Here is a great article discussing one particular mental ordering (autism) and how diagnosis changes and does not change lives. I find this story to be compelling because it lays bare the defining mental orders and how mental ordering defines individuals.
My usual metaphor for brain traits is an enormous equalizer loaded with perhaps billions of sliders. You could conceptualize these sliders as broad categories like autism or obsessive compulsive disorder, but it may be more appropriate to scale the sliders as individual traits like those which make up the diagnostic criteria for the various mental states we have so-far defined.
In any given individual a particular slider may be higher or lower depending on various contributing factors. It would be somewhat rare to locate someone who had all the sliders for a particular concept (autism or even masculinity) pushed all the way to the top (or pulled all the way down), but we should expect that for any given individual few sliders would be resting right in the middle.
(This model should work for genetic expression as well.)
Food for thought.
