Among the "Big Five" personality traits, the Openness/Intellect domain has been the most difficult for psychologists to describe. The problem is that it is such an all-encompassing domain, with psychological linkages to human art, aesthetic interests, unconventionality, imagination, creativity, perceived intelligence, and intellectual curiosity. While the unifying force of the domain is a drive for cognitive exploration, recent research conducted by myself and my colleagues (including Colin DeYoung and Jeremy Gray, who I worked with in graduate school) show that Intellect can be separated from Openness, both behaviorally and neurologically. Intellect is more related to exploration and engagement with abstract or semantic forms of cognition, whereas Openness is more related to engagement with perceptual and sensory experiences. This cognitive division has posed some problems for psychologists trying to understand this broad domain, because intellectual forms of cognition are mixed in with more intuitive and sensory forms of cognition. This situation has created a paradox: "intelligence" (as measured by I.Q. tests) and "madness" (as measured by tests of a mild form of schizophrenia called schizotypy) are negatively related to each other yet are positively related to the overall Openness/Intellect domain. How can this be?

In a recent series of studies, Colin G. DeYoung, Rachael G. Grazioplene, and Jordan B. Peterson set out to resolve this paradox. Let's take a tour through their findings and theory. There's a lot to get through, but stick with me. I promise it'll be worth it!

First let's cover some terms. Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness that affects roughly 1 percent of the population and involves altered states of consciousness and "abnormal" perceptual experiences. Schizotypy, which is a watered-down version of schizophrenia, consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone. Schizotypy can be broken down into two types: "positive" schizotypal traits such as unusual perceptual experiences and magical beliefs and "negative" schizotypal traits such as physical and social anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) and introversion. Researchers have been trying to figure out where exactly to place schizotypy in the Big Five structure of personality. Along the way, they have tried renaming positive schizotypy to such wonderful labels as "Oddity", "Peculiarity", and "Experiental Permeability". Apophenia is a component of positive schizotypy, and involves a general human propensity to see meaningful patterns when they don't really exist. Apophenia is a natural part of human nature. Some examples include wearing good luck charms, seeing Jesus in toast, or mistaking random sounds for someone calling your name. This can get more serious, such as seen in compulsive gamblers, but we all lie somewhere on the apophenia spectrum.

Now we've defined our terms, we can get to the good stuff. DeYoung and his colleagues decided that when looking at normal human variation, "apophenia" is a desirable replacement for the term "positive schizotypy." Apophenia is more descriptive of the actual phenomenon, and has more neutral connotations (schizotypy is associated with ideas of schizophrenia). They note that psychologists just haven't done a good job of measuring the apophenia side of cognition. This makes me wonder why psychologists have had a bias against apophenia-type thought (perhaps because apophenia is antithetical to good science?). Whatever the reason for the neglect, DeYoung and his colleagues predict that if more measures of apophenia are administered, apophenia will reveal itself in the Openness/Intellect domain.

And that's what they found. Across two studies, they administered a very large battery of personality questionnaires and a measure of I.Q. to well-educated middle-class Americans and Canadians, none of which were suffering from schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (in which apophenia is particularly severe). Therefore, their study was able to look at normal human variation in both intelligence and apophenia. Turns out, the key to resolving this longstanding complex paradox all comes down to a simplex.

The Paradoxical Simplex

A simplex is an arrangement of variables along a single dimension. The simplex describes, in a visual-spatial way, the strength of the relationships among the variables. Here is their beautiful "padoxical simplex":

As you can see, intelligence and apophenia are on opposite ends of the simplex. Intelligence is all the way at the top, and apophenia is all the way at the bottom, both separated by lots of different tests. In other words, even though they live on the same planet, they are miles away from each other. At the same time, all of the measures that appear on the simplex are positively related to the overall Openness/Intellect domain. Thus, the paradoxical nature of the simplex. As the researchers note, "some forces cause intelligence and apophenia to vary together, whereas other forces cause them to vary inversely."

One system that is probably acting on the entire Openness/Intellect domain is the dopaminergic system. Dopamine has mostly activating effects on behavior and cognition and contributes to approach behavior, sensitivity to rewards, and breadth of thinking. Dopamine has shown linkages to Extraversion, positive affect, Openness to Experience, broad thinking, and mental flexibility. Some evidence even suggests that variations in two genes involved in the dopaminergic system is indeed related to Openness/Intellect. That's what brings them together...

What forces pull intelligence away from apophenia?

As you can see in the simplex, an excellent marker of intelligence appears to be the "Need for Cogntion" scale, whereas an excellent marker of apophenia appears to be the "Absorption" scale. Which makes sense, considering the absorption scale include items such as:

"I like to watch cloud shapes change in the sky"

"Sometimes I feel as if my mind could envelope the whole world."

"Sometimes I experience things as if they were doubly real."

"Sometimes I am immersed in nature or in art that I feel as if my whole state of consciousness has somehow been temporarily changed."

"Things that might seem meaningless to others make sense to me."

Far out, man.