50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

whether the whole methodology for identifying personality types is unsound. Jung himself was wary of applying his general principles to particular individuals, and skeptics also claim that the type explanations are too vague and could apply to anyone. Judge for yourself. You may find, if you take the test or a variant of it, that the description given of you is remarkably accurate.
    On her own scale, Briggs Myers came out as an INFP (Introverted–Intuitive–Feeling–Perceiving). She noted that introverts often gain the most from doing the test. As three out of every four people are extraverted, and for every intuitive there are three sensing types, we therefore live in an “extravert’s world.” As a less common type, introverts may, not surprisingly, feel some pressure to be something they are not, and the MBTI allows them, perhaps for the first time, to feel it is OK to be who they are.
    One of the fascinating insights in
Gifts Differing
is that recognition and development of our type may be more important to success in life than IQ. Isabel Briggs Myers’ view was that personality type is as innate as left- or right-handedness; anyone who tries to be a right hander when they are really a leftie is asking for stress and misery, whereas going with our strengths massively increases our chances of fulfillment, happiness, and productivity.
Isabel Briggs Myers
    Born in 1897, Briggs was schooled at home by her mother in Washington DC. Her father, Lynam Briggs, was a physicist and for over a decade was the director of the National Bureau of Standards. Isabel married Clarence Myers in 1918 and the following year graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in political science
.
    Her tests of over 5,000 medical students were conducted at the George Washington School of Medicine. She followed up the study 12 years later, finding that the students had generally followed paths (i.e. research, general practice, surgery, administration) that might be expected of their type. The nursing study involved more than 10,000 students. The MBTI was first published in 1957 by the Educational Testing Service
.
    Isabel Briggs Myers died in 1980. Her work is continued today through the Myers & Briggs Foundation
.
    Peter Briggs Myers , born in 1926, was a Rhodes Scholar in physics. A scientific researcher and administrator, he was a staff director at the National Academy of Science. Involved in the development of the MBTI since his teens, he is now Chair of the Myers & Briggs Foundation and a Trustee of the Myers-Briggs Trust
.

2006
The Female Brain
    â€œMore than ninety-nine percent of male and female genetic coding is exactly the same. Out of the 30,000 genes in the human genome, the variation between the sexes is small. But those few differences influence every single cell in our bodies—from the nerves that register pleasure and pain to the neurons that transmit perception, thoughts, feelings and emotions.”
    â€œJust as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes. That probably explains why eighty-five percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty two seconds and women think about it once a day—or up to every three or four hours on their most fertile days. This makes for interesting interactions between the sexes.”
----
    In a nutshell
    Men and women experience the world differently thanks to each gender’s vastly different exposure to sex hormones.
    In a similar vein
Alfred Kinsey
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(p 174)
Anne Moir & David Jessel
Brainsex
(p 204)
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate
(p 228)
Gail Sheehy
Passages
(p 260)
Robert E. Thayer
The Origin of Everyday Moods
(p 284)
----
CHAPTER 8
Louann Brizendine
    As a medical student, Louann