How to care for introverts / extroverts

This pair of wonderful diagrams has been circulating around the internet without source or acknowledgement – but as far as I can see the original designers are here, and we should acknowledge their brilliance.

For me, there are several reasons why these diagrams are great. First, they get right the meaning of introversion and extraversion. The popular misconception is that introverts are shy and don't get on with people, or are lacking in social skills, whereas extraverts (or extroverts, as it's now often spelled) are gregarious and get on with people splendidly. But in Jung’s original conception, introversion is a focus on the inner contents of one’s mind, and extraversion is a focus on external objects and the outside world. So extraverts get energy from other people, and introverts get energy from thinking. It isn’t that introverts don’t like other people or don’t know how to deal with them: it’s that they find them draining of energy (though not quite in the sense of this Dilbert cartoon). Introverts can be very socially skilled, though they’re unlikely ever to shine in a field such as telesales. It’s rare to find an extrovert with poor social skills (though they do exist), but it’s common to find extroverts who prefer to do their thinking by talking to other people.

The second reason these diagrams why these diagrams are great is that they’re actually useful. Most discussions of extraversion and introversion in pop psychology or HR literature focus on “finding your type” or working out where you are on the introversion-extraversion spectrum, but don't tell you what to do about it - except, usually, to imply that if you're an introvert you shouldn't be promoted into management or do any kind of job which involves working with people. (Hence the need for ripostes, such as Susan Cain's Quiet.) These diagrams address the problem that if you're an extrovert you probably don't know how extroverts like to be treated (and they're unlikely to tell you), and if you're an introvert you may know what extraverts like but don't have the confidence to do it for them. These are diagrams which offer the possibility of a better world.

And the third reason why these diagrams are great is of course that they're superb pieces of design. Pithy and memorable text, engagingly laid out. (I think the variation in type sizes forces one subconsciously to slow down and pay more attention while reading the text, hence encouraging one to pay attention to what it actually says.) Writers and designers of motivational aphorisms, take note.

Which to Teach, Procedure or Understanding?

When I’m showing a colleague how to do something on their computer and I try to explain why it works that way, often they’ll say: “Don’t tell me how it works, just tell me what I need to do.”

The reason I try to explain how it works is that referring back to the underlying system is how I myself remember things. It is, I think usually a better strategy overall: it equips one better to cope with unexpected situations, such as a software upgrade which moves the buttons or changes their names. But what I have to remind myself is that many people really don’t want to know all that; they just want to know what to do.

The trouble is that it’s sometimes very hard to devise a procedure – what the mathematicians call an algorithm, or sequence of instructions – which is really robust so that someone without any understanding at all can follow it and get the desired result every time. For example, what instructions would you give someone to enable them to get across a city by bus, if they don’t really understand what a bus route is or what governs a bus’s starting and stopping?

In the magnificent from-the-inside book about autism Send in the Idiots, that was the problem which confronted Henry and Sheila, who wanted to teach their autistic daughter Elizabeth (age 23) to get from their house to the public library, which she loved, by bus on her own. They’d shown her the way to the bus stop and explained the bus numbers and how the motions made by people at the bus stop attract the driver’s attention and make the bus pull over. “She might not have realized [that there was a correlation between people sticking out their hands and the bus pulling in], not because she lacked deductive reasoning but because she might have noticed the green stain on the person’s sneakers instead, the misplaced apostrophe in the advertisement on the side of the bus.”

Next they had to teach her when to get off the bus. They started with a street map and a bus route map, and she understood the differences between them. But when they tried the trip together, with a portable copy of the bus map, she couldn’t follow their route. “Each time the bus stopped, Elizabeth thought that she was to count off a dot, except that the bus stopped for traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, as well as to pick up or let off passengers. And, to make things worse, it also didn’t stop every time that it was supposed to. There weren’t passengers to let off or pick up at every point designated on the map.” Trying to follow the bus map, she became increasingly confused and distressed, to the point where Sheila had to take her off the bus.

The next strategy was to teach her to count streets, to use just the street map and to count the streets to her [destination]. However, when they tried this, she disputed their interpretation of a street. She wanted to count everything that was paved as a street. Again the map didn’t match what she was seeing. Elizabeth’s parents tried to wean her off this by telling her to count only those paved routes that had street signs. This had the potential for excluding entrances to parking garages and walkways. She was good at noticing details, so it seemed safe to assume that she would notice every street sign and cross-reference it with the map. However, not every street on the map had a sign – far from it, especially when they got downtown. They also tried by counting only streets that had white lines drawn on them. But some of the wider streets had several lanes – so several white lines – and some of the narrower streets had no lines. This didn’t work either.

They’d been trying for three weeks, when Elizabeth’s distress during another unsuccessful attempt Elizabeth’s distress forced them to get off the bus early yet again. They were feeling a deep sense of failure. Blind people travelled on buses. So did children. But their grown-up daughter couldn’t.

‘Where are we, anyway?’ exclaimed Sheila.

‘Twelve,’ replied Elizabeth….

‘What?’ asked Henry. ‘Why twelve?’

Elizabeth pointed to the bus stop.

She had worked out that the bus map wasn’t at all abstract. It was only abstract if you were comparing it to the street map, or if you assumed that the bus had to stop at every dot. Instead, the bus map was a map of all the bus stop signs with the same logo as was in the bottom righthand corner of the map. In fact, you didn’t even need the map. You just needed to know the number of signs from the point of embarkation to the point of disembarkation. They were at twelve. They needed to get to fifteen.

So a triumph of sorts. But what a distance there is between Elizabeth’s algorithm for working out when to get off the bus and anything like a systemic understanding of the situation, in which the counting of bus stops relates to her progress across the city. And how good is her algorithm really? Would she know how to adjust it, if say a bus stop was suspended due to road works, or the bus route was diverted? Nevertheless, this story was a reminder to me that, if what you’re most concerned about is a practical outcome, it may be a good idea to abandon the goal of teaching understanding: even with non-autistic people, the effort may simply not be worth the benefit, for everyone concerned

Reference

Kamran Nazeer, Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism (Bloomsbury, 2006), pp 147-150.

Seen and heard: September 2013

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, Episode 1 The Hangman - tremendous point-and-click adventure game (see this trailer and this review), on which Jane Jensen (celebrated game auteur) was a consultant. Worked beautifully on the iPad too. And best of all, I still have three more episodes to go...

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone - book based on their workshops of the past few years. I used to be a big fan of Joanna Macy's marriage of Buddhism and systems theory, but I found this disappointing: the spiritual process is sound enough, but environmental activism isn't where I am right now. The British doctor and psychotherapist Chris Johnstone seems to have introduced another note to her West Coast philosophy; I think he may be the one to follow up at this point.

Banyalbufar fiesta, celebrating both a hundred years as an independent parish (hence a Solemn Mass performed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Barcelona, an adopted son of the town) and a hundred years of electrification. Events and entertainments included water slides for the kids, a magic show with Albert the Magician, a variety night opening with the town's primary school children performing Gangnam Style, and a dance evening ending only at 7:00 am .

Culture Show programme about the new Birmingham City Library, the People's Palace. They seem to have created something which is genuinely a nice space in which to be, and not just something functional (for which the internet would be a more serious rival). There's some speculation that we're now seeing the rise of the "super-library".

Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies - skillful and accessible TV series by film composer Neil Brand, with detailed examples of how music and sound have been used to achieve powerful effects across the history of cinema.

The Young Montalbano - how could anyone take the place of original Montalbano Luca Zingaretti? Well, like this actually. The programme makers have done a smashing job of finding a cast to play the same principal characters at a younger age, and the stories have the same Sicilian sunshine look and feel. I miss the old titles music, though.

About Time - the new Richard Curtis film: not profound, but very amusing and well-told, and moving in a gentle, impressive kind of way.

Seen and heard: August 2013

Proms in the Park - with the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and Polymnia (in which I sing) belting out the popular standards (Zadok the Priest, Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Jerusalem, Rule Britannia); great fun!

Chopin Saved My Life - beautiful Channel 4 documentary featuring people for whom Chopin piano pieces have been transformative, including one brought back from a coma by the Ballade Number 1.

The BBC Proms season - highlights for me being Naturally7 (American a capella group, like a hip-hop version of the Swingle Singers); John Elliot Gardener and the Monteverdi Baroque Choir doing Bach's Easter Oratorio and Ascension Oratorio; Nigel Kennedy and Palestinian string players performing a remix version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (which I though really worked, like Stravinsky's remix of Pergolesi's Pulcinella); and the John Wilson orchestra, delivering a belting full-force (double orchestra with integrated dance band) rendition of film score music both familiar and unfamiliar.

Miss Marple, the old Joan Hickson versions, showing on the Drama channel, still head and shoulders above the more recent pretenders to the franchise. I'd say the best female detective on the telly at the moment, except that Vera has just started a new season.

The Social Network, film (recorded off air) about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook. Neat presentation of the thesis tracing the technology to the interests and social psychological needs of American college students, and since the script is by Aaron Sorkin even the rowing jocks get witty funny lines.

Salvador Dali's house at Port Lligat. Or rather, we didn't see it, because it turned out you needed to book in advance which certainly wasn't clear from the brochures. But we bought a DVD tour and watched that instead, and found Dali (perhaps through Gala's influence?) a much more grounded and practical person than his waky output would suggest.

Iain Banks, The Quarry. His last novel - ironically, since the events centre on a character who is dying of cancer. Nicely written, well-paced (with gradual introduction of the large cast of characters), and a gripping acceleration towards the end. The misanthropy of the dying character, and the sense of disillusion for this group of '90s film and drama students, is quite painful, though.

A falcon (? some kind of bird of prey anyway) in the hills above Joch, "turning and turning in the widening gyre" - now I know what W.B. Yates was talking about.