- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Three resources *
- Meeting the world
- Nine strategies *
- Nine types
- Gut types
- EIGHT *
- NINE *
- ONE *
- Gut types review
- Corruption and redemption
- Heart types
- TWO *
- THREE *
- FOUR *
- Heart types review
- Symmetry of the board
- Head types
- FIVE *
- SIX *
- SEVEN *
- Head types review
- All nine sectors
- Discerning home base part 1
- Gifts and temptations
- Developing all three resources
- Taking the advice of the opposites
- The path to redemption part 1
- Celebrating all of who we are
- Neurology
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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Neurology
And finally in this section – the strategy board and the human brain.
The strategy board is a map of humankind. It is also a map of the individual. Both emerge from the strategy board’s simple mapping of three human experiences – those we call ‘head’ and ‘heart’ and ‘gut.’
All three of these human experiences can be traced in the human brain. And the three are arranged in the brain in a logical and practical and orderly fashion – just as they are on the strategy board. The strategy board – is a map of the human brain.
The brain is essentially a concentration of nerve tissue at the top end – the front end – of the spinal cord. The parts closest to the spinal cord specialize in the essentials of life support: breathing, heartbeat, hunger, thirst, pleasure, and pain. Next come those parts responsible for the control of the body in terms of sensation, movement, and learned physical skills. All of these functions tend to straddle the boundary between conscious and unconscious thought. We rarely think in detail about the physical movements involved in breathing, or in picking up a cup, or even in changing gear while driving. We do not need to calculate consciously that a particular pattern of colors and shapes represents a familiar table or door – or that a particular series of sounds means that the door is about to open. We are talking about functions that belong in the realm of instinct and intuition and direct action. This is the brain of the gut zone.
As we move further away from the spinal cord into the higher brain or forebrain, further into the uniquely large cerebrum of the human brain, we enter those parts of the human brain concerned with conscious thought and emotion and memory and planning. These processes of the brain are less concerned with direct physical sensation and movement, and more concerned with the breadth of complex experiences and conscious choices, which make the human race unique. Furthest of all from the spinal cord are the frontal lobes, concerned entirely with abstract, analytical, and conceptual thought, and not at all with the sensations and control of the body.
The cerebrum is famously divided into two by a deep central fissure. The resultant left brain and right brain are well connected to each other, but they remain distinct: each side is better connected to the lower or rear parts of the brain than to the other side.
Each side of the brain manages sensation and action in one side of the body – but even so, the brain is not entirely symmetrical across this central divide. The left brain and the right brain have different higher specializations. The left brain looks after language and logic: the inner life of the ‘head.’ The right brain looks after complex emotions and non-verbal concepts and images and dreams: the inner life of the ‘heart.’
Place the strategy board diagram on the wall, and place the crown of your head against the diagram, and you have a remarkably accurate map of the human brain.
FOURs and FIVEs, our artists and philosophers, self-consciously separate from the outside world – observing it from afar, distilling wisdom, and abstracting concepts – are the people whose dominant center of thought is all the way out in the frontal lobes.
More generally, our heart types have their dominant center of thought in the right brain – all emotions and concepts and images – and our head types have their dominant center of thought in the left brain, all language and logic. THREE, in the middle of the right brain, is the expert at picking up the nuances of a complex group situation and acting on them. SIX, in the middle of the left brain, is very precisely where language and logic reside. TWO is in the right brain, full of emotion, but closer to the rear brain, taking direct engaging action. SEVEN is in the left brain, planning and deciding, also closer to the rear brain, concerned with pleasure and pain.
We must not undervalue or underestimate the intelligence of the lower or rear brain. Analysis and calculation go on there in a place inaccessible to the consciousness – but with no less accuracy or insight for that. Only the result is sent out to the conscious brain – producing the phenomenon that leads us to say ‘I just know it in my gut’ or ‘in my bones’ or ‘in my blood.’ These are the instincts and intuitions of the directly engaging gut types – EIGHT and NINE and ONE. Many successful business people know full well that they only write up detailed ‘left brain’ business plans in order to justify to their superiors and bankers ‘what they just know in their bones’: for some people, their best thinking goes on right back there where the consciousness cannot reach. NINE’s instincts are right there at the center. ONE’s instincts add in that right brain influence of sensitivity to the approval or disapproval of others. EIGHT’s instincts add in that left brain influence – learning about the world by testing things out.
And so it seems that in using these three resources, these three ‘centers of intelligence’ – ‘head’ and ‘heart’ and ‘gut’ – we are using three distinct resources of the human brain.
For whatever reason, we each tend to rely on one of the three more than the others. How we do use the others – equally or unequally – produces a pattern of nine ways of working: nine patterns of influence from these three distinct zones. The main contrast is left brain versus right brain – across that central divide – and the other contrast is how far backward or forward we are working: close to the actual sensations and actions of the body in the world, or far away from sensation and action, in abstract thought. These are our resources, and our different patterns of using them make us the diverse people that we are.
There may be elements of both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in determining who we become: genetic factors may influence which parts of the brain become most dominant, and there may be ‘nurture’ factors as well. At the strictly physical level, there may be some asymmetry of brain development determined by non-genetic physical factors – how we lie in the uterus, or a bump on the head. And at the microscopic neurological level, it is known that storing information, or learning a skill, actually causes physical changes in the brain. Perhaps our consistent use of one strategy early in life actually locks us into that strategy through physical changes in the brain. But no harm is done: however it may come about, we become experts, practiced in our own strategy – and we have unique gifts to bring to the world. Our strategy becomes a fundamental part of who we are, and our spiritual journey is not to change who we are, but to find, in our walk with God, our unique God-given redemption and vocation and gifts.