Sandeep Gautam | Equivalent eXchange

I was excited to recently find the long running blogs of Sandeep Gautam. The one I’ve looked at so far (“The Mouse Trap”) is mainly about psychology and neurology, but he seems to have a penchant for fourfolds, and some of the entries in “The Mouse Trap” talk about the same topics as my blog. He has also developed many interesting models of psychological and mental organization.

Guatam is a software developer and psychology enthusiast, from his short bio on his Psychology Today blog “The Fundamental Four”. He also has a multitude of other blogs (where does he find the time?), gives TED talks, and is just about everywhere on social media. Entries on “The Mouse Trap” are appearing less frequently these days, but it has been going since 2006.

Above is a diagram of the four fundamental evolutionary problems of humans as per psychologist Theodore Millon (and each also associated with a duality): survival or existence (pain/pleasure), adaptation (passive/active), replication (self/other), and abstraction (broad/narrow). Gautam’s Fundamental Four are the four basic drives to overcome these problems, a “lens” through which he sees psychology: food/foe (survival), flourishing (adaptation), family/friends (replication), and focus/frame (abstraction). (I hope he doesn’t mind if I added “frame” to “focus”.)

I was not familiar with either Millon’s or Gautam’s work until now. I was thinking about updating my article on Aristotle’s Four Causes, and I chanced upon Gautam’s post on the subject because of images from it. I was soon very intrigued, because I see similarities in many of his formulations and mine! Also please compare these fourfolds to the Relational Models Theory.

Some of the more interesting blog entries of “The Mouse Trap”:

http://the-mouse-trap.com/2011/11/19/the-four-mechanisms-of-evolution/
(See my Theory of Evolution)