Personality

I came across a article named Personality Plus by Malcom Gladwell in which he analyzes the different methods available to test and understand the personality.
The following portion of the article captured my interest...

Our personality can hold contradictory elements—is at the heart of “Strangers to Ourselves,” by the social psychologist Timothy D.Wilson. He is one of the discipline’s most prominent researchers, and his book is what popular psychology ought to be (and rarely is): thoughtful, beautifully written, and full of unexpected insights.

Wilson’s interest is in what he calls the “adaptive unconscious” (not to be confused with the Freudian unconscious). The adaptive unconscious, in Wilson’s description, is a big computer in our brain which sits below the surface and evaluates, filters, and looks for patterns in the mountain of data that come in through our senses. That system,Wilson argues, has a personality: it has a set of patterns and responses and tendencies that are laid down by our genes and our early-childhood experiences. These patterns are stable and hard to change, and we are only dimly aware of them.

On top of that, in his schema we have another personality: it’s the conscious identity that we create for ourselves with the choices we make, the stories we tell about ourselves, and the formal reasons we come up with to explain our motives and feelings. Yet this “constructed self ” has no particular connection with the personality of our adaptive unconscious. In fact, they could easily be at odds.

Wilson writes:
The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people’s uncontrolled, implicit responses, whereas the constructed self is more likely to influence people’s deliberative, explicit responses. For example, the quick, spontaneous decision of whether to argue with a co-worker is likely to be under the control of one’s nonconscious needs for power and affiliation. A more thoughtful decision about whether to invite a co-worker over for dinner is more likely to be under the control of one’s conscious, self-attributed motives.

What we really need is an understanding of how those two sides of the personality interact in critical situations

-- Excerpt of the Article ends here

He says a person could react to situations differently based on which part of the personality wins over the other and gets into action at any given circumstance

I was impressed with the analysis done. The "constructed self" here could also be referred to as "I - The ego". I think that the Adaptive conscious is created based on the intensity of our experiences, thats the reason it stops with Child-hood experiences...

And what the excersies like Meditation and Yoga does is to become aware of this Adaptive conscious train it and use it in a positive way.