I recently made a friend, someone I met randomly on a flight to Seattle. We’ve since done lunch, dinner and met each other’s families. It’s a potential long term relationship. After we have been talking on the plane for a couple of hours, the attendant asked, “Did you know each other before this?” – Our chumminess was uncanny. Now everyone who knows me knows that I straddle the divide of introvert and extrovert extremely well. Depending on my mood I can turn on the social graces and bonhomie like a tap and derive great pleasure from it. Yet at other times, my own lonesome is what the doctor ordered and its darned peachy. Usually on plane, I make some kind of unconscious calculation of whether I want to socialize or not. Give my flight from NY today for example – I had no desire to chit chat and deliberately barely engaged my very intimately squished together neighbors. However occasionally I will be besides someone and even without knowing why, I make an unconscious decision to engage – to be witty, interesting and outgoing. Almost like I see some benefit from doing so or sense something unspoken that I want to connect to. And all this without allure – the person trying appeal to my ego or even necessarily being obviously classically attractive as in “OMG, I’m talking to a super model!” or “OMG, I’m talking to the CEO of blah”
Every year or so (probably a function of my rate of travel and not absolute time), I run into someone like this; someone who makes me reach out to them and be extraordinarily to exploring ideas in conversation. Ane someone who generally feels the same way or reciprocates. Where there is an instant something. And it doesn’t necessarily happen only on planes.
The question(s) that arises for me is: how does this happen? How does my brain recognize who to be open to conversation with and who to be closed to? What is the mental algorithm that gets executed? Is there some signal based on experience that the brain recognizes about the person and makes a determination to reach out? What goes on other brains that re not exactly like mine (introverts, phlegmatics?)
How do you make the calculations that lead to social effort and engagement? Do you know the secret? Drop me a line.
