Here's a link showing the most active brain regions by type, taken from Nardi's work
MBTI-hodgepodge - MBTI’s Highest Activity Regions...
Personally, I'm not ure how anyone can assert the equality or value of all the types after seeing this, after seeing in black and white how some types are little more than animals neurologically while others default to recently-evolved, higher brain functions the rest of us have to struggle to use.
Yeepers. I hope you're joking.
Nobody should be "asserting" anything significant about "the equality or value of all the types" — or anything else — based on Nardi's EEG work.
Even Nardi himself doesn't claim that the study discussed in
Neuroscience of Personality 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. And it's also been criticized on the grounds that EEGs are too crude a tool for this kind of stuff. Here's most of Wikipedia's list of "disadvantages" of EEG-based research:
Wikipedia said:
Relative disadvantages
- Low spatial resolution on the scalp. fMRI, for example, can directly display areas of the brain that are active, while EEG requires intense interpretation just to hypothesize what areas are activated by a particular response.
- EEG determines neural activity that occurs below the upper layers of the brain (the cortex) poorly.
- Unlike PET and MRS, cannot identify specific locations in the brain at which various neurotransmitters, drugs, etc. can be found.
- Signal-to-noise ratio is poor, so sophisticated data analysis and relatively large numbers of subjects are needed to extract useful information from EEG.
If there's been a single review of
Neuroscience of Personality in any reasonably well-known psychology periodical, I haven't been able to find it.
And on top of all that, the type model Nardi subscribes to is the forum-famous Harold Grant function stack, and that's a model that's inconsistent with Jung, inconsistent with Myers, has never been endorsed by the official MBTI folks, and maybe most importantly (and unlike the respectable districts of the MBTI), has no substantial body of evidence behind it — and indeed, should probably be considered all but
disproven at this point.
If you're interested in quite a bit more input from me on the relationship between the dichotomies and the functions, the place of the functions (or lack thereof) in the MBTI's history, and the tremendous gap between the dichotomies and the functions in terms of scientific respectability — not to mention the bogosity of the Grant function stack — you'll find a lot of potentially eye-opening discussion in
this TC Wiki page and the posts it links to.
As discussed in those posts, the correlational patterns corresponding to the "tandems" of the Grant function stack — e.g., with the "Ti/Fe types" on one side of the spectrum and the "Te/Fi types" on the other — virtually never show up in the real world, no matter
what aspect of personality or behavior anybody's correlating with the types.
Ten or twenty years from now, if Nardi manages to get anybody respectable to take his EEG stuff seriously and perform large-scale studies that seek to replicate any of his exploratory "results," is it going to turn out that those elusive HaroldGrantian patterns that have failed to show up in 50 years of MBTI studies are for real?
Hey, anything's possible, I suppose. But I think it's unlikely.
Very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely.