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CreativityTranscript
00:00That's part of the magnitude of error problem, and so people don't like to think, and so it's hard to read difficult books, like Beyond Good and Evil, because you're just forced to think and think, and it's just exhausting.
00:12You wish that he would just go away, you know, which is why they're trying to not teach difficult books in universities anymore, so that people don't have to undergo the difficult process of actually having to think and transform themselves.
00:26Anyways, I read Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, and it was like that. He was something, man.
00:35Student of a psychologist named Hans Eysenck, who was the most cited psychologist in the 20th century, and really quite a good psychologist.
00:45He laid a lot of the groundwork for modern theories of temperament and personality.
00:50They've been modified since his work, but he got extroversion right. He was the first person to really identify extroversion in a manner that could be measured.
00:58Carl Jung actually invented the notion, but Eysenck figured out how to measure it, which is a big deal, and he also noted that there was another important personality dimension, neuroticism, which is the tendency towards negative emotion, and he got that right too, because that actually happened to be the case, and he figured out how to measure it.
01:14So, Eysenck was the first person who really established, conceptually, the fact that we have two fundamental emotional systems, one positive and one negative, that they're not opposites exactly.
01:30They're actually separate biological systems, so some people can be extroverted, which means they're quite happy and assertive, they smile a lot, they laugh a lot, they tell a lot of jokes, they like to party, they always like to be around people.
01:43That's an extroverted person, and they can also be unhappy, worried, anxious, depressed, frustrated, disappointed.
01:51I mean, living with someone like that's quite a trip, because they're just all over the place, but there are people like that, because you can be high in negative emotion, and you can be high in positive emotion, or low in both, or whatever.
02:03And it's useful to know that, it's useful to know that about your partner, and about the people around you.
02:08If you are interested in this sort of thing, by the way, I have a personality test online, at understandmyself.com, and you can go there, and it takes you about 15 minutes, and it gives you five dimensions of personality.
02:23Extroversion, neuroticism, that's positive and negative emotion.
02:27Agreeableness, which is probably the maternal instinct dimension, but at least it's the variance between compassion and competitive aggression.
02:38It's something like that, and that looks like a continuum.
02:41And there's another dimension, which is trait conscientiousness, which is integrity and undutifulness, orderliness, industriousness.
02:50And then finally, the fifth dimension, which is openness, which is like a hybrid between intellect, intelligence roughly, and creativity.
02:59And so you can go there, and find out how you compare to other people, and that's kind of interesting, and useful, because it's kind of useful to know who you are.
03:06To know that that's actually who you are, you know, that you have a nature, and some of that stuff's movable, but it's not as movable as you think, and the farther you want to move it, the harder it is to move.
03:19Like, you can take an introvert, you know you're an introvert if when you're around people, you get exhausted by it, and you have to go off by yourself and recover, you know, then you're an introvert.
03:29And if you're an introvert, you don't really like being in groups, and so sales, you know, maybe that's not for you, you know.
03:36And that's a good thing to know, because if you're an introvert, why go be a salesperson and be miserable?
03:42Do something where you can spend time alone and not be miserable, that's better.
03:47You might as well match your occupation to your temperament, rather than the other way around.
03:52Now, you know, you can take an introvert, I've worked with lots of introverts who say had made pretty good progress in their careers, and they were at a point where they had to do a lot of social networking, you know, and otherwise they were going to hit a plateau in their career.
04:08And they could be taught the skills of extroversion sort of one at a time, rather painfully.
04:15So they could learn them, they could accrue the skills, and that would broaden their personality outward into the, say, extroverted end of the continuum.
04:24But it didn't make them extroverts, and so they were still temperamentally introverts.
04:28And so, you know, if you're a neurotic person, high negative emotion, you can learn to regulate your anxiety and so forth.
04:35But you hit a point of diminishing returns, and it's difficult, it's effortful.
04:43So, anyways, back to Eysenck, and then back to Jeffrey Gray.
04:48So Eysenck identified extroversion and neuroticism, and that's going to be very important in a minute.
04:54And Gray elaborated Eysenck's theories to a large degree, but he did that neurologically.
05:02He was a master of the animal experimental literature.
05:07And a lot of that's being phased out of universities, because the regulations for animal experimentation have become so onerous and difficult
05:16that it's much easier for beginning scientists just not to bother.
05:22And that's a real catastrophe, because we have learned a lot about the brain in the last 50 years, a lot.
05:29And we've learned very little about the brain from PET scans and MRI scans and like that complicated technology that's used to study human beings,
05:38and an unbelievable amount by studying animals.
05:43And you might think rats in particular, and you might think, well, you know, rats, they're not much like human beings, you know, but that's wrong.
05:54You share, I don't know what it is, 98.5% of your genetic structure with rats, some of you probably more than that.