lonely god

From my local newspaper, a special insert called "body & mind" for health.

My only nit, just because a child is showing some of the same behavior
as the parent doesn't mean it is always genetic. The kid could be just
picking up the signals and cues from the parent. OTOH even if it's coded
into our genes, wouldn't therapy be counterproductive and useless anyway?

--
LG


Why at least 30 percent of us are extremely shy

Doug Holly is shy by nature, not nurture. He's sure of it.

"I was born shy," says the 56-year-old sales engineer. "It wasn't the
way I was raised or anything that happened to me, it's just the way I've
always been."

Evidence is building that he's right, that brain biology may explain why
at least 30 percent of people are extremely shy, so introverted that
many choose careers or just naturally evolve into jobs and lifestyles
that suit their personalities and let them avoid situations that can
literally make them squirm: life meetings, giving speeches or just
interacting with others.

Up to now, shyness has been mostly self-diagnosed or identified through
personality tests. But scientists using sophisticated scanning tools
that let them monitor brains have detected differences between
introverts and extroverts that last from infancy to adulthood. And
though shyness can be overcome or at least managed, researchers say born
introverts may be more likely than their gregarious brethren to develop
serious or even debilitating mental problems later in like, such as
social phobia, anxiety disorders, even depression.

Holly has never been depressed, but he's always had a tendency to "freak
out" in certain situations. He's an inside sales engineer -- making
sales calls from his office -- because he knows he'd be less effective
talking to strangers on the outside. And though married for 23 years,
he has always liked to have plenty of "time alone" to contemplate the
world without interruption.

"I've always felt on the outside," he says. "I don't mind being around
people, I just don't feel comfortable. I don't know if being shy has
made life tougher. But I'm doing OK, as long as I keep working on the
things that make me feel antsy."

Like most shy people, he used to be terrified of public speaking and
still feels tense and awkward, but forces himself to participate in a
Toastmasters club, which was "one of the hardest things I've ever done."

In a culture that glorifies extroversion, Holly and other shy folks
admit they're envious of extroverts.

"I'd like to feel more comfortable in situations that now make me
uncomfortable," says John Cargile, 48, of Decatur, GA, a divorced father
of two who's been shy "at least since I was around 3."

In college, the packaging designer majored in art and sometimes would
pose in the nude in front of an entire class, "but I still wouldn't want
to speak in front of anybody." Now, after much effort, he's learned to
live with his shyness and even speak "pretty comfortably" in public, but
that feeling of insecurity is always there.

Megan Neyer of Decatur and Charles Melville of Atlanta, both
psychologists, recommend that their shy patients join organizations that
force them to meet others and face their worst fears -- like talking in
public. And both are convinced that there's a strong genetic component
to shyness.

"I see children coming in with a lot of the same personality traits as
their parents -- shyness, aggressiveness, extroversion," Neyer says.

Adds Melville: "I've been told by too many mothers that right from the
time their baby was born, it was shy, 'like me.' I used to think it was
nurture, that shyness was learned behavior. But I no longer believe
that. I've been converted." He says shy children, like shy adults,
also can benefit from "exposure therapy." This means getting people
who're afraid of flying to get on planes, or persuading those who're
afraid to make speeches to do so. The twin issues of shyness and
anxiety have been filling the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists
since pharmaceutical companies began touting antidepressants such as
Paxil on T.V. as a balm for the jitters a few years ago.

"It's been amazing," says Richard Winer, a Roswell, GA, psychiatrist.
"Before, I can hardly remember patients coming in with their chief
complaint being shyness or anxiety in social situations. But now,
people come in and want medications."

none

WTF not even my shrink who of course is of the "everybody got some
disorder, we just got to find it" line estimates social phobia to
affect any more than at the most 15% of the population.

franco

....<Article snipped>...

Very good article. I always maintained that there's an important genetic
component to shyness. Another reason to not reproduce and have children who are
prone to shyness, anxiety and depression. I fucked up my life, I don't want to
see my offspring being fucked up as well.

easytoremember123

I'm not only of the opinion that we are FREE willed beings without
genetically determined behaviors, but I'm actually angry at the
onslaught of respectable and authority opinions that virtually
everything we do is in our genes.

The US consumes legal drugs at a rate that is unheard of in Europe or
Japan. And the scientists in universities in the US have become so
interwoven with financial dealings around their research that it would
be best to describe the vast majority of them as
businessmen/scientists, with a very few receiving the impartial title
of scientists.

The homogeneous message from the mainstream is "take this drug, take
that drug, gimme your money". I have even heard, amongst many other
amazingly ridiculous "theories", that "thrill seeking" is in our
genes.

Just listen to these businessmen/scientists:

Wow. It's been amazing. My patients didn't know they had a problem.
Now they are very in tune with the labels. I have this, I have that.
What you got? $50? $200? How about you? You're feeling down? You got
the blues? You probably inherited a mental disorder. Here's a pill.

maxxie moore

I used to subscribe to the notion that nearly everything we are and do is a
result of environmental factors interacting with our own unique and
intrinsic hard-wired qualities, with the environmental factors playing the
dominant role. That's what I was educated to believe, and to a great
extent I suppose I still believe that. We all have been more or less fully
assimilated into the culture in which we live, for example. But I have also
come believe that we are much more constrained by our hard wiring (e.g.,
genes) than we'd like to suppose, and that these intrinsic properties
express themselves in ways that are constrained by our socialization but not
necessarily counteracted or controlled by it.

We all accept, for example, the fact that a great many diseases are
inherited through our genes, but we seem more reluctant to accept that less
tangible personality traits might be as well. I am a social phobic, for
example (as the condition has come to be classified, and putting aside for
the moment the validity or lack thereof for applying such a system of
taxonomy), but in retrospect I also know that my mother was a social phobic
as well. My two brothers, who were reared in the same household, do not
share that trait. Was it by nature or nurture that I came to be a "social
phobic"? I tend to believe it was the former; otherwise, I could have
reasoned myself out of it by now. Instead, I still experience an
instantaneous jolt of panic when I'm unexpectedly invited to a party or when
I approach a group of people already engaged in lively social interactions.
I literally want to flee the scene.

I know of a couple of cases where some solidly middle-class or perhaps even
upper-middle-class families adopted infants that were the offspring of
families troubled with crime and alcoholism. Even though in one family the
adopted child was reared side by side with their own natural children and
treated in every way as equals to their own children, the adopted child had
serious problems growing up. The adopted child would not or could not make
good grades in school, was not interested in going to college, and got into
trouble for stealing, drinking, and generally delinquent behavior in his
adolescent years. Now, finally, he has settled down with a blue-collar job
making a livable but not altogether adequate income. He is much more like
his natural parents than his adoptive ones.

The other adoptive child I have in mind was reared as an only child and
didn't have the same kinds of problems growing up, but neither was she able
to attain the success in life her parents had hoped for her. She, again,
more closely resembles her natural parents than her adoptive ones.

I realize these are purely anecdotal stories, but to me they are fairly
compelling evidence that nature plays a much stronger role in who we are
than most of us were taught to believe it does.

Can we exercise free will? Absolutely. But when it comes to certain
fundamental questions of identity and personality, I have to wonder just how
much free will is truly ours to exercise.

jimsummers87

I fully agree. I have never liked expressing emotions and feeling vulnerable
around other people. I HATED even receiving birthday presents from relatives
because I felt extreme discomfort in expressing emotion in front of other
people. One time I broke down crying in my room after my younger brother had
bought me a gift because emotions whether positive or negative have always been
extremely painful to me. My mother is also very sensitive.

meryl

And then of course, there are the studies of identical twins separated
at birth Meryl

the babaloughesian

The way I see it, free will the way you use it is a misnomer for something
else. Real free will, to me, is a type of magical thinking. It basically
amounts to the idea that there's some aspect of a human being that exists in
an almost-vacuum, unable to be affected by anything whatsoever yet
apparently exercising absolute control over thought and decisions. A Prime
Mover. It's just like religious deities-- completely acausal. It just
supposedly exists, without rhyme or reason. I can't see any way to
logically reconcile the notion of free will (in any objectively meaningful
sense) with reality without first superimposing some sort of unprovable
religion-based metaphysical heirarchy on the universe. Subjectively,
though, it seems like we have something vaguely resembling free will, but
IMO, calling it free will invokes the wrong idea. I think the idea of
different ranges of options makes more sense than the idea of freedom. Some
things are hard-wired so that there's only one possible outcome; others are
determined by a complex combination of so many variables that we can't
precisely identify every link in the chain from cause to effect. I prefer
to think of the hard-wired outcomes and the complexly-determined ones as
determined to different degrees rather than imposing an arbitrary "free/not
free" separation. But I suppose since humans seem to have a hard-wired
tendency towards absolutist thinking and breaking everything down into
dichotomies, there's probably always going to be some sort of psychological
benefit to believing in "free will"


--
People fall in love because they have been programmed by their genes to do
so.
-Rex Stephens

lonely god

"Thrill-seeking" and "shyness" and "obesity." Some gay rights groups
even advance the idea that homosexuality is determined at birth (prob
more credible than the others).


I agree with what you mean. Geez, how does one blue pill undo thousands
of years of evolution and billions of genes??

--
"This is what we shall do with man's divinity: we will hide it in the
deepest part of man himself, because it is the only place where he will
never think of looking." --Brahma the Hindu Master of the gods, on
removing mankind's divinity to punish his misdeeds

theshiestofthemall

Interesting post, indeed!
I agree with it to some point: free/not free will is a matter of
degree.
But if you take in account the modern physics, specially quantum
mechanics - which supposedly is the basics of all modern science and
of our very understanding of matter - this duality is answered
positively in the direction of "free will".
Material processes are, in the core, not deterministic.

Tchuss
TheShiest