Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

introverts are “geared to inspect”
: John Brebner and Chris Cooper, “Stimulus or Response-
Induced Excitation: A Comparison of the Behavior of Introverts and Extroverts,” 
Journal of
Research in Personality
12, no. 3 (1978): 306–11.
35.
 
more likely you are to learn
: Indeed, it’s been shown that one of the crucial ways that we
learn is to analyze our mistakes. See Jonah Lehrer, 
How We Decide
(New York: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 51.
36.
 
If you
force
extroverts to pause … how to behave around warning signals
in the future
:
Interview with the author, November 13, 2008. Another way to understand why some
people worry about risks and others ignore them is to go back to the idea of brain networks.
In this chapter I focused on the dopamine-driven reward system and its role in delivering
life’s goodies. But there’s a mirror-image brain network, often called the loss avoidance
system, whose job is to call our attention to risk. If the reward network chases shiny fruit,
the loss avoidance system worries about bad apples.
The loss avoidance system, like the reward network, is a double-edged sword. It can make
people anxious, unpleasantly anxious, so anxious that they sit out bull markets while
everyone else gets rich. But it also causes them to take fewer stupid risks. This system is
mediated in part by a neurotransmitter called serotonin—and when people are given drugs
like Prozac (known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) that affect the loss avoidance
system, they become more blasé about danger. They also become more gregarious. These
features coincide uncannily, points out the neurofinance expert Dr. Richard Peterson, with
the behavior of irrationally exuberant investors. “The characteristics of decreased threat
perception and increased social affiliation [resulting from drugs like Prozac] mirror the

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decreased risk perception and herding of excessively bullish investors,” he writes. “It is as if
bubble investors are experiencing a partial deactivation of their brains’ loss avoidance
systems.”
37.