but they can cause terrible trauma. for children can be broken by bare touch. and only the will of life can make old pains and sores. fragile people on r.t. . and

welcome back to the big picture i'm sam sacks in for tom hartman and this half hour we're going to revisit a conversations with great minds that tom had recently with susan kane the author of the critically acclaimed new york times best seller book quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking we live in a society where extroversion is celebrated and young people in particular are encouraged to be extroverts but in this conversation susan came challenges this norman explains how we just love introverts to be well introverts then society as a whole could do it better so here it is tom's conversations with great minds with author susan page. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by susan cain susan is an author like sure and former wall street corporate attorney she graduated undergrad from princeton university received her j.d.

from harvard law school she's also the author of the critically acclaimed new york times best selling book quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking she joins me now from our new york studios susan walkable thank you so much it's a pleasure to be here thanks for joining us i thought i have to say by the way in addition to your book being extraordinary your ted talk was exceptional as well i don't see the sort of some i've gone viral it's. what thank you what brought you to this topic of intrusion extrovert. well you know i'd say what brought me to it was really my my own life history i consider myself an interviewer and i think like many ensure verts from the time i was a small child so you know as early as four i had the sense of the world having different expectations for me from the ones that i had for myself and i couldn't i obviously didn't have a language for describing the situation but it was something that i continued to notice as i grew older and before i became a writer i actually had a career as

a wall street lawyer and i looked around at my fellow attorneys and i realized that many of the tourney is who i admired most. were really good at what they did because they were more quiet more flecked more careful more thoughtful and and that the these traits were standing them in good stead and that we had no real language for talking about identity in the workplace we had the language of gender and we had the language of respect nobody was talking about personality style even though back then and since then i've come to believe that that's one of the most fundamental aspects of who we are. let's hope i'm sorry no i was just going to say and and i believe that our society really undervalues the quieter side of the personality spectrum and that that's that's. that's a problem for introverts themselves but it's a problem for society as

a whole because it means that we're not making the most of the talents. of the quieter people and introversion you're not meaning shy or necessarily even just quiet. what's your call young stuff and. you know the whole myers briggs thing and all that what grade were were what are your points of agreement disagreement with that high. how do you define introversion and extroversion well i really like carl young definition which. temporary parlance has come to be seen as interior you recharge your batteries by being by yourself or being very quietly with with one or two people you know well or do you tend to recharge your batteries by going out and being at a party so that's one way of looking at it and the other way that i think is really instructive is to understand that it's about how you respond to stimulation physically as well as emotionally so introverts feel at their most alive in their

most switched-on when they're in environments where there is less stimulation coming at them by which i don't mean intellectual stimulation but rather just less less of a sense of how about less you know you just if you're in lights that kind of thing sensory stimulation yeah whereas extroverts really crave more stimulation in order to feel at their best and when they're not getting it they start to feel bored and restless you know there's a serious about the suggests the fellows control is the choke point it's the all of all of our sensory inputs with the exception of the all factors sense or smell go through before they are distributed to the other parts of the cortex that process vision in the ox and. go in the auditorium the in the in the bridle region so on and again the volume control of the elements is controlled largely by dopamine and the people who have normally higher levels of dope i mean

tend to be quieter because the world is loud to them they've got a lot of auditory and poor a lot of visual you know everything they notice and people have low levels of dopamine tend to be very loud didn't and this is a theory of a.d.h. d. or the hyperactive part of the to be very loud because the world is distant and quiet they're trying to loud and it up and this is why stimulant drugs which kick up the opening. because people become quiet you know the part of our school for right does not make any sense to you in this context well it's funny you know i think we're still at the very early stages of understanding the neurological and biological bases of these personality styles. one of the things that we're starting to see from the research is that one of the things that distinguishes introverts from extroverts is how active their reward networks are so extroverts actually seem to have more active reward networks than introverts do meaning and excuse me that

when they see the prospect of something appealing like an attractive stranger across the room let's say their their networks get very easily activated and those networks are actually based on dope i mean so you know in some ways confirm is the opposite of of the kind of framework you were talking about. with their logo for me and so they're more sensitive to you know the threshold has been is different right . but the hungry person notices food. and there's that way of looking at it as well. you know i think what's interesting about seeing these styles through that lens is first of all just the idea of it that we kind of are who we are and there's there's you can will yourself to be different only to a certain degree and second that these these biological roots have really profound impact on the way we act in the world so if you look at that the what i was just

talking about with the word networks. having more activated reward network means for extroverts on the one hand it's a quite lovely quality and it means it gives you kind of the extra impetus that you need to go out and to seize the day and to just do it all the precepts that are so valued in our society i mean other hands it also makes you more likely if you're an extrovert to go out and take a lot of risks and. i was i warranted risks and there's actually just a recent study that came out that found that extroverts are more likely to go after immediate gratification and introverts more likely to be able to wait for delayed gratification so. there are pros and cons to both ways of being and they're related to some degree in our biology do you do you think. going back to. well actually this whole spectrum of things there are theories of these being these these different temperaments i guess you could call them being adaptive or you know

there's the theory that depression might be adaptive because among primates the depressive ones are the ones who disengage from society become basically the sentinels for the community and there was a study back in the seventy's really pulled the depressed chimps out of the group in the in the group died because that nobody was warning to the predators and you could argue the depressed people among us are the ones you know the albert koos they're the ones who are saying look out. and you know the eighty h.d. the hunter versus farmer theory that you know some people are are you know more in . a good society benefits from having both the you know the do you think that there's and adapt. or maladaptive aspect to either introversion or extroversion yeah i absolutely do and i think it's sad to operative one of the most interesting things that i found from my research is that there are many many quotation marks introverts and extroverts in almost every single species in the animal kingdom and this is true all the way down to the level of proof lies. and the reason for this

is exactly what you're suggesting that that the two types have different kinds of survival strategy is so over the course of evolutionary history. that one type survives better in one condition and one type in the other condition. there's this amazing study of pumpkin seed fish where the biologist david sloan wilson went to a pond to fish and dropped a. a trap in the middle of the pond and the more extroverted fish went swimming straight into the trap if the trap had been a real predator those fish would have been eaten and it would have been the introverted ones who were kind of cleaning service sides of the pods are not going anywhere near the trout they were the ones who would have survived. when he managed to get the introverted fish back to his lab along with the extroverted fish in that case the extraverted fish did better because they they were more comfortable more quickly adapting to a new environment and starting to eat and go about their business whereas the introverted fish were freaked out by the new environment as they think introverts

introverted humans kind of know this you know they often need a period of adjustment when they're in a new situation really just like the fish that's it's it's remarkable it's it's doctorow rubber maurice's so i think it was in the book the edison gene do this research. traditionally agricultural societies and the. more people who were the opposite of a t.h.d. or hyperactive or what might be interpreted as an extrovert and because they were traditionally people who for years and years and years would just pick bugs off plants all day long you know. and hunting gathering societies had higher levels of of the same. you could almost translate eighty h.d. for introversion or for extroversion rather and the farmer for introversion and. do you think that our society favors one of the oh absolutely and you know that's

really at the end of the day that's why i wrote my book because i believe in the bias in our society for and for extroverts and against introverts is deep in its profound i i really believe it's as deep as i am let's say where women were at the time of the one nine hundred fifty s. or the one nine hundred sixty s. where we really have a cultural preference for the kind of person who is bold he's assertive is comfortable in the spotlight. and. and children know this from a very early age they know it from the minute they get to school they often know it from parents who might be very well intentioned but also from an early age communicate to their children that that they should be more out there they should be more growth areas and children feel these things very deeply and had old story too i get hundreds of letters. constantly from people telling me these stories that's remarkable i want to get into whether that you mentioned like women and. whether the you know that who turns out to be temporal it seems or at least it

seems to be changing whether all sources saudis preference for extroverts over introverts as to what we'll get to that right after the break of thoughts or we do we'll be right back more conversations with great minds with susan page after the. government no longer represents the people. the people. the way or. the.

choose your language. calling me kevin though if i'm going to. choose the it's the consensus here to. keep the opinions that invigorating to.

choose the stories that in high life truth be access to your office. or go back to conversations of great minds with susan kane susan susan is an author lecturer former wall street corporate attorney and the author of the critically acclaimed new york times best selling book quiet the power of interference in a world that can't stop talking let's get back to it susan just as we as we hit the break you were mentioning society's preference for extroverts and how you would draw an analogy just society's preference arguably for men over women or at least in terms of power situations in the one nine hundred fifty s. versus today. there are probably apocryphal stories about times when women had met

power over men you know the amazons. as in women up the river. and and actually you know some indications in some cultures the major lineal matriarchal cultures of many native american tribes and of the icelanders for example. are there are times. in have there been times in our culture in modern american culture in the last five centuries or european culture western culture where. introversion has been prized over extroversion. it's a great question and i would not say there is a time that introversion was prized over extroversion norton or my colleague for such a time it would have what it really calling for is a time of balance between the two just as i think many of the early activists for women's rights were looking for equality between men and women not not the

offensive. of matriarchy but yeah you know interestingly. during the time of let's say the nineteenth century up until the top of the turn of the twentieth century we moved in a society that historians. a cult call a culture of character and then moved at the turn of the twentieth century to a culture of personality so in the culture of character we were living in an agricultural society people were living in small towns alongside people they had known all their lives and they valued each other based on based on their internal worth based on their character based on the good deeds that they performed for their neighbors were that they performed when no one else was looking and so in a society like that there wasn't really a such a distinction between introverts and extroverts it was more a question of who you were but then at the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of big business and urbanization and people leaving these small towns and venturing forth into cities where they now had to look for jobs and go for job

interviews and pay sales calls and basically book too. to distinguish themselves from other people and to make a good impression on people who they had never met before all this time and that is one qualities of personal magnetism and charisma and dominance and these kinds of things rose to the fore and in a way we're really still living with that heritage today. i think we're reaching a kind of turning point where we're realizing that the values of a sales based society are not really enough for us and we're we're focusing now on questions of innovation and this kind of thing and that's actually been in the making for the last twenty or thirty years as we've seen the rise of the tech industry and i think people have started to see that people of all kinds of personalities have been contributing in pretty profound ways so we're starting to see this shift but it's still going to be

a long time coming to appreciate the introverts steve was doing x. as much as the extrovert steve jobs is exactly exactly that that era that you talked about the lead one hundred century you read on walden pond and. i mean it's been forty years since i read it but. i remember thinking at the time throw i had to be the world's most eloquent interviewer and arguably emerson and i suppose walt whitman although he thought he did like to you know travel around the jurors. were those the the kind of speakers of their time who exemplified introversion as a cultural value or character as a cultural value yet you know they were some of them i think arguably lincoln might have been that kind of a person he was actually praised i think it was emerson as as a man who did not offend by superiority and he had a very modest. presentation which was prized at the time but also you know even if

you go across the pond to the romantic poets of great britain you also saw this care. celebration of the solitary thinker the solitary figure who felt things deeply these things were prized at that time and we've we've lost sight of that more recently. though he was there too you know when you talk about well through must be the world's most eloquent interviewer i think there are a lot of eloquent introverts out there and i think if you look probably at many of the great artists and writers working today you also find a lot of introverts but it's just that there's a pressure nowadays to really be able to go out and also be a public spokesperson at the same time and yet there are some who and you talk about this your own experience of the some who who have learned how to dance in both worlds i if you score me on a myers briggs i'm an extreme introvert and i've always worked in radio and i've worked as a writer which are actually fairly solitary things of radio it's one person one

microphone even t.v. it's one person one camera although in t.v. i find a lot of my colleagues are clearly extroverts and radio most of my colleagues are clearly introverts and i have noticed the same thing just going on my book tour i would say probably i don't know eighty five percent of the radio hosts who if interviewed me if not more introverted and t.v. is the opposite you know i think the media those two mediums. are more appropriate for those it seems but so but for myself you know when i was twenty one years old i took a deal carnegie course and i learned how to pretend i was an extrovert and a very very useful skill you want through a similar learning can you tell us about that and what's your advice to introverts who might feel intimidated by the extroverts of the world or might you know want to to use their introversion in a way in the extroverts world. well i mean personally for me i guess i've been going through that in one way or another for most of my adult life because i went

to law school a very very soon out of college and law school and many parts. for about seven years and so obviously doing those things you have to kind of be out there being able to present to be able to speak. to the public speaking in particular was always difficult for me it was always something that i found kind of scary not all introverts do by the way some are really comfortable with public speaking but it wasn't that way for me. but i really systematically worked through my fear by trying to practice public speaking in small manageable juices until i reached a point where i'm actually now pretty comfortable with it and i'd say that introverts in general that it's important to have those kinds of skills even even if it's not your preferred way of being to be able to kind of step out of your preferred way of being temporarily for the sake of a greater project and the sake of a work project or the sake of of

a person. you might want to throw your extroverted wife a surprise party even if that's not your cup of tea so i think acquiring the skills to do those things and and sort of judiciously pushing yourself to do those things is a good thing as long as. the base you're honoring who you really are and you're willing to come back to your core self when you're not pushing yourself out there all the time what's the nature of your experience and your research what's the outcome of introverts and with extroverts interpersonal relationships your marriage your or go-gos kinds of really deep friendships do interest should interest be looking for extroverts or should they be looking for introverts or are there are pitfalls for both who people need to know about yeah that's such a good question and i was curious about the same thing when i did my book research and what i found is that there are pros and cons to both ways and in fact. if you

look at the research it seems that about fifty percent of couples are introvert extrovert and then the other fifty percent are assorted. couples where people are meeting with one kind and yet their present comes to both for introvert extrovert couples there's the obvious advantage. of a kind of sense of the whole being greater than the two parts and each one is complimenting the other and each one is attracted to the other because they have talents that the other does not have but the downside for these couples well there are a bunch of them probably more than i have time to tell you now but i have them in my book but i'd say that the main one that i heard about over and over again is the question of well how often are we going to go out as a couple you can have an extrovert who whose idea of the perfect weekend is party after partying and the introverted wants to stay home and snuggle on the sofa that's when you do about that and and it really calls for

a lot of maturity and self-awareness and being willing to negotiate a kind of compromise that works for both. and then on the flip side if you have to introverts married to each other you can kind of. you understand each other really well but you might feel a sense of. lacking the person who's going to kind of push the two of you out a little bit because everybody needs that to some degree and i when i've interviewed couples who are made of student made up of two extroverts you sometimes are kind of spinning out there. and they they say that they lack a sense of anchoring and and they don't spend enough time together because they're they're always so outward turned off so. yeah so pros and cons both ways and i'm sorting all these couples that are known going you know. what absolutely. yes the funny thing with this whole subject you can really start seeing the entire world through fist lens and everybody you know much of what you've written about

has. interests can learn how to. behave like extroverts can learn extroversion skills as it were to function in the extroverted world is there are a flip side to that do you have lessons for extroverts you know how to become more introverted. yeah and you know in general i would not say i mean my main goal is to make introverts act more like extroverts it's more really to do. it to celebrate the qualities of both and so very different some of the ways that extroverts would do well to act more like introverts and there's a few of them. through one for example as we know from studies of creativity that. the most creative people across a broad variety of fields over time have been people with serious streaks of introversion these were people who were comfortable going off by themselves and working deeply by themselves and sitting by themselves so that they could kind of

pull their own original thoughts from deep inside their minds and if you're not comfortable with or willing to put in that solitary time you might not be able to get to that place so so one thing for extroverts is simply to be to develop the comfort of spending time alone and then another interesting thing is. the physiologist out of grand management professor at. work in school recently did this amazing study where he found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do and the reason is that they're more likely to let their employees run with their ideas and implement their ideas whereas extroverts can get really excited about what they're doing and and put their own stamp on things more and so other people's ideas don't ever see the light of day so one thing extroverts can do to take a page from the introvert playbook is to just kind of step back

a little bit and let other people take the spotlight and and run with things as you can. absolutely brilliant thank you so much for being with us to thank you it was such a pleasure i really enjoyed it to see this and other conversations with great minds go to our website it conversations with great minds dot com. and that's the way it is tonight friday february first two thousand and thirteen for more information on any of the stories we've covered visit our website to free speech dot org and r.t.e. dot com and if you missed any of tonight's show you can now watch it in h.d. at hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture also check out our two you tube channels there are links at tom hartman dot com and don't forget as tom always says democracy begins with you get out there and get active tag your it.

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