Alright then, what I want to do is just -
well, I'll just just say one thing 'cause I feel more comfortable when I say it, is
that I never planned to write any of these books. I never planned to do
anything like this. Never planned to be speaking to a lot of people. It's kind of
like - I've said this before - it's like walking down the street and a parade is
formed behind me. It's kind of uncomfortable to me, in a way.And, and I
just like to say that I'm sure each of you could be up here talking about
something. It just happens that you've come to hear me talk about this. But I
think I'd like us to feel kind of equal and connected. rather than me parading
around like the big deal here, anyway. Because now I'm going to do that. I'm
going to, I'm going to give you a lot of information, some of which you may have
heard before. But it'll be a little different and also you all need it again
and again and again and it actually has changed a lot from when I wrote the book.
Not the trait at all, but the way that I talk about it, and think about it.
And in the book I said this, but it's much clearer now that this trait is
found in, in the minority of people but a substantial minority. About 20%. And it's
found in at least a hundred species besides humans and so we now know, you
know, this is new. This idea of personalities within within a species -
that there could be two types rather than just one ideal. You know we used to
think in evolution that that everything is sort of merging towards the perfect
animal in that particular environment. But now we know that there, often, are two
types that are, that are there. One is more numerous than the other always. And
the two strategies - one is to be very responsive and pay careful attention to
everything that's going on, and the other is not to bother.
And you might say, well, of course it's better to pay attention. But it isn't
always, because sometimes there's nothing really that you can learn from this
situation that applies to the next situation. And then you've you've wasted
your energy basically, and we all know as sensitive people that there is energy
that is taken up by being so observant and processing everything so deeply. So
there are advantages to both strategies. It depends on the situation. But, ah, the
man who did the nice computer simulation of how this would evolve in all
different species, Max Wolf, he's in Germany, and they just did this on his
own and I found we found each other but he was not thinking about my book. He was
thinking about animals. In fact, the animal people are very interested in us
as another species, because here, here the species says this is, you know then that
that seems that it's possible that all these other species would really have
what they're looking at too. And you can't talk to the the monkeys and the fruit
flies and the, and the Pumpkin Seed Sunfish and all these different species
that that's been found in but we can talk to humans. But so his point is that
if everybody were highly sensitive then there would be no value in it. So his
example is if there's a patch of grass that's especially nutritious and all the
cows go to that patch of grass and eat it, then there's no benefit for anybody.
But if only some of the cows notice that there's a patch of grass that's
particularly tasty, then they get the benefit of it, and the others don't. But
if there's no special patch, then it doesn't matter. The example I like is that
if there's a traffic jam, because this is me, I always know all the shortcuts.
I know routes through town that nobody else knows. But if everybody knows them
then they're not shortcuts anymore - so you're not going to hear about mine! I
live in Marin anyway. So like one early example that, that I like is of
Pumpkin Seed Sunfish. A person who's become a friend of mine, David
Wilson, did this study. And so they had a pond and they had all these Pumpkin Seed Sunfish they put traps in the pond. And some of
the fish went into the traps and some did not. So they call this is... this is the
problem with naming a trait... and they call the ones that went into the trap
the bold Sunfish and the other it's the timid Sunfish.
Well, I've teased him why didn't you call them this stupid and the smart Sunfish!
But timid has stuck, unfortunately, in the animal world but, but Max Wolf is pushing
for 'responsiveness', because that's what he thinks the trait is. And the
responsiveness is a good term, so maybe we'll end up being Highly Responsive
People. The term, the name, doesn't really matter except that people
have said to me, "Well how could you even, you know, discovered a new trait?" I've
said, "I did not discover a new trait." The only thing that changed was I happened
to be on the inside, as a psychologist. Somebody said to me, "well you're highly
sensitive." and I thought, What is that? I have never thought about myself that way
or ever had the term. But I began to think about it, and then I interviewed
other people and you know you can't . . . One thing I learned in Bamberg, Germany,
teaching these university business students, was they couldn't figure out
how they were going to know if someone was Highly Sensitive if they didn't take
the self test? Well, why is that? Because sensitive
people are not that visible. We tend to, we tend to adapt most of the time.
People who live with us know that we're Highly Sensitive, yes yes yes! But, but we
can often hide it in other places or we choose environments where it's not a
problem for us. So this invisibility factor has made it
very hard for people to discover this trait without really getting inside the
minds of sensitive people. We've done that now with with magnetic resonance
imaging studies, which I will tell you about. So now we got the picture. But
before that, we were talking about inhibitedness. A lot of people thought
it was the same as introversion. But just to reassure the extroverts in the
audience, it's not the same as introversion. About 70% of highly
sensitive people are introverts, but a healthy 30% are extroverts. So that's an
important thing to, to know. There were times when people said that it was like
neuroticism but it's not neuroticism, which is a tendency towards anxiety or
depression and sensitive people who have had a difficult childhood are more
likely to be anxious and depressed. But if you haven't had a difficult childhood,
the new research is that you're less likely to be anxious or depressed than
other people. So that's, that's one of the exciting things that's also happening,
and that is the publication of an article called Vantage Sensitivity, which
is published in a really good scientific journal. And I'll describe that more to
you. Getting back to one more animal example, there was a quite a while ago a
man named Suomi who, it was in 1995, that he was doing this research to begin with.
He was studying rhesus monkeys who, um, turns out there are some that he called
'uptight' and the some that are 'laid-back' and the uptight ones you can figure out
who that they were. They were more easily stressed out. So but he wanted to
see what would happen if you cross- fostered them and gave them to very
skilled mothers or just ordinary mothers at birth. So as soon as he figured out
which kind they were he would directly would give them to a different type of
mother. Well it turned out that the uptight monkeys - and I don't think he
calls him that anymore - became the leaders of the troops when
they were raised by skilled mothers. So this is the whole picture that's
emerging is that sensitive people have tremendous advantages and so that's why
it's a joy to be Highly Sensitive. We just - it was kind of masked and I wasn't
seeing it. I did my research showing that people with a troubled child sensitive,
people with a troubled child had more anxiety and depression but without it
they were more than no more likely than non-sensitive people to be depressed or
anxious. But it never occurred to me to look at the positives end of the scale,
because I was just hoping to demonstrate we weren't any worse
off than other people. And I don't want it to go in the direction of us being
superior - and that's actually an anxiety that I'm beginning to have. I don't want
people to feel superior. That's why I like Janine Ramsey's four types because
each has its value in a company. Each has its value in the world, and and although
evolutionary people do not like to talk about survival of groups, they only like
to talk about survival of individuals, I'm sure that the human race and and
families and all kinds of social groups have benefited from the combination of a
sensitive and non-sensitive people in their midst. And I won't, I don't want to
keep digressing, but a man named Jay Belsky - Michael Pluess and Jay Belsky
came up with this whole idea of Differential Susceptibility. Looking at
our research and a lot of other research on genetics and infants who are
"difficult" or, or "negative", all these different studies in which they found
that with a good environment they did better than others. So they were very
interested in, in that outcome. And Jay Belsky actually has a theory that - he's
at the University of California-Davis - he has a theory that in every family it's an
advantage to have one Highly Sensitive child and one not sensitive child so
that if one survives, then you know, if the environment is best for one then, then
it'll survive or thrive well even if the other doesn't. This is a very interesting
theory. I've kind of teased him, okay so how does the mother's womb know what
kind of baby she had first? He says "I don't care about mechanisms, I just... It's
true!" (laugh) So we'll see. So the way I've been talking about sensitivity lately, and it
came out of my writing my book on Psychotherapy In The Highly Sensitive
Person, which as if anybody's a therapist or anybody has a therapist, slip them
the book because it's, its therapist or bents kind of slow to understand about
this. So I came up with an acronym which DOES, what you can think of as does (noun) if
your woman or does (verb) if you're a man. I don't care, it just happened to work
out DOES worked very well. And the first one is Depth of Processing, and
this is the fundamental thing about us, is that we process information more
deeply than others. And everything else kind of flows out of that. And we know
this, um, I mean kind of - it's obvious in the, Max Wolf's ideas and my interviews and
the questionnaire. But we've been able to do what are called fMRI functional
Magnetic Resonance Imagery, so that you have somebody in the MRI machine and
they're doing something. And so one of the studies we've done is shown people
pictures that are only slightly different, and we find that the sensitive
people's brain activation in particular areas that have to do with deeper
processing or more elaborate processing perceptual processing, those are the areas that are
being activated. So that's an example of - Another one that I really like is a
cultural study where they know that people in different cultures look at
things differently and actually if you just have a box with a line in - it
different sized boxes, different size lines - people who come from a
collectivist culture like, like in Asia they have trouble seeing the difference
in the size of the lines but they can see the difference in the size of the
boxes. People come from, in from U.S., and from, from more individualistic cultures
can figure out the difference between the lines but not the boxes. I know it
sounds crazy, but they had already demonstrated this, and in fact they had
demonstrated this in an fMRI. My husband was in on this research so he slipped in
the HSP scale to all the people in the study. It turned out for the Highly
Sensitive people, their culture did not affect their ability to see these
differences. In other words, their culture just wasn't affecting them. So that's
another example of how we're processing things more deeply. And I think it's, it's
quite fascinating to think we don't even usually use the full scale we just take
like 10 items from it, and yet, and you only use like eight subjects in,
in an MRI study, like five and each group, or ten in each group or something
like that - you don't use a lot of subjects. We still get significant
differences in the brain - the way the brain is operating. So Depth of
Processing. The second one you're all familiar with. 'O' is for easily
overstimulated. That's the downer of the trait, for sure. Getting easily
overstimulated, over aroused. If there's anything that's known for sure in
psychology, it's what's called the Optimal Level of Arousal. That if you are
too bored or too over stimulated you don't function well. You function best in
the middle. So, but people reach their optimal level at different, different
rates, because sensitive people are processing things more and they get over
stimulated more. So that's why you've probably have the experience of taking a
test, or being observed, or practicing and then going to perform, and you don't do
well and it's so frustrating because you know you know you're good but you can't
show it to anybody else because you got over aroused. And it's a, it's a huge
problem for us, I'll admit. It's also what makes a lot of us shy is because you can
think of brilliant things to say when you're at home, but then you go out and
you're at a party and there's all the stimulation and you can't think and you
can't think of anything to say, and then you feel people think you're dumb and
you don't want to go again and then it gets worse and worse. Okay, so the third
one the third one is 'E' for being emotionally reactive or responsive and
also for empathy. And this is again, we've been able to, I mean when I wrote the
book I didn't want to talk a lot about emotion must being very emotional
because I thought I'd make us kind of sound neurotic or something. But I knew
we were. We cry easily. The only reason 'cries easily' is not on the test
is because men don't answer yes to that as much as women do. I don't think I ever
said this, by the way, but there are just as many men as women born Highly
Sensitive. Absolutely no doubt about that. it's just a lot harder for men and it's,
ah, and in some cultures they, they hide it pretty completely. But not in this area (San Francisco Bay Area). Good. Oh.
So this emotional reactivity - I found this lovely article on someone
rethinking cognition and emotion which they said: Cognition thinking is
impossible without emotion because you won't think about anything for any
amount of time at all, unless you are interested in it for some reason. And
furthermore, if you have an experience and you need to learn from it, you'll
learn from it only as much as you think about it afterwards. And you'll think
about afterwards only as much as you cared about what happened. So it's quite brilliant isn't it? So then this makes sense that we have to have stronger emotional reactions in order to process things more. Otherwise
we wouldn't do it. So they're absolutely linked like that. So, back to the MRI
machine. We have found that since that - so we've done two studies one in which
people were looking at pictures that are supposed to create emotions like snails
and snakes and spiders and puppy dogs and birthday cakes, and things are
supposed to create different emotions. Well, it turns out that sensitive people
are responding more, more quickly and with more activation to these
emotional kinds of pictures. Interesting thing was we found that actually they
responded more to the positive than to the negative pictures. Which then starts
to explain this Vantage Sensitivity phenomenon. Because if sensitive people
are picking up on both positive and negative - but everybody picks up on
negative, because we wouldn't survive if we didn't notice what we were afraid of
and what made us sad. But that some people are paying more attention to
positive - it just really indicates this greater responsiveness. Another study
that was done was having people look at their rom - my husband
studies romantic love and so this one was of people being in the scanner
looking at pictures of their beloved or of a stranger, and either a happy, sad or
neutral expression. And sensitive people looking at anyone with a happy or a sad
expression compared to neutral showed more activation, but especially when
their partner was showing a happy expression. That was the strongest result.
But the most interesting thing was where they found the activation. And there's
something that was discovered only about 20 years ago called 'mirror neurons'. I
don't know if you've heard of mirror neurons, but some of you have been in
school recently. Mirror neurons are a part of the brain that they're first
discovered in monkeys, where if, if someone if someone kicks a ball, your brain fires
as if you had kicked the ball, and if someone says, "Kick!" that same neuron fires.
If you hear a ball being kicked that neuron fires. Now fortunately there's
another part of the brain that says, Uh, uh, that was not you, that was somebody else.
But these mirror neurons are what give us empathy, what allows us to read
people's minds and to predict what people are going to do. It allows us to
trick people among other things. I mean empathy is useful for many things. But
among other things, it's good for making people feel better. And sensitive people
have more empathy and they have more activation in the mirror neurons. So the
other - I was teaching a course at Kirpalu in the spring and somebody said, "I'm
so tired of picking up on what everybody else is feeling it's like I can't
separate my feelings from other people's feelings". And I hear this a lot. And so I
said, "Well how many in the room feel this way?" and there were by the way 80 people -
that was not what we planned - there were 80 people for this weekend of Highly
Sensitive People, but they didn't notice that they were filling up, so at any rate,
I asked every person in the room, as far as I could tell, put their hand up that
they all feel other people's feelings and they're all moaning about. I said
"Well these are your mirror neurons. This is what allows you to read people's
minds, to know what's going on, what people are going to do, to be helpful to
them, too if you want to be sneaky. I mean you don't realize that you have this
except when it's inconvenient, but it's it's a powerful tool. The other thing, and
this is really strange, is that there's a part of the brain that has been termed
the Seat of Consciousness because it integrates all the . . . everything that's
going on in the moment, like where I'm standing, what I'm seeing, what I'm
thinking, what I'm feeling, all the stimuli around. It all goes into a place
called the Insula, a little place in the brain called the Insula. It turns out
that sensitive people have more activation in their Insula.
we hadn't even looked there before, but we saw it in this study, and it turns out
to be there in other studies too. So we could just be so nasty as to say that
we're simply more aware than other people. We're not going to go out talking
like that. But I do, I do think it's good first to raise our self-esteem and then
level it out a little bit, okay? So there's special things that are going on
in our brains. And, um, the last of these DOES is being aware of Subtle Stimuli and
we - because my husband does MRI studies, he looks at where love is in the brain.
We haven't done very many behavioral studies. If anybody's a graduate student
in psychology or thinking they'd like to become one, please see me because we need,
we need more research done. But at any rate, in, in this study - ok ,where did I
go? I just went somewhere. Where was I? Oh, Subtle Stimuli, yes. So there aren't very
many of these simple behavioral studies but this one is done by a man named
Gerstenerg in Germany. And he simply had people looking at a screen where
there were L's and T's in among other shaped things that could have been taken
for L's and T's but were not, and you have to identify
the L's and T's upside down and sideways and everything from the other
things. And this is a standard kind of test of reaction time and ability to
observe details. Sensitive people did much better than the non-sensitive
people on this. Interestingly, they were also more stressed afterwards than the
other people were. So there you go again! it's a trade-off. But this, and of
course the brain studies too, have been showing this sensitivity to subtle
stimuli which, in all the brain studies we get, we get this deeper processing in
these parts of the brain that have to do with the visual association area,
secondary visual areas, visual motor coordination areas . . . thee are fancier
terms in that I'm not even going to bother with those. So that's most of the
research. I haven't talked yet about the genetics and I'll do that briefly. People
have said, "Well, how do you know this was in the ... and I said, "Well, because I
just know!" and other people had said this and then they were the animal things. I
have a problem with research and that I tend to think I know and I don't want to
go through the steps of doing the research, because I feel I already know
and I do generally know. But we still have to do the research. So that's taken
a long time to get this done. But there are some genes that have to do
with serotonin and you all know about serotonin - select... selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors it's squash depression. So serotonin was always
thought to probably be related to depression and anxiety. And in fact there
are three alleles. Alleles are the things that decide say whether you're going to
have blue eyes or brown eyes, so they're normal but they're different. So there
are three alleles for serotonin. One is the short short, one is the short long,
and one is the long long. And if you have the short short, you're more prone to
depression. But every time they'd go into a study and look at all the people with
short short alleles they found that they weren't all depressed. So, so you know for
a long time they could not figure this out. Finally they
got it that if you had a troubled childhood or stressful life, and you had
this short short allele, then you were going to be depressed.
But if you hadn't had any of that happen the short short allele wasn't a problem.
Then a few people got really clever and thought, well what is it, therefore, that
about 20% of people have this? Well they found out that people with a short short
allele process information more carefully, they make better decisions in
gambling experiments in the laboratory, where that, you know, they just have
people making decisions, and based on how much money they're going to win and lose.
So it's like sensitive people are more careful when they're going to lose money
and more audacious when they think they're going to win money. And the more
money the more bold they get, but also more cautious they get. My family used to
drag me to the racetrack because I loved horses and I could look at them and
figure out what who which one was going to win. But I hated the betting because I
didn't want to lose. (laugh) It was, it was never a a lucrative enterprise. (laugh) So the other
genetic study was a nice surprise for me. So we found that sensitive people are
more - people who have scored high on the on the scale are more likely to have the
short short than the short long allele. It is not the only story however. Off in
China - I did not know this was going to happen - I then I suddenly some, you know,
the article shows up that this group of scholars in China had observed that the
personality measures that we have - one of the most popular being the Big Five - I
don't know if you've heard of the Big Five - but it's introversion, extraversion,
neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and open-mindedness.
These have been very popular for quite a while. And there are other personality
tests like the Myers-Briggs. But when you give those to people - we know that personality
is highly inherited from twin studies. Identical twins are more likely
to have a similar personality than fraternal twins, and twins raised apart
places twins raised together and all this stuff. But when you actually give the test and you look at the genes, you don't - there
isn't very much correlation between the tests and the genes.
So maybe they were looking at the wrong traits. So, so this these this Chinese
team discovered High Sensitivity and they said, Oh this sounds like it's
deeply rooted in the physiology. So they used it and and then they just looked at
all the dopamine genes. In China people are not as interested in serotonin as
they are in dopamine, I think partly because there's more of this short short
allele in in Asian countries. At any rate they looked at dopamine and there are 78
dopamine alleles but they found that ten of them were highly related to the to
the HSP scale at the kind of level that you would predict from what's known
about personality and genetics. So there are some dopamine genes also involved
and I think there's going to be a lot of genes because there are hundreds of
genes that govern personality and we don't know much about them. In fact the
dopamine genes they found were not ones for the most part that anyone knew had
anything to do with personality. So we're still discovering all kinds of things. So
I think I've worn you out on research, although I could tell you more.
One more favorite story, since we're talking about, since we're talking about
the short short allele - two, well one is that they found that rhesus monkeys is
the only other species that has this allele. And that rhesus monkeys with the
short allele they just have short and long, are are the same - the uptight ones -
but also when they have this, they are superior cognitive perform - a
wide range of - I can't remember quite the phrase - a broad range of superior
cognitive performance, something like that - for rhesus monkeys too - very
interesting to me. And this guy said, "Maybe the adaptability of rhesus monkeys,
because they can live almost anywhere on earth and human beings, is because we
have these two alleles that allow the more responsive ones to figure out how
to adapt than the others imitate it." It's interesting idea. The - Michael Pluess, who
is a Swiss guy and I think I dare say Highly-Sensitive - one of the things
that's happening is like people who are very talented and doing very well in the
world are starting to say they're Highly Sensitive when before they weren't. And
in fact, they didn't even realize they were until, until like Michael got
involved in this Differential Susceptibility research. He did - okay I'm
going to tell you two more studies - one with the HSP scale that he did. He - there
was an intervention being done to teach teenage, young teenage girls to be more
resilient, so that when they were older they would not get depressed, because
teenage girls tend to get depressed in their teens. So they did this program than
they watched the girls and it gave them all the HSP scale to at the beginning.
Turned out that only those who scored in the upper third of the HSP scale got
anything from the program. The others didn't get anything from it. So now Jay
Belsky, who is kind of the bad boy in psychology, is going around saying that
it's - that all the interventions we've been doing all these years to help
people have only been working on sensitive people! And we either had to
change the interventions or save our money and just use them on sensitive people!
So I mean that's what I mean by the whole energy is changing. An SS allele
study that's really interesting. As you know, these Romanian orphans - there's
still too many of them - and so they put some in orphanages, and they have a
random lottery as to which ones will get put into foster care homes that are very
skilled that can take care of these kids that have already been in orphanages for
a while. So they, they, they put them into foster care. They leave them in the
orphanage where they, they've been for awhile. Turns out only the children with the short short alleles get any benefit from
being in foster care. The others don't. At 54 months, the ones where the short short
alleles have, have changed their social behavior and the others haven't. So I
mean one of the good things is that first, people who've had a difficult
childhood, which used to feel like if you're Highly Sensitive you
a difficult childhood - bye-bye - you're just going to be depressed and anxious
your whole life. No actually, it looks as though we're especially responsive to to
therapy and self-help books and the various things that we all try to do to
get our act together. So it seems like sensitive people get more from that.
