A

Cognitive Styles 19

for instance, was easy to discover. In the same way that the Exhorter tends
to be an emotional driver who prods others, a part of the brain called the
basal ganglia acts as a mental pump driving thought and action. Strangely
enough, there is a brain disorder, called Parkinson‟s disease, which appears
to be a paralysis of the specific part of the brain which corresponds to
Exhorter thought. The patient can still act and think, but he is severely
handicapped at prodding himself into a transition from one task to another,
especially when emotions are involved. Even walking from one physical
room to another may involve too much of a mental change; the person with
this disease may literally freeze when he reaches the doorway to the next
room and be unable to move further.
I mentioned that most of the personality traits which we discovered
were variations of a few basic ways of operating. The rest of the attributes
seemed to fall into one of two categories: First, there were a number of
traits which differed from one individual to another. Sometimes these
characteristics would be present, other times not—even though the
individuals had the same cognitive style. As we began to understand the
mind in more detail, we realized that these traits were dependent upon the
way in which the mind was programmed. The mental room of
consciousness was the same, but different people had „furnished‟ their
rooms in different ways. Thus, we could divide each cognitive style into
different subcategories, depending upon how an individual had
programmed his „house‟ of thought. For example, while the Exhorter
person is always someone who pushes and prods, some Exhorter persons
lead by irresponsibility—prodding others on to greater effort while
remaining static themselves, whereas other individuals lead from the front,
always in the thick of things.
Likewise, we slowly realized that some of the characteristics which we
thought were solid could themselves be changed. Gradually we sorted out
the differences between mental „software‟ and mental „hardware.‟A Some
traits really were built into the house of the mind, while others were due to
its contents. Sometimes, so many individuals with the same cognitive style
would have the same mental furniture, that we would assume these aspects
of thought actually belonged to the house and were not just part of the
interior decoration.

A I suggest that other schemes of dividing people into categories tend to

make this mistake of confusing the „walls‟ of mental hardware with the
„furniture‟ of mental software. Therefore, with other systems of cognitive
styles, it is usually possible for a person to move from one category to
another if he applies enough time and effort. This error of confusing
hardware with software is even made to some extent by others who use the
very scheme of cognitive styles that is presented here in this book.