Wednesday, March 29, 2006

personality types and medical specialities

A very long time ago, a pair of ladies known as Myers and Briggs were so inspired by the work of Carl Jung, they went off and created a personality test which split the world up into 16 different personality types. they figured there were four aspects to a person's personality: introversion vs extroversion, intuition vs sensing, thinking vs feeling, judging vs perception. they called it 'the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator', shortened to 'MBTI'.
they tested this little test on a bunch of medical student guinea pigs many, many years ago.
as time has passed, this test has gained in popularity. tests are widely available on the internet, and many websites like to give their take on what it all means. google is a provider of many answers for the inquisitive.
there are those who think this is all a horrible hoax. a person does a test, gets a four letter analysis, reads a description of said four letter analysis, but only sees what they want to see, and forgets the aspects of their personality not mentioned in the description, hence believing it all to be 'like totally true! wow!', when actually, it probably isn't.
a brilliant proffessor at my medical school gave us lectures on personality. he told us that personality is too complex to be differentiated, generalised and generally neatly blocked up into a few aspects.
i am inclined to agree with the brilliant professor...
however...
Zazika does find it all rather fun!
personality types and their specialities
touchy feely guide for students to figure out who they are, and where they belong in the world that is medicine
a study has been done on how type can affect the medical students use of computers... apparantly, it does
and even the student BMJ has joined in the party - woohoo!

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