Enes' Study of Self A Network-Based Typology of Human Cognition
In my study of the self, the brain, its developmental trajectories, and their convergence with mystical traditions and artistic personality, I have arrived at a basic typology of human cognitive orientations grounded in large-scale brain network dynamics.
While there are as many human types as there are individuals, categorization becomes possible at the level of general connectivity profiles. Extreme imbalances in network dominance—especially those observed in psychopathology—reveal stable attractor states around which cognition, temperament, ideology, and creative capacity organize.
My work on mental illness and creativity suggests that a particular neural architecture—hyperfunctional Default Mode Network (DMN) dominance—predisposes individuals simultaneously to heightened creativity and vulnerability to mood disorders. When DMN hyperactivity remains insufficiently regulated, it manifests as affective instability, identity diffusion, and recursive self-referential cognition. Resolution does not occur through suppression of the DMN, but through increased modulation by the Salience Network (SN) and strengthened coupling with the Executive Control Network (ECN). This integration gives rise to creative cognition rather than pathological dysregulation.
Unintegrated DMN-dominant individuals tend toward “being”-centric cognition: a drive toward boundary dissolution, universality, and undifferentiated unity. Ideologically, this often aligns with worldviews that privilege totalizing holism or absolute unity. However, without executive rigor, these perspectives frequently remain applicatively shallow, lacking constraint, differentiation, or real-world implementability. The result is a form of idealism that is expansive in intention but developmentally incomplete—commonly observed among artists, mystics, and abstract theorists.
At the opposing pole lies ECN-dominant cognition, characterized by executive rigor, goal-directed control, and functional specialization. This orientation privileges “becoming”: differentiation, boundary maintenance, instrumental reasoning, and operational clarity. While such minds excel in practicality, science, and system-building, insufficient access to DMN-mediated self-referential and integrative processes can result in reductive dualism, over-specialization, and a fragmented understanding of meaning.
Between these poles emerges the integrated mind—a configuration capable of holding both being and becoming, universality and particularity, dissolution and form. Although this state can develop from either direction, it most often arises through the transformation of DMN-dominant individuals who successfully integrate executive structure without sacrificing depth.
This integrated configuration represents the philosopher–prophet type: a recursive creative system in which deep internal symbolic capacity is united with executive rigor. Such minds do not merely reconcile opposites abstractly; they operationalize integration, dissolving false binaries through creative synthesis. Historically rare, these individuals play a disproportionate role in cultural, philosophical, and civilizational development.
Henri Bergson wrote about the development of history as the continual opening of what was once closed followed by further closing (the inability for collective humanity to integrate at a higher level of consciousness). For Bergson, these developments, advances in consciousness, were always the product of great individuals.
In my view, the form of this integrated mind - balance between being and becoming, a recursive self-curation and development - ought to form the blueprint for the concept of a healthy mind and healthy culture.