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which involved limiting their contact with a patient to five minutes. This was followed
by detailed discussion of everything we’d seen and heard. I’d ask them to predict
what we’d find in the many pages of personal interviews and nurses observations in
the clinic chart. The student psychiatrists with the most street smarts, called
emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, were particularly quick at shadowing and
thus predicting the patient’s global dynamical pattern.

Do personality patterns exist? Evidence from biometric studies of the
hereditary aspects of personality style in animals and humans suggest that
relatively few global component properties underlie a variety of complicated-looking
manifestations of behavioral style. Primary colors are the source of all hues.
Harvard psychologist, Jerome Hagen, has reviewed the history of this idea in his
book, Galen’s Prophecy. While there are differences among personality research
programs, almost all rating scale and questionnaire-based studies result in clusters
of traits that reflect statistically associated properties which when taken together are
called temperament. This idea is close to what we mean by personality. These
relatively few response clusters are given descriptive names such as introversion,
extroversion, neuroticism, impulsivity, sociability, task persistence and tolerance of
ambiguity. As defined by psychological inventories, studies of families show that
these styles are heritable in the range of 60%.

Hans Eysenck, in over four decades of work and more than 5000 published
papers from London’s Maudsley Hospital, derived common global factors of
personality using questionnaires. The best known was called the Eysenck
Personality Inventory. His studies resulted in evidence for only a few fundamental
behavioral axes, behavioral manifolds, which describe extremal properties of
personality types analogous to stable and unstable manifolds: introversion-
extroversion, shyness-sociability, low and high activity level and emotional
constriction versus impulsivity.

To make the issue of personality as dynamical system more realistically
complex, we can call on some examples of the rich history of behavioral genetic
studies using animals such as the mouse. They can be selectively bred for
underlying personality factors, such as dominance, fear, aggression or exploratory

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