steppinthrax wrote:
I have read that there are neurological differences between extroverts and introverts. I've always been an introvert. I've read read that introverts have what's known as "low cortical arousal", meaning they don't need much stimulation to get the "excited". Whereas extroverts need constant stimulation and they do this via a strong tie with the outside word, where they talk and talk and talk and talk. Introverts tend to daydream and keep to themselves. They get simple but enough energy to stimulation themselves with solitary activities.
This describes both myself and my mother to a "T".
She's passed on now, but when she was alive, when we talked about life and things, we both remarked how other people seem to think they only had an exciting time or day or week or occasion if a lot of external stuff happened, a lot of talking and socializing happened. Where, by contrast, both my mum and I would feel like "a lot happened" to interest us even when we'd just stayed home pottering about, deep in our own respective thoughts and activities, or just reading books. It was something I felt I had massively in common with mum and we always remarked at how rich our respective inner lives felt to us, and at how a lot of other people seemed to need "outer" stuff to feel that their day -- or even their inner world -- was interesting or stimulating. I'm not saying we had these incredible minds full of amazing thoughts -- I'm just saying we each felt like our own "stuff inside our heads" was plenty of fun for us.
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What's strange is extroversion is prized highly within the United States, whereas in other countries (particularly east Asian) introversion is more polite and socially acceptable.
This may sound bad, but I believe extroverted persons are "handicap" in the sense that they need some external "medicine". But people don't see it like that....
I also have always had this slight feeling that it's the social whirlwind extroverts who seem to have something lacking in themselves if they can't find excitement, stimulation and interest just from things that go on inside one's mind, but instead feel compelled to have more of an outward life than an inner richness. I don't mean that to sound as bashing as it does, and I'm not knocking highly social people for enjoying their life that way -- it's just that it always made me wonder if that was necessarily a good thing to be so dependent on external meeting of needs.
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