CT and Brain Imaging; My Brain Lab Session with Dario Nardi

[Anonymous]

I know there is already a lot of topics that people are talking about here, but I wanted to add on more to the discussion and one in which I hope leads to greater understanding. I had a brain imaging session with Dario Nardi in May of this year and wanted to give my thoughts on it in relation to CT. The main conclusion I had was that Nardi’s report on my brain was able to capture a quality of my psyche that I thought CT had not captured. There is a lot of information, so I’ll try to be succinct.
One thing to point out first, however, is that Nardi is still working with self-typing and MBTI preferences. I didn’t tell him what my cognitive types (according to CT) was until later at the end of the session. He approached the subject of CT by saying that appreciates the work being done in other domains, but brushing it off by saying that it has a “one-sided” interpretation and that it needs to “grow” to see its one-sidedness in order to be integrated with all the work that has been done in typology so far.
Based on my report, however, he concluded that my brain activity was similar to others who had typed themselves as INFP or similar NF type. And that doesn’t seem far off from what I would have typed myself If I were still under the MBTI paradigm (I see myself as half T and half F in preference). This is the reason I also put myself under F ego in my CT profile.
Anyway, the reason he sees my brain activity as belonging to an F preference was because of the activity/development/and wiring of certain brain regions. My most developed/habitual (“show development from long term habit”) brain regions I used, based on the brain lab session, where T5, T3, T4, F8, F7, T6 as shown here in the report:

The top, most developed/habitual region (T5) and (T4) captures my experience fully: That I do find myself being polite, open and kind around people, mirroring their behavior (region F7) and listening intently to them, picking up emotion and intent (leading to being awkward and embarrassed), to me this sounds a lot like Fe. Region (F7) also shows that I “empathize” with people who are misunderstood, people who are ostracized and shamed by society. I do put myself in other people’s “shoes” and try to see different perspectives, not just as a secondary effect in my mind, but constantly, especially with these debates/arguments about “social justice.”
Obviously, I also see the development of the region (T6) as coming from my developed Ni.
Where I see evidence of my Ti -dominance, according to CT, is perhaps in the region (T3) where preciseness of words/terms matters, but not much else.
However, there is another section of the report which gives me my top “favorite” regions to use, the ones I used the most during the session, meaning the ones that give my brain the most satisfaction/rewards and “show effort, not skill.” These were the brain regions Fp2, Fz, F8, F4, T5, T4 as shown here from the report:

This part obviously also captures another part of my psyche, the curious explorer (Fp2) region which could be seen a general P thing (both Se and Ni). The inductive scholar (Fz) which sounds like Ni and Ti (may “confuse theories with facts” is something I do all the time) And “Witty Classifier” (F4) sound like Ti too. Region (F8) “grounded believer” sounds like Fi to me though, and there are beliefs I think are “true” regardless of context, like the importance of truth and how the real, cold hard  truth can help people lol
Here is a picture of my brain networked by how often certain regions fire together (it means there is more wiring there). The red indicates strong links (more firing at the same time, per second), and the black links, medium strong (less firing, half as fast as the red) and the yellow links means “potential development,” meaning if I were to stop and think more, these links would activate and “contribute”. Generally, more wiring on the left means more "analytical", more wiring on the right means more "holistic". Which I supposed could be seen as left wiring is J development and right wiring as P development.

I would say that the brain imaging results captures a lot more about my psyche than just my “cognitive type” assessment. I have always been torn between Fi and Ti as part of my psyche, and I relate to some parts of Fi in the CT behavioral profile (but even more to Fe profile since it has been written, probably more than Ti and Fi). I also “relate” to Ti profile too, but not in the way is seen as this logical, deductive process as seems to be the case with some Ti-doms here.
If cognitive functions are networks of brain regions/processes firing together, I think we can see evidence of that here. If there was more of this data with their properly typed “cognitive type” and development levels, we would be able to see the “networks” and pattern of the functions themselves. I hope if any of you get to have an imaging session with Nardi, that you would post the results to start analyzing this data. I myself am interested in gathering data and I hope to take some classes in neuroscience in the near future to be able to replicate (enhance) Nardi’s brain imaging protocol to properly typed people in CT paradigm.
I will include the full report here, which also includes every brain region and description that Nardi records activity for. That includes some brain regions that are so reminiscent of our typical ideas of cognitive functions, like region (F3) “Deductive Analyst” which primarily deals with following a chain reasoning, or region (FC6) “Character Adept” which deals with “getting comfortable” with emotional complexity, naming shades of feeling, and monitoring one’s own and other’s feelings. Or region (P3) “Tactical Identifier” which deals with integrating vision with movement, skillfully moving and throwing while tracking other’s moves.
Full Report Here.

[Sander]

@scientiam Thanks for sharing!
Jung stressed the need to individuate functions, and it seems like both Ti and Fi emerge from Ji. They both infer the truth (the text that connects the context with the pretext). Yet Ti seems to start with the context, while Fi starts with the pretext.
This explains why personality divisions follow normal distributions (not bimodal). Also see Pe/Pi/Ji/Je correspond to Big Five clusters

[GreenCoyote]

I like how he basically brushes off CT yet its very possible that self typing of his subjects is inaccurate as he lets them pick their types.
He possibly has some intellectual elitism going on.
But this is all interesting information none the less. My friend right now types as an INFP usually but once tested as an ISTP when taking the test based off of herself at work. So its possible a lot of ISTPs actually type as INFPs on typical MBTI tests. Im sure many istps relate to being imaginative and having a more emotionally empathetic experience than how MBTI portrays Logical types
 
With that said the jury is still out on my friends type but im making her get a vultology report so we will see what she ends up being in the CT system.

[EpicEntity]

CT will show can track down what you look like in least resistant flow and find complementary partners. Brain Imaging  seems to be showing you your would be strengths with precision greater than Clinton strength. The CT and BI could make in interesting integration with more to be gain than any other pairing of typologies.

[Author]

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