00:00That's part of the magnitude of error problem and so people don't like to think and so it's hard to
00:04read 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
00:17in universities anymore so that people don't have to undergo the difficult process of actually having to think and transform
00:25themselves.
00:25Anyways, I read Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety and it was like that. He was something, man. Student
00:36of a psychologist named Hans Isaac who was the most cited psychologist in the 20th century and really quite a
00:44good psychologist. He laid a lot of the groundwork for modern theories of temperament and personality.
00:49They've been modified since his work but he got extroversion right. He was the first person to really identify extroversion
00:56in a manner that could be measured. Carl Jung actually invented the notion but Isaac figured out how to measure
01:02it which is a big deal and he also noted that there was another important personality dimension, neuroticism which is
01:08the tendency towards negative emotion and he got that right too because that actually happened to be the case and
01:13he figured out how to measure it.
01:14So Isaac was the first person who really established conceptually the fact that our two fundamental, we have two fundamental
01:23emotional systems, one positive and one negative, that they weren't, 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.
01:37They smile a lot. They laugh a lot. They tell a lot of jokes. They like to party. They always
01:41like to be around people. That's an extroverted person.
01:46And they can also be unhappy, worried, anxious, depressed, frustrated, disappointed. I mean living with someone like that is quite
01:53a trip because they're just all over the place.
01:56But there are people like that because you can be high in negative emotion and you can be high in
02:00positive emotion or low in both or whatever.
02:02And it's useful to know that. It's useful to know that about your partner and about the people around you.
02:08And if you are interested in this sort of thing, by the way, I have a personality test online at
02:15understandmyself.com and you can go there and it takes you about 15 minutes.
02:20And it gives you five dimensions of personality, extroversion, neuroticism, that's positive and negative emotion, agreeableness, which is like a,
02:30it's probably the maternal instinct dimension.
02:33But it, but at least it's the variance between compassion and competitive aggression. It's something like that and that looks
02:40like a continuum.
02:41And there's another dimension which is trait conscientiousness, which is integrity and, 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.
02:58And so you can go there and find out how you compare to other people. And that's kind of interesting
03:03and useful because it's kind of useful to know who you are and to, to know that that's actually who
03:09you are.
03:10You know, that, that you have a nature and some, some of that stuff's movable, but it's not as movable
03:14as you think.
03:15And the farther you want to move it, the harder it is to move. Like you can take an introvert.
03:20Um, you know, you're an introvert. If you're, if when you're around people, you get exhausted by it and you
03:25have 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
03:34for you, you know? Um, and that's a good thing to know because if you're an introvert, why go be
03:40a salesperson and be miserable?
03:42Do some, do something where you can spend time alone and not be miserable, but that's better. You might as
03:48well match your occupation to your temperament rather than the other way around.
03:52Now, you know, you can take an introvert. Um, I've, I've worked with lots of introverts who, who say had
03:58made pretty good progress in their careers and they were at a point where they had to do a lot
04:03of social networking, you know, and otherwise they were going to hit a plateau in their career.
04:07And they could be taught the skills of extroversion sort of one at a time rather painfully. So they could
04:16learn them, they could accrue the skills and that would broaden their personality outward into the say extroverted end of
04:22the continuum, but it didn't make them extroverts.
04:25And so they were still temperamentally introverts. And so, you know, if you're a neurotic person, high negative emotion, you
04:32can, you can learn to regulate your anxiety and so forth.
04:34And, and, and, and, and, but you hit a point of diminishing returns and, and it's, and it's difficult, it's
04:42effortful. So anyways, back to Isaac and then back to Jeffrey Gray.
04:48So Isaac identified extroversion and introversion or extroversion and neuroticism. And that's going to be very important in a minute.
04:54And Gray, um, elaborated Isaac's theories to a large degree, but he did that neurologically.
05:02He, he was a, he was a master of the animal experimental literature. And a lot of that's being phased
05:08out of universities because the regulations for animal, uh, experimentation have become so onerous and difficult
05:16that it's much easier for beginning scientists just not to bother. And that's a real catastrophe because we've learned a
05:25lot 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
05:36used to study human beings and an unbelievable amount by studying animals.
05:42And you might think rats in particular, and you might think, well, you know, rats, why they're not much like
05:49human beings, you know, but, but that's wrong. Um, um, you share, I don't know what it is, 98.5
05:57% of your genetic structure with rats. Some of you probably more than that.
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