Cognitive Priorities: How Attention Shapes Who You Are A neurotypological look at sensitivity, dopamine, and the reward architecture of personality. Why do some people instantly notice facial expressions while others notice the literal content of speech? Why do certain minds chase novelty while others crave completion? I used to believe that humans were largely born as a blank slate for experience to inscribe upon. I’m personally uncomfortable with the ideas of pre-determination, genetic disposition, inevitability, and destiny. Why? Because I personally detest a sense of helplessness – a huge theme in my own childhood which was riddled with illnesses. Empowerment has become my middle name. I strive to understand things deeply because it gives me more power to make the changes I wish to make. Yet all of my deep research has led me to understand that a tremendous amount of who we are truly is inborn. As someone who used to believe that who we become was 90% nurture and 10% nature, I’m a ...
Cognitive Functions; An Introduction If Carl Jung had been alive today, he might have rolled his eyes at how his ideas have morphed into internet quizzes and personality memes. Let’s explore how he got from, “I observe people’s minds,” to “eight cognitive functions.” Jung published Psychological Types in 1921, in German ( Psychologische Typen ), in which he proposed that humans differ by how they orient to the world (extraversion/introversion) and how they favor perceiving (observing) versus judging (allocating preferences). His original conception had just four “psychic functions” (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition), each of which could be turned inward or outward. Over the decades, later thinkers unpacked that into what we now call “eight cognitive functions,” a more granular taxonomy built on Jung’s scaffolding. Because Jung wrote in German, his words are slippery. The German Empfinden (feeling/sensation) and Empfindung (sensation or feeling) blur in translation; Ansch...