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The 5 Dynamics assessment engages your brain at a level that is lower
than conscious. It is built on four foundations:
Over several decades of refinement, 5 Dynamics founder W. Michael Sturm
was able to synthesize and modify a number of highly powerful assessments
of learning, behavior, and cognition (including Gittinger & Saunders's
PAS, Wechsler's Intelligence Scales, Rokeach's Open/Closed Mind, Rotter's
Internal/External Scale) as well as Sturm's own work. In every instance,
iterations of the assessment were validated by external observation, third
party assessments, and behavioral traits.
Consequently the Starting Point Assessment measures learning, perception,
cognitive and behavioral preferences.
As a social scientist (as opposed to a clinical psychologist) Sturm looked
for a statistical technique that could both measure small but highly meaningful
differences, and would obscure from the assessment-taker the true intent
of the instrument. In this way, we are able to yield highly valid and
reliable results. The items in the assessment were painstakingly selected,
of course, for their correlations to the assessment-takers' approaches
to learning, collaborating, and behaving.
The Gestalt Cycle is both energetic and applicable to the external world.
It presents the Starting Point Assessment findings in a simple model everyone
can instantly understand and apply.
People understand it because it describes how they feel when they are
trying to get something done.
The Starting point Assessment is based on perception and the concept of
synaptic efficiency and long term potentiation (how the brain physically
learns). In layman's language, the brain likes to use neuronal pathways
that are most electro-chemically efficient. Logically, the more certain
pathways are used, the less others are used. The items in the Assessment
have been selected to appeal to certain pathways.
This principle also applies to perception. We tend to see (and miss)
what we tend to see. Some people "see" details; others constantly
"see" deadlines and timetables.
In terms of current understandings of brain function, the working hypothesis
is that when presented with a computer-based assessment containing a selection
of words, the brain registers all of the words, but only one of them may,
for example, correspond most closely to a person's preferred way of doing
things.
The brain is a top-down processor that seeks to recognize what it already
knows. Genetics, life experiences, and positive reinforcement lead to
the formation of neural networks that react to the presentation of particular
stimulus patterns. Limbic-frontal connections in the brain provide positive
emotional valence for a preferred stimulus resulting in an "Ah-ha
experience" as described in the Gestalt theory of perception. A socially
oriented person will “see” the socially oriented word foremost;
this occurs because the neural pathways of the brain that control social
function are most highly activated with emotional charge at such a stimulus
pattern.
Thus the subject perceives the socially oriented word as most "charged"
with energy and activates the neural networks
for a positive response to socialization.
In a broader sense, it is hypothesized that the destinations of these
messages control the individual's preferred modalities of perceiving,
learning, doing, and collaborating. Discrimination and decision-making
are pre-frontal brain functions, but this activity is always colored by
the energetic charge that the limbic (emotional) brain provides through
direct connections of the limbic system to frontal areas.
In order to cut through the noise of additional words presented by Thurstone
pairs, the input pathways probably activate limbic pathways to a critical
threshold and, hence, achieve an emotional charge that leads to the selection
of one word out of the four.
This is not a conscious process, although the mind subsequently
rationalizes the choice by applying reason or logic to the choice through
post-hoc attributions of value and meaning.
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