I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.
—Edith Wharton
The relative size of a simian’s neocortex was directly related to how large their groups became.
Humans, for the vast majority of our history, have hung out in groups of around 150—and we also (no surprise) have the largest proportionate neocortex of any primate. Dunbar argues that our big brains may well have helped us become tool users, but the real advantage was that we became able to increase the size of the communities we live in.
Of the roughly 1.5 billion regular Facebook users, usage spikes among those with social anxiety—in particular, those who have a high need for social assurance
The reward system in the brain lights up when we know that information of ours has been shared with many people as opposed to it just being shared with a few.”
Many feel that only contact with other people can produce thoughts and feelings in the infant. But the star psychologist Ester Buchholz’s work pointed out that newborns actually arrive more inner-directed than outer.
My contact with friends and family has ballooned to something far more pernicious: an ambient, nervous, and constant awareness of each other. We take up this impoverished plenitude because it’s easier and more comforting than the rich scarcity we left behind.
We take it up because we think that companionship is an alternative to solitude—that the big black hole at the centre of our selves can eventually be topped up if we just shovel enough sugary society into it. But the alternative to solitude was never companionship. The alternative to solitude is loneliness.
These, then, are solitude’s uses: new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others. Taken together, these three ingredients build a rich interior life.
I love to be alone,” says Thoreau. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”Walden is a swan song for an antique enjoyment of time alone (so naive by today’s standards that at one point Thoreau complains that distant train whistles are an intolerable invasion of his peace).
One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When the brain drops its focus on the outside world but remains awake and alert (in other words, when it begins to daydream), it activates something called the default mode network, or DMN. medial temporal subsystem bends memories into mental scenes; a dorsal medial subsystem infers the mental state of others and evaluates one’s own; and both the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex seem to construct personal meaning from external and internal sources
Daydreaming is an inherently creative process, she says, because the daydreamer is open to bizarre new options. Fresh insights and methods that don’t already exist in the larger culture are revealed through this solitary style of brainwork. By contrast, analytical thinking, logical thinking, is all about the exclusion and critiquing of ideas so that the brain can become a guided laser that operates with surgical precision. The conscious, analytical style of thinking that our schools train us to use always silences the bizarre or unpopular ideas that the daydreaming mind might try on. “Analytical thinking is ideal for weighing options in a well-defined problem,” says Christoff. But that power is also its weakness, she says: “Analytical thinking is antithetical to inspiration.”
Franz Kafka was very direct about his need for isolated daydreaming: “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
The truth is, we don’t play Candy Crush so much as get played.
One reason is ludic loops. These are short cycles of repeated actions that cater to our id, and to a brute, reptilian desire for play (as opposed to more developed, narrative-driven ideas of play that have coherent beginnings and endings). Behavioural psychologists have found that we fall into these miniature, repeating loops of pleasure and are driven to access that pleasure again, again, again, without wondering when it will end. Even the faintest of dopamine hits will work
Aldous Huxley confronted when he declared—in his foreword to Brave New World—that “in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”
Pablo Picasso, who famously mumbled that computers didn’t much excite him since “they can only give you answers.”
New arbiters of taste are constantly emerging online, offering comforting ways to brave the content floods, all the while nudging aside more solitary, aesthetic decisions.
We may find ourselves inside a “filter bubble.”
of the many invisible “personalized” algorithms that curate your view of things online, filtering the content you consume in order to optimize the chance you’ll be shown things you’re likely to click on. you become trapped inside an algorithmically defined notion of your own taste. Put in a less wonky way: you won’t be exposed to things you don’t know things you haven’t loved yet. Personal growth becomes stunted, and the idea of what you “like” is grotesquely caricatured.
In the end, the crowding of content in the age of screens can be navigated only by impersonal measures—by aggregating and subjugating our personal taste into a lump of crowd-taste.
The title of James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds often gets turned into a sound bite, suggesting that the masses know best. But those who have read more than the back cover know that Surowiecki is subtler than that. He describes how “groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table.
It wasn’t until 1973 that German historian Arno Peters made it clear to the public how flattening a three-dimensional globe onto a single plane the way Mercator’s map does will vastly distort the size of countries, depending on their distance from the equator. We’ve all grown up studying a map that makes Greenland look roughly the size of Africa; Greenland is in fact fourteen times smaller. Similarly, in a Mercator map Europe appears only slightly smaller than South America, while, in fact, South America has double Europe’s land mass.
The “corrected” vision that Peters proposed, with Europe squished up into insignificance at the upper end of the map, is now widely promoted by UNESCO. The “Peters projection” has its own questionable mathematics (areas near the poles and equator still get stretched), but that’s just the point: as Professor Brotton has said, “No map is any better or worse than any other map. It’s just about what agenda it pursues.”
Proust once defined reading as “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Truman Capote’s comment on Kerouac’s On the Road comes to mind: “That’s not writing; that’s just typing.
An idea from the pianist Glenn Gould, an eccentric genius who abruptly stopped giving concerts in 1964; he had retreated into the solitude of the studio and told an interviewer, “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now, what that X represents I don’t really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it’s a substantial ratio"