Windows of the soul

I find the science of personality fascinating, not least because we're only in the earliest stages of any kind of comprehensive understanding.  What makes human beings act the way they do is certainly some kind of mix between genetics (nature) and environment (nurture), but in what proportion, and to what extent the two influence each other, are still mysteries.

The situation isn't helped much by "type tests," the best-known of which is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  Research has conclusively demonstrated that the MBTI is unreliable -- the same person at different times can end up with entirely different results -- meaning that as a psychiatric tool, it's fairly useless.

Of course, maybe I'm only saying that because I'm an INTP.

So it's not surprising that psychologists and neuroscientists are eager to find more reliable ways to measure personality, especially with respect to the "Big Five" traits (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience).  And they may have gotten an unexpected leg up with some recent research indicating that where you fall along those five spectra can be given away by your involuntary eye movements.

In their paper, "Eye Movements During Everyday Behavior Predict Personality Traits," which appeared earlier this year in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers Sabrina Hoppe (of the University of Stuttgart), Tobias Loetscher (of the University of South Australia), Stephanie A. Morey (of Flinders University), and Andreas Bulling (of the Max Planck Institute) found something fascinating; when a headset kept track of the eye movements of forty-two test subjects as they went about their daily business, an artificial-intelligence program could determine where they ranked on various personality scales with astonishing accuracy.

The authors write:

One key contribution of our work is to demonstrate, for the first time, that an individual's level of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and perceptual curiosity can be predicted only from eye movements recorded during an everyday task.  This finding is important for bridging between tightly controlled laboratory studies and the study of natural eye movements in unconstrained real-world environments...  The proposed machine learning approach was particularly successful in predicting levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and perceptual curiosity.  It therefore corroborates previous laboratory-based studies that have shown a link between personality traits and eye movement characteristics. 

[O]ur work... shed[s] additional light on the close link between personality traits and an individual's eye movements.  Thanks to the machine learning approach, we could automatically analyze a large set of eye movement characteristics and rank them by their importance for personality trait prediction.  Going beyond characteristics investigated in earlier works, this approach also allowed us to identify new links between previously under-investigated eye movement characteristics and personality traits.  This was possible because, unlike classical analysis approaches, the proposed machine learning method does not rely on a priori hypotheses regarding the importance of individual eye movement characteristics... 

[I]mproved theoretical understanding will assist the emerging interdisciplinary research field of social signal processing, toward development of systems that can recognize and interpret human social signals. 

Such knowledge of human non-verbal behavior might also be transferred to socially interactive robots, designed to exhibit human-like behavior.  These systems might ultimately interact with humans in a more natural and socially acceptable way, thereby becoming more efficient and flexible.

Which is absolutely fascinating, and of course raises the question of why my neuroticism and introversion would affect the tiny, involuntary movements of my eyes, but answering that was beyond the scope of this study.  Of course, we already knew that the small, back-and-forth movements of the eyes called microsaccades can give you information about what a person is thinking.  A highly amusing experiment a few years ago monitored test subjects in a crowded pub with head-mounted cameras.  The only instructions were that the person should try to keep focused on the person next to them, with whom they were having a discussion.

Well, a few minutes in, the researchers sent in a gorgeous, scantily-clad individual of the test subject's preferred gender to walk by, and even when the subject made a heroic effort not to look, the microsaccades gave him/her away.  While they were focused on the person they were talking to, their microsaccades were going, "Oh dear god that person is drop-dead sexy look that way look that way LOOK THAT WAY."

So the Hoppe et al. study is a fascinating refinement of what our eyes give away about us.  It does make me wonder, however, how this could be used to reveal information the individual would prefer not to reveal.  If an AI program can successfully determine a person's personality from nothing more than eye movements, it's another potential blow to privacy -- however astonishing the results may be to people who, like me, are fascinated with the intricacies of the human brain.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Type tests, weird verbiage, and Pod'Lair

It seems like lately, self-inquiry tests are all the rage.

They range from the banal ("What Harry Potter character are you?"  "What rock star are you?"  "What Joss Whedon character are you?") to the tried and true (the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still really popular) to the absurd (the various sorts of astrology).  And on the face of it, there's nothing wrong with the urge to find out more about what makes you tick.  After all, the legend "Gnothi Seauton" (Know Yourself) was inscribed on the Temple of Delphi over 2,500 years ago, and those Greek philosophers were no slouches in the wisdom department.

[image courtesy of photographer Thomas Hawk and the Wikimedia Commons]

Still, some of them seem to be making unduly heavy weather out of the whole thing, and I ran into an example of this just the other day.  Called "Pod'Lair," for no reason I could find, it is described as follows:

Pod'Lair methodology reads a person's innate nature, what we call their Mojo, with an accuracy never before possible, which allows humans to know themselves in truly unprecedented ways, ending the debate on whether or not people have qualia and what it involves...

Once you understand the basics of Pod'Lair theory, and you've begun to see the Mojo phenomenon for yourself, it improves your understanding of and interaction with every facet of your life, including: education, career, relationships, community, politics, spirituality...basically all of existence.

Well, naturally, I was curious about what my Mojo was, even though it's really hard for me to take anything with the name "Mojo" particularly seriously.  And it required that I send in a ten-minute video of myself, which I wasn't going to do.  The whole thing apparently hinges on subtle facial movement cues that are supposedly indicators of personality types, a bit like Bandler & Grinder's neurolinguistic programming (which honesty compels me to mention has also been flagged as having many of the characteristics of pseudoscience).  So I went to the "About Us" page, where I read passages like the following:

The Mojo Dojo Pathway is the Universal Pathway for the Language of Mojo. This pathway is focused on Mojo Reading of yourself and others, in order to understand how Mojos interact with one another in Social Alchemy. This is the objective study of Mojo, as it applies to the relationships within the Human Matrix.

Well, I think I'm at least above average at reading comprehension, and while reading a lot of the stuff on this site I was wearing a perplexed expression, my head tilted a little, rather like my dog does when I try to explain something complex and difficult to him, like why he shouldn't try to hump the cat.  Unfortunately, unlike my dog, I wasn't able just to wag my tail and forget about it all.  Some sort of perverse drive kept me working my way through this website:

It is essential to know how to rein in your top two Powers. Modulation causes stress on the system, which is Keening. The individual Mojos begin to have shut-down mechanisms designed for self-protection and energy conservation. These are healthy to a point, but over the long term they can shut the system down in a way that is damaging, temporarily or permanently, which is known as Stress Lock.

No, really, I shouldn't read any more, I really think that's...

You can generate energy from within, but as you generate that energy, it encounters the Bubble of your home and responds to it. Much like a creature in the womb reaches out consciously to get nutrients, it needs to be a conducive womb for the creature to get what it needs. This sounds simpler than it is because in many ways humans have stepped away from their Bubble being an essential part of their harmonious existence, having been told what to do by Bubbles that are already in place.

I mean, I have other things to do this morning, and it's not necessary that I...

Spirit Forms refers to the Unconscious Genius that every human has. The unconscious portions of the psyche often present themselves as autonomous entities that when dialogued with improves a human's understanding and performance in any endeavor, be it artistic, scientific, athletic, etc. The Language of Spirit Forms includes the Pathways of Spirit Ambassador (Universal Pathway) and Temple of Spirits (Personal Pathway).

Merciful heavens, please stop...

Humanity is within Gaia, Gaia is within the Cosmos, the Cosmos is within Natural Law, and this all came to be where we are now. To attempt to tell the Human Collective, Gaia, Cosmos, and everything above it what to do is the height of arrogance.

OKAY.  Thank you very much.  So anyway, after I spent way more time trying to read this stuff than I should have, and coming away with the understanding that Humans Are Heroic Love And Cosmic Energy, or something, I did a little digging and found out that evidently some people who are cognitive psychologists think there might actually be some legitimacy to the whole thing (read one interesting thread here, where Pod'Lair is considered seriously along with MBTI and neurolinguistic programming theory).

What strikes me, though, is the question of how a skeptic, with a reasonable background in human neurology, could decide if there's anything to this at all from the outside -- the writing is so dense, and (frankly) so mixed up with woo-woo verbiage, that it's impossible for me to tell.  Even one indicator that the whole thing had been tested against other sorts of psychological assessments, and found to have value, would have made a difference.  Instead, under "Evidence," we're just given some vague hand-waving arguments coupled with a much longer section about why Jung, Maslow, MBTI, typology, and astrology (!) are all wrong, and that's supposed to be enough to go on.

Oh, and we're also given descriptions of the 32 basic Mojo types, including "Xyy'nai," which "engage the dynamics of human communities through interpersonal connection, social awareness, and shepherding, creating an attentive and diplomatic character." We are also told that example "Xyy'nais" are Barack Obama and Miley Cyrus.

Because those two clearly have so much in common.

Now, mind you, it's not that I think that there's anything wrong with pursuing self-knowledge. Far from it.   It's more that I have the sense that any test that purports to divide all of humanity into a small number of classes based upon artificial distinctions is doomed to failure.  And I also wonder if any of these type tests -- be it MBTI, Pod'Lair, or "What Dr. Who Character Are You?" -- is telling us anything about ourselves that we couldn't have figured out with an hour's honest self-reflection.

But being an inquisitive sort, I am tempted to send in a video.  I'd like to see what they'd make of my rather unfortunate face.  And to anyone who goes to the Pod'Lair site (which I linked above), and decides to participate -- do come back here and post the results.  Like I said before: there's nothing like actual results to support a conjecture.  And even if the evaluation of its accuracy would have to come from one's impression of oneself, it'd be interesting to see whether the whole thing has any basis in reality.