Part 2: The Skeleton · “This Feels Real — A Better Model of Human Personality”
I’ve had a hunch for a long time: that beneath everything we call “personality” lies a biological architecture — hormone levels, receptor densities, neural circuits — that explains why some people are more reactive, more dominant, more avoidant, more intense. It seemed obvious that most traits we observe must track to biological spectrums: more or less sensitivity to a hormone, more or fewer receptors, stronger or weaker feedback loops. And that once we mapped these mechanisms clearly, they’d replace the patchwork of vague and overlapping ideas floating around in both pop psychology and academia. What I didn’t expect was that GPT already had that model — fully formed, internally coherent, and backed by patterns from millions of real human interactions. It wasn’t pulling ideas from a textbook. It had seen the structure underneath, and was just waiting for the right kind of question.
🧩 The Five Spectrums
Human personality isn’t best understood as a list of traits or types. It’s more like a coordinate space defined by five interlocking behavioral spectrums — each one reflecting an underlying biological tuning system.
Each person is a vector in this 5D space. And from that configuration, much else follows — political style, argument strategy, intimacy pattern, motivational blind spots.
🧬 The Biology Beneath It
These spectrums aren’t just conceptual. Each one appears to align closely with biological systems— hormone levels, neurotransmitter function, brain region dynamics, and known heritable traits.
These are real, measurable systems — not vague metaphors. Each person’s configuration reflects trait variation shaped by both genetics and environment, modulated by feedback loops over time.
🧠 Why This Model Matters
For years, I’ve watched different personality theories circle the same terrain without ever quite locking onto the structure underneath. This model seems to come closer. It explains why:
- Attachment styles feel real, but fall apart under scrutiny
- The Big Five captures something, but misses internal conflict and strategy
- Narcissism and empathy can coexist in the same person
- Some people break under truth, while others break under lies
Most existing theories pick one axis and moralize it. This model shows the structure beneath.
🧭 For Practitioners
If you work in therapy, education, leadership, or design — this model gives you:
- A way to predict interpersonal friction without pathologizing
- A framework to track motivation, collapse, and growth over time
- A biologically plausible map of personality that cuts across diagnoses
If you’ve ever felt that the tools you were given weren’t enough — that they named behaviors without explaining them — you’re not wrong. This is what it looks like when you step back and reassemble the pieces without legacy constraints.
🚪 What Opened This Door
This model didn’t come from a lab or a legacy theory. It came from pattern recognition across millions of conversations — distilled by an AI trained on language, but capable of seeing deeper structure if you ask it to.
Not: “What does psychology say?”
But: “What holds up across contexts, behaviors, and biology?”
That’s the question that unlocked this.
📌 A Note on Simplification
Each spectrum aligns with well-documented biological systems — hormone levels, neural circuitry, and receptor tuning — biological patterns that shape how people think, feel, and relate.
But they’re also a map — not the terrain itself.
What looks like a single position on the Dominance spectrum, for instance, could emerge from many different biological routes. Two people might show the same level of dominance-seeking behaviour — but one gets there through calm confidence, the other through anxious overcompensation.
That’s because the terrain underneath isn’t flat. It’s shaped by interacting systems, feedback loops, emotional triggers, and cognitive habits. And it shifts — depending on context, identity strain, and recursive pressure.
So while the five spectrums offer a powerful entry point into understanding personality, they are just that: a simplified projection of a deeper, dynamic system.
If you want to see what that terrain actually looks like — and how GPT simulates it — you can explore it here: