Egocentric Typology Mapping

Disclaimer: This text is not based on true academic research. It reflects a set of ideas I played around with during a nine month period extending from May 2013 to February 2014.
L.A. 2/14/14 (THW)

Crudely speaking, we (humans) are little more but brain and gut. The brain helps us survive and prosper, and the gut is needed for the energy intake. Call it controlled chemistry. Agreed? Probably not, but we cannot say much of general value without going into great details with regard to chemistry, biology, psychology and physics. Even so, we are going to discuss the human brain functions in this blog, and the word guts will also show up, albeit with a different meaning than in the above. Since I am neither a psychologist nor a physiologist, I cannot contribute to any of the trained professions in this field, but I think it is quite uncontroversial to say that the brain works upon different time scales. These time scales I will refer to as heart, guts, head, hands and limbs. Let me quickly explain how and why:

In your innermost being you are of a certain basic type. You can be e.g. competitive, bold, lazy, whimsical, etc. This being of yours I call the heart. It is always with you, and it steers your first reactions when new or old situations occur. These immediate reactions are frequently established in a fraction of a second. Let's be pragmatic and say one second.
At the second level, you start to react with a different set of physiological reactions. You can be emotional, sceptical, euphoric, fanciful, etc. This feeling of yours I call the guts. It is also with you all the time, and it typically makes you feel good or bad about a particular situation. The time scale, I would say, is of the order of one hundred seconds.
At the third level, you start to think. This is where your faculties come in. We would perhaps say this is the brain function, but since we are talking time scales here, we might as well use another word. This consciousness of yours I call the head. At this level, you have time to conceive what is going on, to contemplate about it and to make up your opinions. Let's give ourselves ten thousand seconds, or about three hours, to act as intelligent human beings on this level.
At the fourth level, you will start doing things. We might say that you are establishing a behavioural pattern for doing practical work. This doing of yours I call the hands. Think about your first days in a new job. How long did it take before you were able to do something with a certain degree of confidence? The building structure was new and so was the organisation, the colleagues were also new and even so the professional language. I would say, it takes another two decades of time, which means one million seconds, or about two weeks, to achieve the physical confidence required.
On the fifth, and last level, you are establishing your routines. Some people do not function without jogging ten miles a day, while other people must have their morning coffee, still others need to chat with their cyber friends, and so on. This acting of yours I call the limbs. It is the part of yourself that people see most of the time and that make up their (first) impression about you. You have probably understood my time scale arguments by now, so then I say this takes one hundred million seconds or about three years; hence, you are not at all surprised.

Let's start the journey by carefully selecting five nouns describing your heart, guts, head, hands, and limbs. It won't be easy, and you may need to iterate a few times until the description fits you. Maybe you will also need the help of a friend, or two, acting as an eye-opener to yourself. Secondly, you have to pick five adjectives for narrowing in the meaning of the nouns (one adjective for each noun). At this point, it is hard to continue the description without the help of a graphical device which lets us visualise the entire process. My attempt in making something of this kind is shown in the figure below.

I call it the eMap which stands for ego-map or, more precisely, egocentric typology mapping. The word typology is maybe a little misleading and it should perhaps have been replaced by personality, but, if restricted to a limited set of descriptive terms, I bet there is a good correlation between the contents of the eMap and e.g. Jung's typology system. Now, by egocentric, I literally mean you-in-the-centre. Not that you are selfish or egoistic or any of that kind. The map puts you in the middle of two concentric circles. The five nouns are systematically arranged in the inner circle, and the five adjectives are similarly attached to the outer circle. See how the mapping until this point has been devised solely to render your inside-out behaviour. Notice then, how the diagram has room for another set of five attributes which we have not mentioned yet! These are placed in-between the adjectives forming cross-overs that can be used in describing your state(s) of action. By judiciously selecting this second set of adjectives, we can reverse the interpretation order and make a description of what other people (might) see of you - based on your physical tendencies. These thoughts are concluding my ideas.

Whom I am (eMap)

The eMap reading instructions:

The eMap is designed such that it can be read radially, from the inward to the outward, and also along the two concentric circles, in two different directions:

Read the inner circle counterclockwise, and it will unveil your inner states in terms of increasing time scales (bluish colour).
Read the outer circle clockwise, and it will tell you what other people will see of you based on your physical behaviour (reddish colour).

A person will never understand your innermost state without first getting used to, and filtering out, your physical behaviour. I think it is wrong to assume there is a one-to-one correspondence between the interior and the exterior. Humans are a little more complicated than that. To give an illustration on how the actual diagram may look, I'll share one of the eMaps with you (see the next figure).

The diagram does not reveal any private secrets, so I feel comfortable about sharing it with the rest of the world. Now, let's try to interprete it! Even though I know the person very well, it is quite difficult to pin-point exactly what other people see. So, in the transcript below I have summarised in words what I think other people would (might) perceive of that person. The comments (in the parentheses) are mine entirely; and therefore, are not explained in the diagram.

An eMap transliteration example:

He is a vital guy who likes to be on the move (walk, stroll, hike, roam). He is romantic, and he sees the beauty wherever he travels (architecture, gardens, landscape). He is a handy-man, and he explores the world through his hands (landscaping, carpentry, handcraft). He is quite inventive in his doings. When given a chance, he is not only empirical but also scientific in his methods. He is a renaissance-man who believes that the unity of hand and mind is unique to the human being. He is also a dreamer who likes to play around with new ideas, but his dreams can take a serious or idealistic form (of a better world). This makes him wistful at times, although he, by instinct, will use humour as his first reaction.

Note: The high-lighted text differs somewhat from the eMap but the semantics is the same. The intention was to make the text free flowing.

THW (eMap)

Notice how this story, about an unknown man, unwinds from a restricted set of fifteen words. The eMap does not tell the whole story, but it helps addressing the high-lighted words to a standard set of type functions. This procedure is very different from matching your personality to a set of prescribed profiles. With the eMap you are free to describe yourself in the terms of a given set of functions. However, the description will of course vary over one's lifetime, maybe in relation to the seven stages of a man's life (ref: Shakespeare's Jaques in Act II Scene VII)?

OK, this is all fun but, is it useful beyond one's amusement? For those who are interested, I will now make an attempt to justify the eMap. For instance, based on the eMap above, I can tell right away that the person is not a good business manager. How come? Well, honestly speaking, neither a humorous romantic wayfarer nor a holistic dreamer having opinions about science and handcraft should take the position of a CEO anywhere. He simply has the wrong attitude. But there is much more to the eMap than this simple fact.

Searching for "head heart gut" on the internet returns millions of hits. Among the hits are many references to books like: Head, Heart and Guts: How the World's Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders by David L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo and Stephen Rhinesmith (May 10, 2006), and to Head Versus Heart - and Our Gut Reactions: The 21st Century Enneagram by Michael Hampson and Rowan Williams (Jan 17, 2005), etc.

You'll also find references to Carl Jung's personality type analysis, to the "enneagram" typology introduced by Oscar Ichazo, to MBTI, and to much, much more. They all have concepts in common - mutually as well as with my way of thinking. For instance, most people seem to agree on the importance of: Fixation (head), passion (heart) and instincts (gut). However, there are comparatively few people who also take into account the extremities of the body, and that I find puzzling. Firstly, it is the physical behaviour we notice immediately when we meet people. Secondly, most of our memory "sits in our hands", so to say. To accept the last statement, try to explain in words how you tie your shoe laces, or how a zip fastener works, and you will see what I mean. I sincerely think that our physical behaviour is very important for the understanding of what is hidden "under the hood". For the reasons mentioned above, I find it deficient not to include "hands" and "limbs" in an applied typology system of any kind - be it mine or a truly scientific one.