David Eagleman's The Brain (O5, O6)

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, wrote The Brain: The Story of You as a tour of how three pounds of tissue build the person you take yourself to be. He is unsettling about how little of it is fixed, on its quotes page: "You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed." His account touches two Big Five facets.

Fascination with the machinery of you is Intellect

The first is Intellect (O5), under Openness, your appetite for ideas and for understanding how things, including yourself, actually work. Eagleman's whole book is an invitation to be curious about the hidden mechanics of your own experience. A high scorer finds that fascinating and wants more. A lower scorer would rather live the experience than dissect it, and reads the neuroscience as interesting but beside the point.

Doubting that you see reality straight is Liberalism

The second is Liberalism (O6), under Openness, the willingness to give up a cherished certainty, in this case that you perceive the world as it truly is. Eagleman is blunt, on the same page: "Our perception of reality has less to do with what's happening out there, and more to do with what's happening inside our brain." A high scorer can hold that humbling idea. A lower scorer trusts the evidence of their senses and resists the claim that it is a construction.

Read your O5 and O6 to know how The Brain lands. If your intellect runs high, Eagleman gives your curiosity a guided tour of its own hardware. If your liberalism runs high, his case that reality is built inside your skull will land as freeing rather than threatening. You are, in his telling, a story your brain is writing. Eagleman shows you the pen.

Read the book: The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman.

See Where You Fall

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