Your Brain Can Now Be Linked To Your Personality Traits

So it turns out that your brain is more responsible for your neurosis than originally thought. In a new study published in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience journal. Evidence has proven a link for the first time between your brain shape and your personality.

There have been prior studies showing how brains can effects ones individual toe length,  handwriting and even sleeping position, but this is the first time personality traits have been directly linked to your brain shape.

Scientist Luca Passamonti led a team of international researchers to study the brains of over 500 healthy people aged 22 to 36 years. They focused on five traits neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. People with neuroticism and anxiety showed a thicker cortex and a smaller area and folding in some brain regions. In contrast persons with traits of openness and curiosity showed to have a thinner cortex and a greater area and folding in the brain.

Luca writes of the study, “The differences are likely to stem from “cortical stretching”, a developmental process that shapes our brain in a way that maximises its area and amount of folding while minimising its thickness. In other words… It’s like stretching and folding a rubber sheet – this enhances its area, but, at the same time, the sheet gets thinner.”

This study suggests that personality traits are at least in part genetic but that our environment still plays a pivotal role in the brains maturation process.