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 true convert, now knowing that genetics make up at least half of who we become. Let me explain why and how this works.
Sensitivity Genes
I’m going to use the example of sensitivity because it is the most striking: there are many genes that determine what stimuli we’ll be sensitive to. Some of these genes, such as the serotonin transporter gene, (often called SERT) have become famous. It was originally discovered for its (now debated) role in depression; later its role in resilience was discovered. This one gene, which regulates serotonin reuptake, was thought to be the penultimate determinant of whether one was a “highly sensitive person.” But SERT is just the tip of an iceberg in thousands of genes which affect how we process incoming sensory information and how we rebound from stressors.
Sensitivity, as a broad concept, is key to understanding human personality – and societal roles. Those of us who are less sensitive become warrior archetypes – those who can be stoic and strong in the face of adversity. Those with medium sensitivity can act as bridges, mediators, and healers. Those with high sensitivity become hermits, sages, and shamans. While being more sensitive doesn’t guarantee more scholastic intelligence by any means, many top performers appear more sensitive than average, and sensitive individuals often benefit more from supportive environments and therapy.
However, sensitivity isn’t as simple as “low” or “high” because, as I already alluded to, there are thousands of genes which pertain to the thousands of ways to be sensitive. How sensitive you are at the biological level relates to things like serotonin and histamine production. How sensitive you are at the psychological level can relate to things like anxiety and gratitude. Sensitivity at the mental level can contribute to genius or excessive distraction. Sensitivity at the sensory level can mean being paralyzed by loud noises or becoming a musical genius.
Even something as simple as “sensitive to sensations” can be broken up into many categories: texture, temperature, taste, proprioception, and even our sense of balance. All of these have genetic influences – and all of these can be trained to function better. There’s a little bit of predetermination, but I’ve found that there is more empowerment in acknowledging what we started with and where we are. For example, trying to pretend you’re not sensitive to something and bulldozing that sensitivity to try to do something which is high-stress for you will ultimately backfire, turning into burnout. Our sensitivities are literally our genetic gifts and do better being trained and embraced than repressed.
Gut & Personality Expression
Our own genetics are only part of the inborn picture, however. Our microbiome has its own set of genetics which contribute heavily to how we develop. Most of our serotonin and much of our other neurotransmitter production comes from our gut. If our inner rain-forest was clear-cut by antibiotics or stunted from the beginning by a cesarean birth, then we might have difficulty rebounding from tough situations (low serotonin), or reading faces (altered vasopressin signaling), and may be more likely to identify as neurodivergent.
The empowering news is that regardless of your predispositions, you can grow your nearly-infinite plastic brain. But the more you know about the dispositions that genes, trauma, microbiome and environment have saddled you with, the more informed your decisions may be.
Unconscious Elemental Priorities
Our brains and bodies take the path of least resistance by default, meaning our inborn sensitivities bias us toward unconscious priorities. I call these your cognitive priorities which can be plotted on your cognitive priority map. Unconscious priorities create an underlying value system which directs your attentional control – to borrow the term from neuroscience. And here’s the thing: you become what you pay attention to.
Jung originally glimpsed how our underlying “attitudes” created personalities. He divided up different skills into groups that pertained to what typologists today call cognitive functions. However, I’m here to bring you a revelation in how we think about cognitive functions – they’re not functions at all.
What we’ve been calling cognitive “functions” are actually priorities of attention – deep patterns in how the mind allocates focus. These priorities determine which information streams feel rewarding, which are ignored, and which are stressful to maintain. Over time, repeated attentional patterns sculpt both neural connectivity and skill development. What we call “type” is simply your brain’s enduring reward architecture for attention.
Another way to frame this is as an emergent system. An emergent system is any system which comes about through a complex set of factors (not just one) and then self-reinforces. Personalities – including neurodivergent aspects of them as well as Jungian archetypes – are emergent systems.
Personality is an Emergent System
Your neurotype, as a whole, is an emergent system. This means that exerting force on one part of the system doesn’t dismantle it. You don’t become a whole new person just because you started an exercise routine. Yes, you might feel very different because of the higher daily release of endorphins, but ultimately, your internal priority map is the same.
Your cognitive priority map does evolve and grow over time, but the overall shape of it remains constant, and this is because unconscious priorities feed skill development, and skill development, in turn, feeds unconscious priorities. This works at a profoundly elemental level.
If, for example, you have inborn talent regarding facial recognition and face-reading, then you will possess information which others lack. This gives you a bias, relative to other people without this talent, toward noticing faces and utilizing that information. From there, due to a higher influx of face-related information to work with, you develop skills on top of this. This is happening even as a baby, a toddler, and a young child. You gravitate toward the information available to you: faces. You learn to manipulate that information. The skill and the unconscious priority ping off of one another again, and again, and again, until you’re light-years ahead of others without that inborn talent. And all of this is happening unconsciously, invisibly, and manifesting simply as “a very social child.”
Attentional Control
Attentional control is not a single brain area. It’s a coalition of networks – notably the frontoparietal, cingulo-opercular, and salience networks – all modulated by neuromodulators like dopamine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine.
✨ Dopamine signals reward prediction and motivation. (What was worth noticing last time is likely worth noticing again!)
✨ Norepinephrine governs arousal and focus stability.
✨ Acetylcholine enhances sensory precision and top-down expectation.
Your unique pattern of dopamine release – when and where it fires during perception and discernment – forms a reinforcement loop that shapes your attentional priorities. In other words, your archetype is the pattern of what your brain rewards you for noticing.
Because dopamine strengthens whichever networks were active when it spiked, the mind gradually automates its rewarded patterns.
While studies in this direction are limited, researcher Dario Nardi has demonstrated that different cognitive types exhibit distinct electrical patterns of neocortical activity under various tasks. His electroencephalography (EEG) experiments in the typology field have measured dynamic, surface-level brainwave patterns while people engaged in conversations, creative tasks, and introspection. His findings suggest that keystone priorities manifest as a unique style of attentional engagement.
For example, Nardi found that those with external sensory perceptions (Se) as a keystone priority demonstrate more isolated brain engagement and an ability to swap region engagement very rapidly in real time. Their opposites, those with internal abstractions (Ni) as a keystone priority demonstrate a more “zen-like” brain engagement style, with more of the brain activating at once, yet with far less agility. This reflects real-time, rapid-paced behaviors and attitudes of Se-dominants, and the more far-ranging, future-oriented, integrative thought patterns and attitudes of Ni-dominants.
To expand on these trends, a common hypothesis is that brains heavily rewarded for spatial parsing tend to favor sensorimotor-spatial circuits (often associated with Ti-Se styles), while brains that reward novel recombination tend to show patterns linked with Ne-heavy processing.
Reinforced circuits become your default attentional economy – your cognitive priority map. It’s easy to confuse the cognitive priorities with skills themselves because of how strong the emergent tendencies are. INFPs, due to their sensory-awareness priority blind-spot, truly are much more likely to unconsciously leave messes behind them. INFJs, due to their external systems blind-spot, truly are more likely to struggle with taxes, bills, paperwork, legal agreements, and political discussions.
Genetic Sensitivity Bias → Differential Awareness → Prioritized Strengths → Attention → Neuro-Reward → Increased Skill → Reinforced Priority Bias → Emergent Personality
Or, more simply: Skill grows where attention flows. Or, again, you are what you pay attention to.
Forty-Eight Archetypes
Jung came up with a way to group unconscious priorities into two forms of perceiving (P) – abstract (N) and concrete (S), and two forms of discerning (J) – gut intuitions (F) and rational evaluation (T). He multiplied the two types of perception and the two forms of discernment by two orientations: external (E) and internal (I). This gave us what modern typologists call the eight cognitive functions – which are actually cognitive priorities.
For each of the eight cognitive priorities there are two basic types who “lead” with that cognitive priority as their keystone – as their dominant cognitive function. Multiplying these lead priorities by their two possible auxiliary priorities gives us the sixteen types which have been utilized by typologists for over half a century.
My research and practiced observation have led me to uncover three developmental subtypes per type – canonical {C}, polarized {Z}, refracted {R} – producing forty-eight archetypes.
Each of these forty-eight types is its own emergent system with its own cognitive priority map guiding its development. While the specific complex skills (such as gymnastics or understanding tax law) which emerge from an individual can evolve quite idiosyncratically with regard to someone’s type, the more elemental skills beneath (such as deduction, spatial perception, or rapid classification) will harken back to the priority map of the personality.
Twin studies and fMRI research suggest to me that baseline attentional styles are heritable. This implies the keystone priority is genetically seeded – a predisposition for which neural networks produce reward. Subtypes, however, form through early conditioning. Under age ten, experiences of safety, praise, or trauma tune the reward system, subtly reshaping the relationships between priorities.
In an environment where your inborn priority map was adequately rewarded, you become the canonical {C} subtype.
If your most natural auxiliary is (1) discouraged and/or (2) lacks for any models or examples which allow it to flourish, and/or (3) your microbiome is at odds with some of the neurotransmitters required for optimal development of your auxiliary, then you develop what would have been your tertiary priority second instead. This results in a polarized {Z} subtype, where your keystone priority matches the orientation (internal or external) of its wingman priority.
It is important to note that the polarized {Z} subtype will still prioritize their native auxiliary in adulthood if given the chance. However, their subtype remains unchanged as the skills developed in their teens and twenties remain with them. You can think of it like a video game where you assign skill points. Even if you change your methodology for assigning skill-points mid-game (in your thirties, let’s say), the skill points you assigned in your twenties still impact how your personality operates. Another metaphor: Even if you change your major half way through college, you don’t entirely lose what you learned while you had a different major in the past.
The third subtype {R} occurs when your keystone inborn attentional bias is specifically shunned – when your dominant function isn’t allowed to thrive. In existing models these people are notoriously hard to type. They can even appear to be the opposite type because their stack seems almost flipped. This subtype, which I called refracted {R}, develops their min-max priority unusually early – around puberty instead of their late twenties. As a result, their keystone priority develops less than it typically would in their teen years.
Like the polarized {Z} subtype, the refracted type also regains something closer to the canonical priority balance as their adulthood progresses – if they are given space to do so. If they get into a career which relies heavily on their min-max related skill-set, and particularly if their ego becomes exceptionally caught up in these skills, then they may never end up taking the path which would have been the one of the least neurological resistance.
Whenever we encounter someone who is exceptionally unusual, my experience is that this is usually because they are either a polarized or refracted subtype. When we look at the childhood of these subtypes we find unusual pressures which had enough intensity to bend their cognitive priority map. The remarkable lesson in this, however, is that these pressures aren’t enough to actually change the underlying type! The canonical priority focus still remains the path of the least resistance even after tremendous adversity to the underlying archetype.
I’m not saying that trauma will always lead to a polarized {Z} or refracted {R} subtype however. Let me reiterate that forming a subtype isn’t synonymous with “having trauma.” To state this a third time: A person can experience deep hardship and still develop canonically.
Non-canonical subtypes specifically arise when early circumstances are specifically adversarial to one’s keystone and/or auxiliary attentional architecture. That is, when a child’s natural way of processing the world is punished, ignored, or impossible to exercise. Thus, if your childhood hardships don’t directly contradict your inborn cognitive priority map, you can still become an unusual person with a fascinating biography and have the canonical cognitive priority development. In conclusion, adversity can leave marks without bending the cognitive priority map; only priority-specific friction produces a polarized or refracted pattern.
The Cognitive Priority Map
In my neurotypology sessions with my clients, I teach them about their own cognitive priority map. On this map are all eight priorities – as these are all things we must attend to at least a little at some time in our life. The base map, as I’ve said, is genetically determined. The subtype, as I’ve outlined above, is a calibration of dopamine reward loops to suit the childhood environment. (And, even within the forty-eight subtypes there are still plenty of subtle variances between people, of course!)
1️⃣ Keystone: your primary reward and attentional anchor. All other priorities are beholden to this one, even in refracted individuals whose keystone focus is somewhat reduced in favor of their min-max priority.
2️⃣ Auxiliary: the underpinning key which determines how the rest of the priority map unfolds. This priority canonically directs the development of skills in one’s teens.
3️⃣ Tertiary: the opposite of your aux priority. This is an adaptive zone which strengthens easily and canonically accrues skills in the late teens and over the course of one’s twenties.
4️⃣ Min-Max: the opposite of your keystone and an ego zone of volatility and potential. Canonically develops in one’s late twenties and over the course of one’s thirties, but early development of relevant skills can be readily nurtured through mentorship and life circumstances.
5️⃣ Inverse: this is a congruent counterweight. It is the same baseline priority style as your keystone (congruent), but its orientation is flipped. This develops through ample mentorship and incentive in one’s thirties or forties, but may always have weak and limited associated skills if not ardently trained.
6️⃣ Aux-Plus: the canonical congruent counterpart to your auxiliary. The tutelage of others with this as a high priority combined with appropriate circumstances can make associated skills “grow in” through your late thirties, forties and fifties.
7️⃣ Blind-Spot: as the congruent counterpart to your tertiary, this is the furthest priority from your keystone priority. Attention fatigues here to the extent of utter deterioration – sometimes in a fraction of a second. Hence, associated skills with this priority may not even grow in. Being a polarized subtype may make this a little easier to access, but generally, skills relevant to this priority remain highly limited throughout one’s life.
8️⃣ Weakness: as the congruent counterpart of one’s min-max, this generally remains a weak area for life. For refracted subtypes this may be more reachable, but still remains distant from the keystone priority. High external pressures may cause this to develop more so in some individuals, but generally, if associated skills develop much, it will likely happen in the forties or (much) later in one’s life.
Together, these eight priority positions form an attentional hierarchy – a map of how your brain allocates energy, curiosity, and learning speed.
Why Your Archetype Matters
Knowing your archetype lets you align with the path of least biological resistance to meet your goals – leveraging the unconscious on behalf of the conscious.
Furthermore, understanding type through this lens of priority and detailed subtypes transforms typology from a static personality label into a dynamic neurodevelopmental framework for ongoing self-development. It also expands into understanding how your archetype complements those closest to you – both at work and in your personal life.
Ultimately, our unconscious priorities stack upon one another to create our consciously held values. Understanding how our values relate to these elemental pieces of priority can help unmask ongoing conflicts in relationships. In other words, it can help bring clarity and acceptance to value conflicts in your domestic life so that work-arounds can be implemented gracefully and with compassion.
We can all change and grow more dramatically than feels possible. We’re capable of liking foods we previously hated, adopting lifestyles that seemed unthinkable, and unlearning cultural mores that seemed to form the bedrock of our values. But intentional, purposeful change is much easier to apply when we know how to leverage our existing neurological biases.
I’ve found that relationships, career choices, and even allocation of domestic chores all flow more easily with an understanding of one’s neurotype and how it pertains to those around us. Everyone can work toward uncovering their own neurotype through study, introspection, and thoughtful discussions with friends. However, if you’d like my experience and expertise as a guide, you can book a session with me now.
The bottom line – you are what you pay attention to. Your attention becomes behavior, which in turn becomes skill, which forms a feedback loop to your attentional focus – your cognitive priorities. If you want your attention to be more consciously leveraged – thus making your selfhood more consciously under your command – then it behooves you to understand what your mind rewards itself for noticing. If you can shift your reward biases, you change who you become.
And maybe you’re not looking to change at all, but merely to accept yourself. And this, too, is beautiful, perfect, and deeply aided by an understanding of your underlying attentional reward system. No matter how dysfunctional or broken you may have felt at various times in your life, your genetic code has survived thousands of years of selection. You do have a role to play. Your inborn gifts are valuable. Thousands of ancestors led to creating you.
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