This post is part two of a two-part series.

My wife, Chris Gilbert, and I wanted to develop a unique extraterrestrial (ET) character for our recent novel, The Shadow of Time.

In a companion PT post, Chris described how she approached the problem based on her experiences as a physician who learned to see the world as her patients did to better understand their ailments.

Here, I describe a completely different approach to getting inside someone else’s head based on my experience as a neuroscientist and psychologist. I aim to apply these ideas to improving relationships.

My first step in envisioning an alien psyche was to imagine human characters who were polar opposites and whose contrasting personalities would lead to tension and conflict (writing teachers say that every scene in a novel should sizzle with conflict). I did this using the “Big-Five” personality traits: agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.1

Below are “spider charts” of two human characters whose personalities are distinctly unlike each other in every dimension of personality. On each of the five axes, the........

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