THE PERSONALITY AND THE BRAIN:

ersonality psychology, on the one hand, and neuroscience, on the other, have at times taken routes that are far removed from mutual findings in relation to the construct that we call personality. The successive models proposed to explain personality, closer to the conceptual level than to the tangible nervous system, have competed with each other to accumulate empirical evidence describing its relationship with normal and pathological behaviour while neuroscience has aimed to describe the more pragmatic aspects of behaviour, with direct repercussions in pathologies or different manifestations of brain functioning. However, the encounter between the two approaches is a necessity that has long been called for: “Psychologist and neurophysiologist thus chart the same bay –working perhaps from opposite shores, sometimes overlapping and duplicating one another, but using some of the same fixed points and continually with the opportunity of contributing to each other's results. The problem of understanding behavior is the problem of understanding the total action of the nervous system, and vice versa. This has not always been a welcome proposition, either to psychologist or to physiologist ” (Hebb, 1949; p. XIV). The present moment represents, perhaps, the encounter between the various approaches to the study of personality in the context of a transdisciplinary understanding, characteristic of neuroscience. The latest findings indicate that the concept of personality is “more than just a concept ” and “personality constructs do reflect more than mere descriptive taxonomies ” (Sosic-Vasic, Ulrich, Ruchsow, Vasic & Grön, 2012). Although we should refer to the typology of Pavlov as the first reference of the study of personality characteristics associated with the functioning of the central nervous system (Strelau, 1997), Eysenck was the first researcher to deal with the study of human personality from th