As Jane Kise notes near the start of the video: "I saw the biggest differences in Energy [E/I] and Information [S/N] looking at the math research, so that's where we'll spend most of our time today." And as she explained to one of the YouTube commenters: "My research focused on the quadrants of the type table rather than the cognitive functions."
In other words, and as the rest of the video makes abundantly clear, in studying different math learning styles, what Kise discovered was that the main contributing MBTI-related factors were the E/I and S/N dichotomies, rather than the eight "cognitive functions," and that the significant type groups for purposes of math learning were the INs, ISs, ENs and ESs — each of whose members have
three different dominant functions.
So far, so good, and utterly consistent with the fact that, whenever a study gets done where a dichotomy (or simple dichotomy-combination) framing and a cognitive function ("type dynamics") framing lead to different expectations, it's virtually always the dichotomy-centric framing that ends up doing a better job of accounting for the results — which is to say that it's virtually always the dichotomies that end up having what's known in the respectable districts of the personality field as "validity," and the cognitive functions that
fail to have validity to the extent that they predict results that are inconsistent with the simple additive effects of one or more dichotomy preferences.
But surprisingly — well, OK, it didn't actually surprise me very much — Kise opens her video by noting that she can "say with confidence that Jung was right. There are eight kinds of brains." And she closes the video by declaring: "I can say with confidence that Jungian type is a research-based useful framework that helps us" to "help students tackle [learning] in their own way."
Buuut, on the fucking contrary, Kise's own research demonstrated that Jung's "eight kinds of brains" — at least for purposes of the math learning approaches she studied — were
not the relevant categories. As already noted, IN/IS/EN/ES were the relevant categories.
Four of Jung's "eight kinds of brain" groups include an S type and an N type (e.g., Fe-doms), and Kise's presentation leaves no doubt that the biggest math-learning-style difference she found among the types was the one between the S's and the N's. So her research didn't
support the validity of Jung's "eight brains"; it dramatically
failed to support the validity of Jung's eight function-based pairs when it comes to math learning styles.
I'm sorry to be so repetitively irritable about the endless parade of "cognitive functions" horseshit, but is there really any fucking way that Jane Kise — who refers to herself as an "expert" on "Jungian type" who's been working with it for at least 15 years — is not aware of that? Is there really any fucking way that Jane Kise's opening reference to Jung's "eight kinds of brains" wasn't just a disingenuous toss-off because, as we all know,
it's cool to be Jungian?
Is there some reason I'm not seeing for why Kise, rather than praising Jung and his "eight brains," shouldn't have praised Isabel Myers and the many years of data-gathering effort that led her to substantially redefine what E/I and S/N were about and conclude that the dichotomies were the main event — and shouldn't have acknowledged that Kise's own research, far from supporting Jung's "eight brain" model, contradicted that model (as far as the impact on math learning styles is concerned) and instead provided yet another good example of the validity of Myers' dichotomies?
And am I just a hopeless goody-goody, or should Jane Kise maybe be at least a little ashamed of herself?
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As a supplemental, more wonkish note, Kise refers to Nardi's little EEG "study" (perhaps not really the appropriate word) and presents several examples of Nardi's brain patterns while sloppily eliding the differences between, e.g., Se and ES and Ni and IN. One minute she's talking about an "Extraverted and Sensing" student (an ES) and then she puts up a slide showing Nardi's supposed Se (tennis hop) brain pattern — but of course, as every good Jungian knows (assuming you subscribe to
either of the two modern function stacks), around half the ESs are Si types, not Se types (and around half the Se types are ISs). One minute she's showing us a slide showing Nardi's supposed Ni (flow) pattern and the next minute she's showing us a follow-up slide labeled "Introversion and Intuition" while she purports to continue discussing the
same people — but of course, as every good Jungian knows, around half the INs are Ne types, not Ni types (and around half the Ni types are ENs).
Even Dario Nardi doesn't claim that his study was anything more than a tentative, exploratory one. It involved 60 people and didn't come close to providing sufficient data to respectably validate any of the functions. But here's how Kise saw fit to characterize Nardi's brain lab work to her TED audience:
Kise said:
The insights and images we got from that research really helped teachers understand the very different needs of students who don't learn like them. ...
[Nardi] saw the same big patterns in the brain that I did. ... Dario was taking the patterns he saw in the filming and overlaying them against these 16 regions of the brain that are well documented in neuroscience. ... When you look at these regions, the 16 types actually use different ones. ... There's only two types that actually use the logic center. ... There's phenomenal correlation between type and how we use our brain.
But setting aside the spectacularly tentative nature of Nardi's findings so far and the inexcusable way Kise characterizes them, and partly repeating a couple previous points... Even if you assume, for the sake of argument, that Nardi's brain patterns are pointing to significant differences among users of the eight functions, the cognitive functions Nardi is purportedly studying
don't align with the IN/IS/EN/ES groups who Kise found differed in their approaches to learning math. And yet Kise says that Nardi "saw the same big patterns in the brain that I did," and her slide show presents Nardi's brain patterns and her IN/IS/EN/ES groups to the audience as if Ni and IN are the same, and Se and ES are the same, and so on.
Dear Ms. Kise,
If you're an "expert on Jungian type," I'm the Count of Monte Cristo.
Your pal,
reckful
