The introvert brain is not the same as an extravert brain

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The introvert brain is not the same as an extravert brain

13 February 2023

Neuroscientist and author Friederike Fabritius, writing for CNBC:

One Harvard study found that introverts’ brains work differently, and have thicker gray matter compared to extroverts. In people who are strongly extroverted, gray matter was consistently thinner. Introverts also showed more activity in the frontal lobes, where analysis and rational thought take place. Another study that scanned brains of both introverts and extroverts found that, even in a relaxed state, the introverted brain was more active, with increased blood flow.

I never thought of looking at it this way. The thicker their grey matter, the less a person generally talks. The thinner a person’s grey matter, the more they talk, possibly nonstop. Now there’s a topic of dinner table conversation for you.

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introversion, personality, psychology

Ideas to help introverts and extroverts work together

14 September 2022

Philip Coggan, writing for the Economist’s Bartleby column, with workplace strategies helping introverts and extraverts to more effectively work together, despite their personality differences.

Then there’s this:

The study also found that the children of professionals were more likely to be extrovert. It could simply be that children who grow up in more prosperous homes are less likely to face the kind of stressful events that undermine self-confidence. People with higher self-confidence may apply for more prestigious jobs and may be more likely to believe that their efforts will be rewarded; those with a negative self-image may feel it is not worth trying too hard.

Maybe I’m reading this paragraph in the wrong context, but the suggestion seems to be introverts see themselves negatively, and aren’t so confident. That’s not my understanding of introversion.

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Introverts prefer foods that are not so spicy says Kurzgesagt

9 September 2022

Regardless of the subject matter the Kurzgesagt videos are never dull. Their latest takes on the question of why people are lonely, and offers some constructive solutions. One initiative are the newly launched Kurzgesagt Meetups… where likeminded Kurzgesagt followers across the world, who are aged eighteen or over, can arrange gatherings locally.

Extraversion and introversion also features in the discussion, where I learnt introverts are generally not fans of spicy food. I’d not thought about that before. You learn something new everyday.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: an introvert on steroids?

27 May 2022

Detail, Imaginary Prisons, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Detail from Imaginary Prisons, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Warning, spoilers follow. Return to this article once you’ve finished reading the book.

Imagine you live in a sprawling multi-storied house. The lower levels are flooded by an ocean, while the upper floors are shrouded in mist and clouds. The seemingly endless labyrinth like hallways are adorned with classical style marble statues, and for whatever reason, sea birds have taken to nesting among some of these figures. But it’s not really a house you’re in, it’s more like a complex with the dimensions of a city, and one none too small at that.

This is the world, Piranesi, the titular character in the second novel of British author Susanna Clarke (published by Bloomsbury Publishing, August 2021), finds himself in. Piranesi knows little about how the house came to be, or when he arrived there, although he has vague recollections of living elsewhere before. Come to that, Piranesi knows hardly anything about himself. He’s perhaps aged in his mid-thirties, and if pressed, couldn’t even be sure his name was Piranesi.

Despite these peculiar circumstances, Piranesi otherwise seems content, and goes about his day to day life as if nothing were amiss. But how would you feel were it you in Piranesi’s place? Wouldn’t you wonder how you ended up in this predicament, and whether there was a way leave, and return to the real world? Wouldn’t you miss family and friends, and wonder if they felt the same way? Wouldn’t you crave the company of others at least some of the time?

But Piranesi doesn’t appear to be the least bit perturbed. Why though? Does he have some sort of problem? Does he loathe all people, and is thankful for the sanctuary the house offers, a place devoid of humans? Or is he perhaps an introvert, who’s found his happy place? Yet Piranesi isn’t completely alone in the house. Once or twice a week, he goes to a certain area of the complex, where he briefly meets a middle-aged man, whom Piranesi refers to as The Other.

If Piranesi knows little about himself, he knows even less about The Other. He has no idea who this gentleman really is — although he believes him to be some sort of academic — nor does he know where The Other resides in the house. The Other meanwhile frequently questions Piranesi, and even sets him tasks, some relatively arduous. One such request required Piranesi to walk to a distant point in the house, on a journey lasting two days return.

To make a comparison, and better understand the scale of the house, I looked up the walking time and distance from Sydney’s CBD to the western suburb of Penrith on Google, and was advised the trek is approximately fifty-six kilometres in length, and the non-stop walk would take almost twelve hours.

Of course the question of exactly what sort of place Piranesi finds himself in came up repeatedly as I read the novel, particularly as he never encountered anyone else — at least not at first — in the sprawling complex. While plenty of Clarke’s readers (myself included) have ideas as to the nature of the house, and what it really is, I found myself wondering how Piranesi could remain oblivious to his acute isolation, and not miss the company of other people.

After all, surely not even the most extreme of introverts would continuously crave the deep solitude of the apparently empty house. But there were indications Piranesi was lonely. He regarded the sea birds nesting in the statues in some of the hallways as friends, and would often have conversations — albeit one-sided — with them. But when it becomes obvious another person is lurking, out of sight, in the house, Piranesi is keen to find out who they are.

In trying to understand Piranesi’s apparently people averse personality, I would describe him as an introvert. But no ordinary — if there is such a thing — introvert. To live alone for years in a vast complex, spending perhaps an hour at most, once a week, with one other person could not be anyone’s ideal. While it can argued something else is going on, that he is unaware of, Piranesi’s outright acceptance of his plight remains compelling. Piranesi is certainly an introvert, but he’s more, he’s an introvert on steroids.

Lockdown, an introvert’s paradise, now sadly missed

28 March 2022

Almost two-thirds of readers surveyed by London based magazine The Face reported missing pandemic imposed lockdowns, with many reporting “significant improvements in day-to-day-life.”

You might be surprised to learn that an overwhelming majority of respondents reported that, yeah, actually, they did miss lockdown life – 66.9 per cent of them, to be exact. For all the sadness and boredom born out of the pandemic, many of you experienced significant improvements in day-to-day-life.

As an introvert who enjoyed lockdowns, I couldn’t go passed this thought:

“[Lockdown] was an introvert’s paradise. I miss it immensely,” says 23-year-old Sarah, who also described the most challenging thing about the pandemic was “it ending”.

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introversion, personality, psychology

Loneliness is an affliction of epidemic proportions, a visual essay by Alvin Chang

28 September 2023

Twenty-four hours in an invisible epidemic is an especially poignant edition of visual essay magazine, The Pudding, produced by New York City based journalist Alvin Chang.

The epidemic in question is not Covid-19, though the lockdowns triggered by the pandemic have aggravated another malady: loneliness.

The pandemic exacerbated social isolation, and we’re still not back to pre-pandemic levels. Being alone isn’t necessarily the same as being lonely. But according to a meta-analysis of studies, more people have reported feeling lonely every year since 1976. In short, there really is a loneliness epidemic.

This is case study, Chang looks at the profiles of seventy-two fictitious persons, one of whom is probably similar to you. But look at the profiles of the people who differ from you. Some people are truly living in isolation, and their only interactions — for want of a better word — with others in the course of a day may only be a visit to the supermarket.

I know a number of these people will be introverts, and possibly not so bothered by social isolation, but think of those who are not. This cannot be easy on them.

For another perspective see The Loneliness Project, and also Why You Are Lonely and How to Make Friends, which offers some solutions, by Kurzgesagt.

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introversion, personality, psychology

A return to blogging RSS and blogrolls for content discovery

6 December 2022

Links page, disassociated.com, late 1999

While I’m not one hundred percent sure we’re entering the end-days of social media, some recent talk of a resurgence in blogging, and a return to using RSS for content discovery, is encouraging. It’s kind of the web I know the best. But like anyone else, I can be found on the socials, Twitter and Mastodon, among them. I should add I’m an introvert, so my socials are relatively quiet. And no, the irony of that last sentence is not lost on me.

I first acquired the disassociated domain name, disassociated.com.au, in 1997. disassociated.com, meanwhile, came along in early 2003. But not before someone else, who’d bought the name, tried to sell it to me in the early 2000’s. But way back in the day, a person’s own website was always regarded the central pivot of their online presence. Pages on the early socials, Friendster, MySpace, and later Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, were always seen as “outposts”.

As a web person you had presences there, because everyone else did, but they were not core to your overall online presence. And for good reason. The socials might have been public web-spaces, but they were privately owned. Fall foul of their terms of service, and you stood have your account suspended, or worse, permanently shut down. Sometimes without recourse, because you were in the realm of someone else who was setting the rules.

But no problem, you still had your largely untouchable core online presence, your website, at your own domain, which was self-hosted somewhere. Until we didn’t. The socials became too easy to use. They were free, and no hosting charges needed to be paid. Having a self-hosted website required some degree — no matter how little — of technical competence. Twitter and Instagram offered unlimited server capacity, ease of use, and, through their sprawling memberships, a multitude of potential followers. No more drawn out wrangling with SEO to find eyes to see your stuff, an audience was already present. You simply (sort of) had to make yourself known to them.

But before SEO and the socials came along, audience building was a little trickier. Website owners and bloggers were required to put in a lot more groundwork. In the late 1990’s I was writing blog posts before blogging was a thing. Back then we called these blogs online journals. To make ourselves known to other people then, we might write an online journal post about them, while linking to their website at the same time. Another option was through guestbook comments.

Guestbooks were one of the earliest methods of interacting with a website owner, and were hugely popular in the late 1990’s. There were akin to the comments section of a blog post, although the discussion was confined to a single page on a website, where the guestbook was situated. Another tried and true way of making yourself known to other website owners was by way of a links page. Above is the links page that featured on disassociated in late 1999. I know a lot of those links are gone now, but later on I might click links and see who is still around.

I guess you could say website link pages evolved into the blogrolls that once adorned the main pages, usually a side bar (which I stopped using about ten years ago) of a blog, when blogs per se arrived. The search engines however bought about the demise of the old school blogroll, from around 2007 or 2008. They were concerned many of the inclusions to what were the favourite websites of the blogger, were paid placements. In those earlier days, the search engines were also opposed to the practice of linking to so-called “bad neighbourhoods.”

Bad neighbourhoods were seen as websites having little, or no relevance, to the subject matter of the blog that linked out to them. For instance, it was seen as bad practice for a blog focussed on film production to link to a blog focussed on baking cupcakes. That could only be downright suspicious, couldn’t it? Too bad if the cupcake blogger was the significant other of the film production blogger, interlinking was simply unacceptable, and might earn you a slap down from a search engine.

Hopefully those days are behind us. The web is too vast and diverse a place for anyone to stay in their own lane. But blogrolls have been making a comeback. Not so much on individual blogs, but in the form of a number of aggregator websites, which are focused on content discovery, and the work of outstanding writers and bloggers. Chief among them are feedle, Blogroll, ooh.directory, and FeedLand, which is a feeds repository.

As I wrote on Twitter recently, “search engines are great for finding resources on topics of interest but scrolling through lists of blogs and randomly spotting something compelling is plain fun”. I for one am hopeful of a blogging renaissance, and other ways of discovering content, far from the shadows of the social media giants.

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Little Tornadoes, screenplay co-written by Christos Tsiolkas

6 April 2022

Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas, author of Seven and a Half, teamed up with Melbourne based filmmaker Aaron Wilson to write the screenplay for Little Tornadoes, trailer, which premiered at last year’s Melbourne International Film Festival:

Introverted* Leo is a steelworker at his small town’s local plant. After his wife abandons him without explanation, leaving him to care for their two young children, he is bereft – barely able to cook a decent meal or keep the household running. So when a recently-arrived Italian colleague suggests that his sister, Maria, act as surrogate homemaker, Leo reluctantly accepts. But can one woman’s warm, nurturing presence fill the void left by another, and can Leo yield to the winds of change?

Little Tornadoes is set in 1971, and was filmed in Tocumwal, in New South Wales, where Wilson grew up. In a voiceover in the trailer, one of the characters utters the words “so long ago, it was a different country.” I’m not sure of the context of her words, but here the film somehow feels more like it was set in 1921 rather than 1971. Little Tornadoes arrives in Australian cinemas on Thursday 12 May 2022.

*Leo’s either an introvert, or he’s reserved. You cannot be introverted, just like you cannot be called blonded if you have blond hair, right? Pedantic I know…

The difference between introversion and social anxiety

17 December 2021

Kylie Maddox Pidgeon is a Sydney based psychologist, who is also an introvert. The world needs more psychologists who are introverts, because there are some psychologists who are extraverts but appear to have little real-world understanding of introverts. To put it mildly. One once told me I needed to be more outgoing, because I seemed to be too reserved. Thanks for that.

Kylie is a psychologist, academic and introvert. I met Kylie playing netball in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales and I wouldn’t have guessed she was an introvert. She loves socialising and sparks with energy during conversation, but she says if she overdoes it, she feels drained and can experience headaches.

My favourite analogy when explaining introversion is to suggest introverts have a constantly playing media device in their minds. There’s times we’re able to turn down the volume, say for the first hour or two of a social gathering, but as time passes the volume from our in-built media device begin increasing, as the ceaseless thoughts cascading through our minds begin competing for attention. At some point we need to get away, to somewhere quiet, to make sense of this almost subconscious brainstorming.

But instead of being recognised as an introvert, our sometimes reserved demeanour can be mistaken for social anxiety. Although something else entirely, there is a link between introversion and social anxiety, but as Maddox Pidgeon points out, there is a key difference. Social anxiety occurs when a person is worried about what others will think of them. That’s generally not the case for introverts. If they’ve had enough of being at a party and want to leave, they won’t be concerned at what anyone thinks.

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introversion, personality, psychology

Loner, by Georgina Young

29 October 2021

It’s a difficult path to walk, the journey to becoming the person we want to be. There’s the frequent self-doubt, and the sometimes futile attempts to appease those around us, who expect our lives to take a direction more in suiting with their preferences. How many of us have been in, or are in, such a place? At least Lona, the twenty year old protagonist of Loner (published by Text Publishing, August 2020), written by Melbourne based Australian author Georgina Young, knows what she doesn’t want.

But then the arts student decides one day a life in the arts isn’t for her. Nor the dead-end jobs she calls work. Lona goes from having some direction, to having almost none. All that seems to fulfil her are books, a part-time gig as a DJ, and photography, an interest that requires her to sneak into her old art school to access the dark room to develop her pictures.

Loner is one of the titles shortlisted in this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and in addition to her other woes, it seems to me Lona also has to grapple with being an introvert. Choosing to be in her own company, or perish forbid, enjoying being in her own company, is another source of self-doubt for Lona, since some of the people around her probably feel she is lacking as a result. It’s kind of difficult then. Trying to find out who you are, while others are expressing disapproval at what you are.