Mapping Conative Traits to Brain Structures

I have to apologize for this one. It deals with connecting the ideas between two books but I only have the time and energy to provide a few sentences on each book. The books are The Brains of Men and Machines, by Ernest W. Kent, 1981 and The Conative Connection, Uncovering the Link between Who You Are and How You Perform, by Kathy Kolbe, 1990.

Kent's book is supposed to be a book to help artificial intelligence researchers build better artificial intelligence. Kent himself is a brain scientist. Because the purpose of the book is not to describe the brain with rigor but to provide a practical source of ideas for artificial intelligence, Kent creates a mixture of known facts, probable facts, and mere speculations to build a complete model of the human brain. The difference between facts and speculations are clearly delineated in the text. The result is a fantastic model of the brain. It is much better than anything else I've ever read.

Kolbe's book describes a quality of the brain she defines as "conation." "Conation" is an archaic word that Kolbe has revived. In the Middle Ages, the mind was seen as having three components: conation, or will; emotion; and reason. Kolbe points out that we have forgotten about the conation part.

Kolbe says there are four flavors of conation, Fact Finder, Follow-Thru, Quick Start, and Implementer---the four action modes. If one considers the four types of conation as analogous to the four suits of a bridge hand, we can see that Kolbe is not saying that there are four types of people. Rather, she says each person has 20 conation points and a rating from 1 to 10 for each of the four types of conation. As with a bridge hand, some hands are heavily weighted in one suit, such as Hearts. Likewise, some people have 10 conation points, half of their entire allotment, in one of the four action modes, such as Quick Start.

On the other hand, in bridge there is such a thing as a No Trump hand, an even distribution. Likewise, there are people who have 5 conation points for each action mode.

At this point, I have to say that I read about psychology extensively for many years as part of my quest for personal growth. However, I eventually rejected the entire field. It just seemed to me that the information there was too unreliable to be useful. In general, I found that psychological theories worked sometimes and didn't work at other times. To resort to recursion, a terrible thing to do really, I think a field like psychology can be useful to a person with a lot of Follow Thru, but not to myself, being that I am very short on Follow Thru. I found that I preferred to use my common sense than to use psychological theories.

However, Kolbe's Conation theory is the single exception I have observed. It is the only psychological theory I have seen that seems to have 100% accuracy.

Here's my idea. It seems to me that each of Kolbe's action modes centers on a different part or parts of the brain. For Implementers; people who relate directly to things and tend toward careers like athletics, being a mechanic, etc.; the key parts of the brain would be the basal ganglia, the motor cortex, and the cerebellum. For Fact Finders; which I see is people who like to read, people who like history, judges, that kind of thing; the key part of the brain would be the cerebral cortex.

For Quick Starts, people who are creative and tend to challenge the status quo, I think the thalamus is the key part of the brain. For Follow Thrus; people who tend to see the forest rather than the trees and can often be planners, designers, or pattern-makers; I think the limbic system and the pre-frontal lobe are the key parts of the brain.

Obviously, I understand that everyone uses all the parts.

My assignment of limbic system and pre-frontal lobe to Follow Thrus is based on my "layer cake" view of the brain. First, you have to look at the brain as having only four parts (obviously a simplification.) The parts are: the thalamus, limbic system, the cerebral cortex, and the prefrontal lobe. At this point, I must mention that the limbic system does not seem to be a term that is used anymore. I'm speaking of a grouping of structures, the largest of which is the amygdyla. The hypothalamus is the most famous of the structures in limbic system.

I labeled the four parts of the brain as follows. The thalamus is the instinctual part, which I also call (despite the gross inaccuracy of the term) the reptile part. The limbic system is the emotional part, which I'll also call the mammal part (again apologies for the total inaccuracy). The cerebral cortex is the intellectual, or human part (also innaccurate). The pre-frontal lobe, I call the "third eye," meaning the advanced, new part of the brain.

Here is the layer cake idea. Odd numbered layers are logically exclusive. This would be the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. They are analytical. They work by the dictum, A and not-A cannot both be true.

Even-numbered layers are synthetic. This would be the limbic system and the prefrontal lobe. They can comfortably include contradictory ideas, they encompass logical contradictions.