Stranger in My Room - Roundtable

This Roundtable focuses on the ‘Stranger in My Room’ podcast in which our hyper-social nature is explored using a thought experiment that reveals our obsession with what other people think of us.  The conversations in the Roundtable covered an array of topics: the central human drive for control and our important need to predict and anticipate socially; the difficulties for introverts at parties and strategies to cope; the ever-widening gap between human biological and cultural evolution and the pressure this places on us to adapt - as balanced against our design as a very open system which mounds itself to whatever world we are born into; the ‘spade-work’ an introvert needs to do to start to feel comfortable with a stranger – especially finding commonalities and engaging in deeper conversation; and a discussion about the ‘ego’ as akin to ‘training wheels’ that help us navigate the social world.