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Neurodynamics of Personality

Adam M. Mirot, M.D.

This book tackles a set of fundamental issues at the mind-brain interface valiantly, and with some success. The authors, a neuroscientist and a clinical psychologist, have produced an interesting hybrid model of personality built on Neural Network and Chaos theories, with contributions from basic neuroscience, cognitive neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, primatology, and psychodynamics.

Personality is described as one of a number of emergent functions of the brain, neither reducible to it nor distinct from it, a hierarchy of neurobehavioral processes that serve to adapt the individual to its external environment. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, personality is seen as a verb rather than a noun, only relatively stable and partially localized, probabilistic, dynamic, organizing and reorganizing itself in response to changes in context and internal state. This perspective is used by the authors to build a model of personality that allows for change and continuity, complexity, heritability, indeterminacy, circumscribed consciousness, and a definable "staircase" between brain and behavior.

The first several chapters deal with the biological substrate, including evolutionary principles that drive its development, mechanisms of learning, plasticity, general principles of modular brain architecture, and principles underlying the organization and timing of brain activities to produce normal dynamics. The authors describe pathogenic dysregulation of circuit dynamics by aberrant input, temporal derangement, forced rerouting, and abnormal automaticity. In this model, psychological disorders are seen as caused by dysregulated neural network dynamics, with personality disorders emerging from overlearned, aberrant cognitive and behavioral circuits.

The remaining chapters look at mind and personality in more depth. Conscious and unconscious mental functioning are described as distinct and complementary modes of information processing, concurrently represented in the higher-order component functions of personality, including Temperament, Character, and Self, each of which is separately examined. The differentiation of procedural learning-based Character from declarative memory-based Self is helpful, as is the conceptualization of temperament as phenotype rather than genotype. Split-brain behavior and clinical disorders of self-perception are used to introduce the author’s view of Self as involving a multiplicity of self-representations, and of self-awareness as the meta-function that orchestrates them, with variable degrees of success. Borderline and dissociative states are seen as akin to the neuropsychologically disconnected states produced by callosotomies.

In terms of therapeutic implications, the authors build on their concept of personality, asserting that different component functions of personality are best approached in different ways. Logically enough, they advocate approaching character change through procedural pathways, involving the disruption of ingrained behavioral patterns and the repetitive establishment of new ones. Changing self-concept is seen as more amenable to episodic and semantic approaches involving subjective self-experience, particularly when affectively charged. Insight is felt to have a role insofar as it focuses the patient’s attention on dysfunctional patterns of self or character, but in and of itself is of limited benefit in mediating change. None of this is particularly new to clinicians and is implicit in a variety of techniques of psychotherapy, including cognitive behavior therapy and its variants.

Neurodynamics of Personality is a bit of a long read, and its wording can be repetitive. Its graphics and illustrations are also a bit sparse and uninspired. On the other hand, the authors aren’t pedantic and do make a visible effort to introduce a leaven of humor into the discourse. The cardinal virtue of this book lies in its ability to phrase existing concepts of psychodynamics, personality, and learning in the language of neurobiology, and in its ability to provide a non-dualistic framework with which to apply these concepts to the understanding of personality pathology. It is interesting, thoughtful, and relevant to clinical work—a valuable addition to the theoretical tool kit.

FOOTNOTES

Dr. Mirot is a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.

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