Quarantine

As an introvert who's been in self-quarantine for 4 years, I can say this period is only affecting little bits of my life, but otherwise, things are same-same. I'm also grateful to live only with my parents,who aren't extroverted. Plus, the benefit of having built up resilience over the course of the past year really helped, so overall everything is working in my favor to help me cope with highly uncertain periods like this.

Quotes below taken from 'Elastic' by Leonard Mlodinow for those who're too lazy to pick up a book or have too much time to kill, and also because it covers a lot of stuff that helped me cope, so I thought it'll help a bit.

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'When an animal ventures out for into new territory, it could lead to the discovery of a food source - or to become one. A novelty-seeking organism might get injured exploring alien terrain or might face a predator, but an organism that avoids the unfamiliar at all costs might fail to discover sufficient food sources and starve.'

'An unchanging environment offers those who have found a comfortable niche no urgent impetus to explore or innovate.'

'Why is change that hard? If people are generally averse to change, psychologists must have missed it, because you'll find nary a mention of change aversion in the literature of research psychology.'

'While management endows change initiatives with names like restructuring, turnaround, strategic shifts, employees often see them as something else : layoffs. When change translate to the risk of losing one's job, or what is novel is an increased workload, it's understandable that people react negatively. But that's not change aversion; it is unemployment aversion or negative consequence aversion.'

'Consider how an employee feels when being told that the corporation is striving to be more efficient, so you will be asked to do ten percent more work for the same salary, as opposed to being told that the corporation is striving to be less efficient, so you will be asked to do ten percent less work for the same salary. That's two opposite reactions to the same degree of change.'

'To avoid change because it is negative or requires work or introduces the risk of either of those eventualities is a rational and logical reaction. But as far as human nature goes, in the absence of negative consequences, our natural instinct is the opposite.'

'Many scientists now believe that the environmental battering in the past acted as a genetic filter, culling from our ranks the less adventurous and preferentially allowing to survive those with the bold desire to explore.'

'We humans tend to be attracted to both novelty and change and it is a trait called neophilia. An individual's attitude toward novelty and change is affected by both nature (genes) and nurture (environment).

'While degree of neophilia is an important indicator of your comfort in confronting novelty and change, it is your cognitive style - your manner of drawing conclusions, making decisions, and solving problems - that determine the approach you take when facing challenges from such situations.'

'When we are confronted with familiar situations, we tend to behave mindlessly, according to programmed patterns, and with relatively little adjustment due to the specifics of the situation at hand.'

'The first step in nurturing either analytical or elastic thinking is to nurture thinking - to become more conscious of when you employ automated scripts, and to discard them when they don't serve you well. For it is only when you are self-aware that you can interrupt an automatic script if it is not appropriate. It is called mindfulness, a concept with roots in Buddhist meditation.'

'Analytical thought can be objective, untinged by distortions of human feelings, and therefore tending toward accuracy. However, one can also criticize it as not being inspired by emotion, as elastic thinking is. The relative lack of an emotional component is one reason analytical thought is simple than elastic thought, and easier to analyze.'

"The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm."
'The surprising ease with which you can read a jumbled up paragraph attests to the elasticity of your thinking. Your mind notices, without being cued, that something is not right. Then it figures out what is going on, focuses on the correct first and last letter of each word, and plays it loose with the letters in the middle. With the aid of context, it decodes the meaning with just a little slowdown in pace.'

'The elastic thinking of the brain is non-algorithmic, by which I mean that we achieve our ideas and solutions without a clear definition of steps needed to get there.The neural networks in our unconscious minds somehow learn to weigh complex object traits in a manner of which we are not even aware.'

'We are adept at confronting novelty and change because, when faced with an unfamiliar obstacle to achieving our goals, our emotion-based reward system guides us toward elastic thinking, stimulating us to generate alternative ideas and invent a way to choose from them.'

 'Many recent studies in social psychology suggest that monetizing creative output can disrupt the processes that lead to innovation. Offering an extrinsic reward for an intrinsically enjoyable behaviour can be counterproductive.'

 'Though scientists rightfully treasure only theories that work, we can also recognize the degree of intellectual beauty in a proposed theory, whether or not it ultimately proves successful.'

'That a person who made a monumental and revolutionary contribution to his field could find equal pleasure in solving problems of far less significance is a testament to the fact that the exercise of elastic thinking is intrinsically rewarding.'

'Paradigm shifts are peculiar in that they leave many previously successful people behind, people whose rigidity of thought cause them to cling to the old framework to which they are accustomed, despite overwhelming evidence that the paradigm shifts is valid. Or sometimes, those who cannot accept a shift form the vast majority, and its implementation is blocked or delayed.'

'We each develop our point of view on common issues during out first few decades of life. We form a framework to apply those ideas and apply them when we're called upon to draw conclusions in those realms. For some, those paradigms never evolve. Those who are open to personal paradigm shifts - to altering their attitudes and beliefs - have always had an advantage in life, because they are able to adapt to changing circumstances.'

'I didn't think my belief is really wrong. My instinct to reject the notion that I'm wrong kicks in, that's when I am in the position of all those who,in the past, failed to adapt to challenge to the ideas that they,too,held firmly.'

'That's when I push myself, and try harder to be open to the possibility that I'm mistaken. Why do I hold that belief? Are there those who don't? Do i respect them, or at least some of them? Why might they have come to a different conclusion? I try to recall times in the past when I was wrong about something, even though I'd been confident of being right. The bigger the mistake, the better. The process helps me to understand that the mental adjustment to a new thought paradigm isn't as easy as hindsight always make it seem.'

'We tend to make quick initial assessments of issues based on the assumptions of the paradigms we follow. When people challenge our assessment, we tend to push back. Whatever our politics, the more we argue with others, the further we can dig in, and sometimes vilify those who disagree. Then we reinforce our ideas by preaching to the choir - our friends.'

'When we talk about triumphs of intellect, we tend to focus on brilliant analytical thinking, the kind of thought produced by powerful logic. But rarely do we recognize the contribution of being able to reimagine the framework in which our thinking occurs, the terms in which our mind defines the issue we are considering. That's the product of elastic thinking, a task that requires that squishy ability called judgment.'

'Our culture can provide an approach to issues that will help us see solutions, but it can also hinder us. A strong cultural identity, if it produces a deeply ingrained approach to problems, can make it more difficult to change that approach, even if it is not working. On the other hand, exposing yourself to other cultures is beneficial, because those who grew up in or work within a different culture will often have different attitudes toward life'

'The energy of the default mode of our brain arises from the background of cerebral activity. It was long hidden from us, because the default mode is not activated during everyday activity. Instead, it becomes active when the executive brain is not directing our analytical thought processes to anything in particular.' (unconsciousness)

'The associative processes of elastic thinking do not thrive when the conscious mind is in a focused state. A relaxed mind explores novel ideas; n occupied mind searches for the most familiar ideas, which are usually the least interesting.

 'Although some may consider 'doing nothing' unproductive, a lack of downtime is bad for our well-being, because idle time allows our default network to make sense of what we've recently experienced or learned. It allows our integrative thinking processes to reconcile diverse ideas without censorship from the executive brain.'

 'Before an idea passes to your awareness, your brain conducts a kind of trial in which it considers all the evidence for the various meanings your unconscious mind has produced. Only then does it pass to your consciousness what it has deemed to be its best guess. As the brain weighs the meanings, the two hemispheres slug things out. Your left hemisphere advocates for the obvious and literal meanings, while your right hemisphere takes on the underdogs, the meanings that at first may seem remote, a bit of a stretch, but that are sometimes the correct interpretation.'

 'When attacking a tough problem, impatience to make progress can lead to a suboptimal solution while blocking your ability to find a better one. Adopting a relaxed mindset, on the other hand, can enable original and imaginative answers to emerge.'

'Being able to think without any kind of time pressure is also beneficial for generating insight, because if you have to start on something else soon, your awareness of that can pull your mind back to the external world and block an unconscious idea from popping into your consciousness.'

'Frozen thoughts are deeply held ideas and principles that we long ago developed and no longer question. People operating according to the dictates of frozen thoughts may be powerful processors of information, but they blindly accept ideas that conform to their frozen thoughts and resist accepting nonconforming ideas even when there is ample evidence for them.'

'The kind of thinking we engage in when we rise above frozen though is critical thinking. The inability to think critically is not stupidity. It can be found in highly intelligent people.'

'It is ironic that frozen thinking is a particular risk if you are an expert at something. Your deep knowledge is obviously of great value in facing the usual challenges of your profession, but your immersion in that body of conventional wisdom can impede you from creating or accepting new ideas, and hamper you when confronted with novelty and change.'

'Dogmatic cognition is the tendency to process information in a manner that reinforce the individuals' prior opinion or expectation.' (or known as confirmation bias that I've read elsewhere)

'Beginner's mind refers to an approach in which you have a lack of preconceptions and perceive even routine situations as if you are encountering them for the first time, without automatically making assumptions based on past experience. That doesn't mean you discard your expertise, but that you remain open to new experience despite it.'

'Dissent can not only sway us with regard to the issue at hand - it can also act to thaw frozen thinking in contexts unrelated to that in which the dissension was voiced. It is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us, because even if you're not consciously open to considering opposing points of view, with a little exposure, they can affect your thinking.'

'Unfortunately, those who suffer most from dogmatic cognition may be reluctant to listen to opposing opinions. Even worse, if they are in positions of authority, they often punish those who have them.'

'One of life's ironic truths is that though we love to be right, we are better off if sometimes people tell us we are wrong.'

 'Immaturity is not  necessarily a bad trait. Any teacher will tell you that children are not afraid to do or utter crazy things, and in a sense, whenever we relax our inhibitions and allow ourselves to generate an uncensored flood of ideas, we are acting like children.

'The creative adult is the child who has survived. The spirit of the child doesn't disappear from our brains; it just becomes more difficult to conjure. The truth is that, within all of us, there exist the neural networks of both a mischievous, imaginative child and a rational, self-censoring adult.'

'A lax cognitive filter promotes a high level of schizotypy, a tendency toward original thinking and nonconformist behaviour, while a stringent filter process leads to what psychologists call cognitive inhibition, leading to conventional thought and action.'

'Schizotypy is used to describe a constellation of traits such as those the children of schizophrenics seem to have inherited. People with a schizotypic personality may fall anywhere on the spectrum from a mild dose to a full blown schizophrenia.'

'Many of our greatest thinkers seem to have had minds on the high end of the schizotypy scale. Those who have consistently produced original ideas have often also been original, sometimes even bizarre, in their conduct, grooming and dress, and their relationships. In such people, the degree of cognitive inhibition is high enough for them to function, but low enough to allow them to entertain ideas most others would deem inappropriate - including, at times, ideas that change the world.'

'Though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel burnt out.'

'Fatigued people's more diffuse attentional focus led them to widening their search through their knowledge network. This leads to better performance in problem-solving that requires elastic thinking.'

'Positive emotions prompt us to consider a wider range of thoughts and actions than are typical. They encourage us to create new relationships, expand our support network, explore our environment and open ourselves to absorbing information. Those activities increase resilience and lower stress, which is why a happy disposition contributes to survival and longevity.'

 'Without the need for drugs or technology, positive mood has an effect similar to getting high, enabling more original ideas to surface in our unconscious minds.'

'Happiness is not only an end in itself, but it can be a strategy for mental productivity. For those of us who live life focused on what we need to get done rather than on what we need to make us feel good, it's nice to have a reason to add fostering a positive mood to our busy agenda.'

'As we age, connections between neurons waste away, weakening the communication between structures that are meant to work together. Still, we can make the most of our abilities while we still possess them.'