Handwriting Legibility-Clumsiness, Noradrenaline, and Socionics

Let us consider the property (after the questions are the correlations of their type profiles with the averaged profile of the property as a whole):

EVENNESS AND LEGIBILITY OF LETTER FORMATION, “GRAPHOLOGICALITY” OF HANDWRITING (low noradrenaline?)

1. If I want to, I can write almost calligraphically. 0.81
2. Even when I write in a hurry, I still produce quite beautiful and clear handwriting with neat, legible letters. 0.57
3. The same letters in my handwriting inevitably “dance” in size and form, even if I try when writing - I am definitely not cut out to be a calligrapher. -0.95
4. The letters in my usual handwriting are “of assorted kinds” and barely legible. -0.86
5. When I write, my letters are clumsy, even if I try to form them neatly. -0.85
6. In my usual cursive, the letters strongly “dance” in height, width, and form; they cannot possibly be called even and identical. -0.85
7. It is difficult for me to write with even and identical letters. -0.84
8. Other people have difficulty deciphering my handwriting. -0.82
9. In my usual handwriting, it is difficult for me to write with even and identical letters. -0.76
10. In writing, I have a distinctive clumsy handwriting that appears “careless” and is difficult for other people to decipher. -0.73

The resulting socionic profiles are shown below.

No. 185. Evenness and legibility of letter formation, “graphologicality” of handwriting (low noradrenaline?)

(Averaging the profiles of 10 scale questions, 14310 respondent answers in total; all profiles, except the 2nd and 3rd type profiles, are normalized to unit sigma of the type profile). All profiles are given after corrective factor rotation.

WHAT MAY NORADRENALINE (NOREPINEPHRINE) HAVE TO DO WITH THIS, YOU MAY ASK?

An increase in noradrenaline (for example, under acute stress, agitation with arousal) is always accompanied by difficulty and coarsening of fine finger motor control. Although poorly legible handwriting may, in principle, be caused by various reasons (for example, the professional habit of district physicians rapidly filling out a mass of paperwork for their patients, or dysfunction in a special “graphological” area of the left parietal cortex), nevertheless elevated baseline noradrenaline is the most common and, moreover, a natural biological cause of clumsy handwriting, clearly associated with a person’s temperament.

Why does noradrenaline cause deterioration of fine motor control? Because it is a neurohormone for ensuring “fight or flight”; its increase is adaptive for ensuring rapid decisions and large movements of the whole body, torso, legs, and arms as a whole. Remember – fight or flight? Providing fine motor control in such a situation is entirely unnecessary – it would only divert brain resources.

Noradrenergic mechanisms are also used to increase concentration of attention and filter out all extraneous, unnecessary information, with sustained focus only on what is most important and essential (which is also important in critical situations). From this there should also follow a positive association of noradrenaline with logic, and a negative one – with ethics, which tends to react with nearly equal intensity to everything indiscriminately.

When noradrenaline is applied directly to the cerebral cortex of rodents and cats, something interesting occurs: they stop reacting to all the incidental stimuli that previously attracted their attention in the experimental chamber. Instead, they run directly to the lever that delivers food reinforcement. This effect of noradrenaline is called enhancement of the goal reflex with concomitant ignoring of environmental stimuli. In general, similar behavior is also, as is known, a property of the logical pole in socionics.

Finally, it is also known from neuroscience that comparing the effectiveness of two different actions (running left or right, and so on – a typical Te task) is likewise supported by those mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex that have very strong noradrenergic innervation. And what do we see in the table? Of the two logics, Ti and Te, it is precisely Te that turns out to be more strongly associated with “clumsy handwriting,” that is, with high noradrenaline.

Finally, how can we explain the clear, strong association of noradrenaline with intuition that emerges in the table? By the fact that its main function as a neurohormone – decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, that is, under conditions of a deficit of the necessary sensory information and in the absence of specific experience stored in memory concerning exactly equivalent situations. All that remains is to search memory quickly for situations that at least approximately and in at least some respect resembled the present one. Thus, a strong association of noradrenaline with intuition proves quite justified (and especially with static and rapid Ne, which quickly searches for coarse analogies in past experience without excessive requirements for the degree to which past situations match the present one).

In addition, noradrenaline should ensure rapid impulsive decisions – that is, irrational ones.

It is precisely all these interrelations that are revealed by the table for the property characterizing both legible, neat handwriting and, simultaneously, low noradrenaline as its cause (red positive values in the table), as well as clumsy handwriting and, simultaneously, high noradrenaline (blue negative values in the table).

As we can see, according to the marker of clumsy handwriting, noradrenaline also turns out to be slightly associated with an increase in Questimity characteristics – although much more weakly than with intuition and irrationality. Why and for what purpose might this be, one may ask? At such a low level of correlation, it could be a random artifact, but apparently it is nevertheless not an artifact – because this association also readily finds an explanation. Questimity is closely associated with the instinct of self-preservation. And a noradrenaline surge serves exactly the same purpose.

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So, in whom does baseline noradrenaline appear to be highest? In ILE and IEE. These are quick-thinking and impulsive decision-makers who very much dislike waiting (they “dance” with impatience). And in whom is it usually low? In ESE, SEI, and LSI. It is also not high in EIE and ESI. For the other psychotypes, however, variations are possible – depending on their additional accentuations beyond the type.

Notes

1. “High noradrenaline” (high noradrenaline activity) does not necessarily mean a very high level of its concentration in the intersynaptic space of neurons, and even less so - in the blood. The activity of noradrenaline also depends on the number (density, concentration) and sensitivity of receptors to it on neuronal cell bodies (adrenergic receptors, of which there are several main types).

As a result, noradrenaline activity is formed through:

a) individual genetic influence on the production of dopamine - the substance from which noradrenaline is produced in the brain;

b) individual genetic influence on the intensity of noradrenaline production from dopamine and on the mechanisms that regulate this process in the main “factory” of noradrenaline - the so-called “locus coeruleus” of the brain;

c) individual genetic influence on the mechanisms for transporting noradrenaline to the required synapses along the axons of neurons extending from the “locus coeruleus”;

d) individual genetic influence on the mechanisms for neutralizing noradrenaline in synapses - that is, on the mechanisms of its reuptake from synapses into neuronal cell bodies and on the mechanisms of its chemical neutralization through breakdown into metabolites;

e) individual genetic influence on the density (number) of neuronal receptors for noradrenaline, which, moreover, may be regulated by different genes in different regions of the brain;

f) individual genetic influence on the sensitivity of noradrenaline receptors of different types (that is, influence on the “quality” of these receptors).

2. Since noradrenaline in the brain is produced from dopamine, in the general case the activities of these two neurotransmitters in the brain should therefore be weakly positively correlated. However, there may be exceptions to this rule. Thus, in the average EIE, total dopaminergic activity is quite high, whereas noradrenergic activity (if judged by the fine motor control of handwriting) is low. In LSI, both activities, dopaminergic and noradrenergic, are low. In ILE, both are high.

We will discuss various markers of noradrenaline (not only those related to handwriting) further on.

V.Talanov