- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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The brain and the end of rotational symmetry
Every enneagram author is looking for correlations with other theories or systems.
The acceptance of the ‘natural’ meanings for head and heart and gut pointed this author toward the discoveries in neurology concerning the differential development of functions in different parts of the brain.
In the majority of human adults, the left side of the brain is differentially adapted for language and logic and reason – and the right side for emotions and images and dreams.
And there it is on the diagram: head on the left, heart on the right.
And then this further connection: that the rear or lower brain is the place of gut instinct and gut reaction.
From the enneagram there emerged a remarkably accurate map of the human brain – not just zone by zone but sector by sector: the frontal lobe functions of abstract thought, for example, are properly represented at FOUR and FIVE.
Making the connection with the human brain led to further insights into the diagram itself.
Head and heart together belong to the category of ‘inner life’ – even though they are rivals within it – in a way that ‘gut’ does not.
Looking again at all nine types, it is possible to identify a continuous vertical scale in this circular diagram – from the direct instinct and intuition of the gut zone at the top to the inner life of head and heart at the bottom.
The three-phase rotational symmetry of the diagram has been supplemented by a major left-right contrast and a vertical scale.
Head versus Heart takes this entirely new supplementary reading of the diagram as fundamental to the system – from the top of page one.