Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 20 of 91
Introspection versus extrospection
These asymmetries originate from a phenomenon well established in the cognitive neurosciences. Any human behavior has many moving parts, roughly divisible into background and foreground elements. Background components involve our evolutionary history, genetic makeup, and fetal environment. Foreground components involve acute hormones, prior experiences, and immediate environmental triggers. Alone in our skulls, we have privileged access to both sets of components, providing detailed knowledge of our psychological interiors, motivations, and intentions. Formally called introspection, we know what we intend to mean or to communicate on a minute-to-minute basis. The problem is, nobody else does. Other people can’t read our minds. The only information others have about our interior states and our motives is what our words say and how our faces and bodies appear. This is formally called extrospection. We are amazingly blind to the limits of extrospective information. We know when our actions fail to match our inner thoughts and feelings, but we often forget that this knowledge is not available to others. The disparity can leave us bewildered or surprised at how we come across to other people. As poet Robert Burns wrote, “Oh that God the gift would give us / to see ourselves as others see us.” Introspective knowledge clashing with extrospective information is the Big Bang of most human conflicts. It has been directly observed between people trying to give directions to a lost soul and between warring nations trying to negotiate a peace agreement. It forms the basis of most breakdowns in communication, including conflicts in marriage.