@jacob, while most people do not spend much time on introspection, those who do seem to spend a great deal of time and energy on it. In my world, those in the extreme category frequently find ways to work it into conversations. Add to that the fact that therapy-speak has permeated our culture, songs, movies, classrooms,....jacob wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 4:32 pmIntrospection is essentially the mind using its CPU cycles to reflect back on itself for extra insight. This is a positive (here meaning "more of the same"... like compound interest) feedback loop. Two ways this could go. If done well, this will lead to additional insight and more insight into yourself and your relation to other people and all the combinations that obtain. If done poorly, it will create a biased feedback loop that rapidly goes down a neurotic rabbit hole of anxiety and conspiracies where the ego of the brain becomes its own echo chamber.
Yet we are more troubled than ever. Which leads me to believe that we are either doing too much of it, or we are doing it wrong, or both.
I lean toward believing it is both.
https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-aware ... ltivate-it
In one study, psychologists J. Gregory Hixon and William Swann gave a group of undergraduates negative feedback on a test of their “sociability, likability and interestingness.” Some were given time to think about why they were the kind of person they were, while others were asked to think about what kind of person they were. When the researchers had them evaluate the accuracy of the feedback, the “why” students spent their energy rationalizing and denying what they’d learned, and the “what” students were more open to this new information and how they might learn from it. Hixon and Swann’s rather bold conclusion was that “Thinking about why one is the way one is may be no better than not thinking about one’s self at all.”