come from the brain and that an EEG machine will show nothing, absolutely nothing, when someone does anything of any kind when wearing an EEG helmet?


No, that is not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that the frequency of activation with the highest spectral power (this is a mathematically very well understood quantity) is not related to the magnitude of activation.



> Or are you saying that patterns of activity cannot be measured at all, that all activities are always generated randomly from anywhere in the neocortex?


No, I am not saying this. However, it is true that brain systems are organized in networks that are not generally localized in one specific region. But this is a widespread issue and not directly what I am criticizing Nardi for.



> He said the use of 16 regions is basic, that another EEG may have over 200 electrodes. It seems sensible to use 16 when taking this into account, to keep things digestible. Is his use of just 16 regions part of your problem? Are you calling his simplification the absurdity of absurdities?


No, it is OK to use a small number of regions. Even if you used an EEG (more likely an MEG assay) with 200 electrodes(magnetometers), the spatial localization from electrical signals in the brain is still very poor. (Because there are far more sources of electrical activity in the brain than electrodes being measured, so there is no unique solution to the mapping of possible loci brain activity to electrodes; equivalently, the parameter space of the input vastly exceeds the size of the output).

If you use a small number of regions, knowing full well that you've used a small number of regions and what the limitations are of doing so, that in principle is OK.



> You said Nardi claims that amplitude = "focusedness" of activity, when he says in the book that amplitude is just the size of the waves, he says in the slide you refer to that amplitude is represented by brightness. He says that when a region increases in activity it is when frequency and amplitude increase.
> 
> When using the word focus in the slide he is clearly referring to the focus of the person in a task, not the focus of electrical activity of a region.


Yes, he does mean the focus of a person in a task. He is wrong for assuming that the fact that a brain region has a higher frequency (or amplitude but it seems like he is measuring frequency) means the person is more highly focused on the task. Indeed attention is a highly complex phenomenon, that is not related in a simple way to mere activation of brain regions.



> This did not seem like something relating to the entirety of the foundation of his work and the very basic concepts that his understanding of neuroscience is founded on. That is quite a leap to take from misunderstanding an individual slide.


There is no misunderstanding of the slide.



> He also says that when looking at an individual electrode region that it displays a mass of different waveforms, he then selects the predominating one.


Right, which is what he should do. This would then be meaningful (although of limited interest) if he said "such and such region is driven by beta activity in such and such task." Which is not what he does, he instead says "such and such region is more active in such and such task," or variously other things that are worse.



> Your part regarding this is also very hard to follow. You say that activity happens at a mixture of different frequencies, but Nardi fully acknowledges this.
> 
> You say 10hz means a nueral assembly is firing ten times a second and that another may fire at 20, ok.
> 
> So you have neural assemblies firing at various frequencies in a particular region, lets say at 3, 10, 15 and 20hz.
> If it is clear that that the 15hz frequency is predominant in this region, during a particular task, why can't Nardi say this particular region is mainly showing 15hz for this task, in this region, which he will represent with a color, in this region, on a map?


He doesn't make it clear that that's what he's doing. And if he understood that he was doing that, he wouldn't draw these crazy conclusions like "all of these brain regions are in blue, therefore the whole brain is synchronized."



> Why is more hz not more active? If you have assemblies at 20 hz predominating in a region that seems to me that more stuff is happening than in a region with assemblies of 3hz predominating. If you were to measure the amount of electrons physically in this area there would be more in the region with mainly 20hz activity surely?


No. Think about what it means to have an assembly of neurons producing activation at 20 Hz. It means that there is a population of neurons somewhere in the region you are measuring that is firing at roughly this rate, that is, there are cell assemblies that tend to fire at the peaks of the frequency but not at the troughs.

But also consider that there are lots of cell assemblies in all regions, because there are billions of neurons in the brain. It's not of great interest to know simply "what frequency is driving" this activity, because for the most part this is already known -- the alpha frequency (7-14 Hz) drives the majority of the activity in the brain, probably because there is a widespread network of inhibitory interneurons that operate at this frequency. These neurons don't do cognitively interesting work, rather they prevent neurons in the brain from firing all the time and making the network go haywire (as in e.g. epileptic seizures where the brain just sort of synchronizes excessively and goes out of control).

Activity in the gamma band range (30-100 Hz) will always have a lower amplitude than alpha activity pretty much no matter what. But it is interesting if the gamma power varies from one task condition to another, even if alpha power dominates over it.

What I take Nardi's color scheme to mean, even though its really unclear, is that he takes the highest frequency band with a significant difference in task activity to baseline activity, and assumes that is the frequency that is most highly active.



> You said it isn't understood what the meaning of information is carried at the different frequencies, but Nardi isn't claiming to know this.


Perhaps, but he is claiming to know that from this information he can determine which region of the brain (and only that region) is involved in processing like "holistic reasoning" and "abstract pattern matching" and so forth, so it isn't unreasonable for me to assume that he is overreaching on this more basic point.



> How does the scientific community not knowing the meaning of information at different frequencies disrupt this - more hz and more amplitude > less hz and lower amplitude?


I explained that, that's just something that completely doesn't follow from physics.



> If the brain states and functions are utter fabrication then how come they, and the people using those functions, operate exactly as he describes?


I don't understand your question, it seems like you are asking "if the world is X because X, then why are you claiming not X," which isn't a neuroscience question.



> If the region usage is fabrication how come it describes the lesser skills of the types perfectly - precise speech, mimic ability etc?


Without getting into what "lesser skills of types" means, "region usage" (which is ill defined) doesn't correlate with those tasks. And least of all perfectly. Again, your question is kind of like "If it is proven that X, explain not X." Which, nothing of the sort is proven, the only that is proven is that Dario Nardi says so, but since he doesn't seem to know which way is up that doesn't mean anything to me.


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## Teybo

hornet said:


> We will have to wait and see what happens, either way I've found his book very helpful.


Here's the thing about Dario Nardi and Lenore Thomson. When they talk about brain activation and such, it adds absolutely nothing new to the philosophical discussion. "Right brain, left brain, P3, O2," etc. isn't really meaningful, at least not in any way that really helps us understand each other better. I can't look into your brain, you can't look into mine. It's about as helpful as me saying that because you're ISFP your isoreporgontarator shows high activation, and since I'm INFJ, my depulsificalithumoid shows high activation. Without the accompanying explanation of the *patterned and consistent relation* between environmental input and behavioral reaction, the so-called biological data is quite useless.

I'm replying to you, @_hornet_, not because I have any bone to pick with you (I like you, and find that I generally agree with both your approach to discussions and the content of your opinions), but because I think your statement here about finding his book helpful, regardless of the veracity of his biological claims, to capture much of what's going on surrounding this whole type+EEG phenomenon that Dario is spearheading. I think there are some people who are so hungry for external validation of their perceptions that they are willing to accept any sort of neuroscience jargon in support of their viewpoint, and Lenore and Dario seem to be exemplifying this phenomenon. Maybe related to INTJ/Te land, I don't know? To be 100% clear (since sometimes I feel like I shoot for understatement and end up in asshole territory), and probably this is unnecessary, but I'm not accusing you, Mr. hornet, of anything, nor implying anything about your perceptions, interpretations, knowledge, thoughts, or anything else about type. In fact, I find your statement quite insightful.


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## Bardo

This discussion is really activating my isoreporgontarator.


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