In recent years, psychologists have zeroed in on five big personality traits that appear to be universal.No matter what culture people come from, a number of studies have suggested, everyone incorporates some degree of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.But after considering the indigenous and mostly illiterate Tsimane forager–horticulturalists of Bolivia, researchers are challenging the idea of the "Big Five." Instead, they argue that the Tsimane have just two main personality traits: socially beneficial behavior and industriousness.The findings call into question the universality of human personality traits. Instead, the specific demands of various societies may affect which quirks of character become most significant to different groups of people.Another way humans might differ is in varying degrees of bicamerality, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in "The Evolution of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind:"
The bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind would thus be a "zombie mind" lacking metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content. When bicamerality as a method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.We're mentioning this because we want to invent a new word, and we want this invention documented and time-stamped. We predict that science will discover large variations in how "humans" experience - or don't experience - consciousness. They will then observe the Contemporary Western Model spreading via internet, mass-media, etc, and bemoan the loss of those other forms. We really need a word for this - a word for different (or absent?) models of human consciousness. Both "psychodiversity" and "noodiversity" already exist, but it's not clear their accepted meanings quite match what we propose.
So...this is left as an exercise for the student.
