Observations-Welcome to the Introvert's World

During this time of self-quarantine and social distancing, it became pretty obvious that the introverts have an edge over the extroverts, as our present situation goes straight to our existential being.

Introverts have been described as outliers in a society that emphasizes the qualities of an extrovert and we have been pretty much shunned and pushed aside because we just don't fit into the noisy and oversharing world of the extrovert. Until Susan Cain's Quiet came along most introverts have plodded along on their own paths, finding a way to go about their business and trying to survive in an extroverted world by going along with the extroversion, trying to fake it until we make it. It's been uncomfortable obviously for many of us, but we adapt and then we all run home to our silence and solitude.

This enforced period of solitude and isolation comes along and we watch somewhat bemusedly yet also with a mixed reaction of satisfaction and horror as the rest of the world panics at the prospects of living in what we would consider to be our nirvana: in solitude. Understand that we are bemused but not unsympathetic to our extroverted friends, for we have been living on their nirvana, where the chaos and noise not only discomforts us, it sometimes paralyzes us to the point of incoherence. We had been forced act against our nature. Once the world has flipped and the extroverted world must react in ways that is against their nature. We are here to say: we get it, we understand, welcome to our world, we will help you to understand our world as no one had in helping us understand the extrovert world.

Book Review-The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam

The author, Shankar Vedantam, is the host of the popular NPR program by the same name. He started looking into what he termed the hidden brain when he became curious about many decisions that people made that just didn't make rational sense. He, like everyone else, assumed that we make our best decisions by relying upon our rational mind. He sensed that this was not accurate description of the  procedure by which we make all of our decisions and he sought to investigate the process by which we make our decisions. He dug into the psychological literature to get at all the existing research on biases and reasons why we usually don’t call upon our conscious or rational brain. The  resulting book is a treasure trove of studies and anecdotes that goes to prove his points.

Interestingly, this book came out in 2010, before Daniel Kahneman published his tome: Thinking: Fast and Slow and well before David Epstein published Range in 2019. They all investigated the same phenomenon albeit with different means. Vedantam is a journalist, as is Epstein, and Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winning economist. Both Vedantam and Epstein called upon the research of others to draw their conclusions whereas Kahneman had been conducting his own research with Amos Tversky for decades.

Vedantam talks about the conscious brain versus the hidden brain when digs in deeper into the research on the subconscious biases and irrational conclusions that we draw when making quick decisions. Kahneman and Epstein uses Kahneman and Tversky terms of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Indeed, conscious brain can is the System 2 and the Hidden brain is the System 1.

Vedantam establishes his argument in the first two chapters of the book and then he delves into the studies that he had gathered in the succeeding chapters. He pairs the findings with great stories which integrates nicely with his arguments and each chapter is an enjoyable read which serves a greater purpose: to show the perniciousness of the biases which dominates our hidden brain. He ultimately draws some interesting conclusions in Chapter 10, where he tries to bring everything together.

I probably should have known about this book earlier, as I would have read it before I was exposed to the works of the others. Remarkably, The Hidden Brain has withstood the test of rapidly changing knowledge and research into the unconscious mind and still tells a great set of stories which shows us that our decision making prowess is indeed affected by our hidden biases, more importantly, other people, people in positions of authority or in a position to affect lives are also affected by the hidden brain. What is worse, they are not aware about how their hidden brain affects their decisions, or they just don’t care.