It’s a game of focus.  Most of each moment is spent throwing out the trash.  The human body is the most sophisticated delete machine.  We filter out the noise from the office next door.  We let the stream of oncoming traffic morph into a single flowing stream of headlight after headlight.  And we ignore that crack in the sidewalk when we’re in a big enough hurry.  We are DELETE machines.

The human body does an amazing job of coping with the billions of bits of information that bombards us.  Noises, smells, internal impulses, and most of our fields of vision are never absorbed, never even considered consciously to keep us from overwhelm.  We retreat to what is comfortable, what is easy to focus on, what is within our control.

The Retreat

“It’s PAINFUL out there!” I told my teammate, and it really was.  Painful cold can be a great example of the RETREAT.  Pay close attention to where your mind is focusing on your cold walk into work in the morning.  You’re likely buried deep in your mind, thinking about the coming work day, the terrible drivers on the commute in, or the song you’ve got stuck in your head.  If you’re lucky, you’ve avoided feeling much of the discomfort of the cold by simply focusing on something else.  This is the RETREAT.

winter_depression

Physical Pain and the Tribe of 150

Recent studies in evolutionary psychology have led many to embrace the model that, thousands of years ago, we lived in tribes of about 150 people.  Since the greatest booms in population have been in the relatively recent past, we spent a major evolutionary period in these groups of 150, and our emotional systems are STILL wired as if that were the case.  And in those groups, social disapproval made you an outcast.  And outcasts were, well, CAST OUT of the group, to survive in the wild, without hope of finding a mate.  OUTCASTS DIED.

In 2003, researchers at UCLA and Macquarie University in Sydney used fMRI imaging to show that in cases of social distress such as rejection, the areas of the brain that are triggered to react are the same areas that react to physical pain.  This may explain, for example, why public speaking is THE #1 FEAR, greater than death; the threat of being rejected, or even ignored, in front of a public group triggers that ancient tribal part of our brain that still needs the support of the 150.  Losing approval still feels like pain.

the_thinker_rodin-2

The Reclusive Genius

The earliest experiences in life shape us most dramatically and often last the longest.  Maybe it was a grade school bully or an embarrassing accident that made its mark.  Maybe, more subtly, it was overprotective parents who urged us to be quiet, be nice, and behave – avoid social risks, and avoid the disapproval of our own parents.  Think of the implications of rejection by one’s own parents in the tribe of 150!  Whatever the cause, there is a subset of the modern population who have sufficient cause, and many opportunities, to engage the same strategy of retreat.

It would be a blatant stereotype to say that smart people are socially inept, but it’s a reasonable generalization to say that the hyper-intellectual - the ponderers, the philosophers, the thinkers – may find less reward in the social world.  The risks of discomfort and perceived possibility of rejection, in an effort to avoid the same feeling of physical pain we aim to avoid in the bitter cold winter, may compel these  may be more likely to retreat into their minds.

Thoughts?

Could this be the reason some people spend more time exercising their minds than others, nurturing logic, reason, and problem solving, managing abstract concepts rather than thoughts?  I don’t know.  Intuitively, there seems to be a correlation by which interest in the intellectual world increases while interest in the social world decreases.  The argument above is one possibility – ironically, what do YOU think?

References:

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/study-links-physical-pain-rejection

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