escapade realization - social well empty or full?

So being an introvert, I always nodded along with the 'limited well of social interaction ability' because yeah, but I didn't actually think I really had that problem. When I wanted to be alone, it was to write, which by nature isn't super social, but here's the thing.

I used to smoke. Now, I don't, and this being my first con since this very important change, I discovered something.

My social well was always regulated by smoking breaks.

Not consciously, but it does now kind of occur to me how often my need for a cigarette would coincide with some sort of group social interaction after some period of time. And sure, I had a wonderful rotating social group of smokers with me, which you'd think would be also users of my well (God that sounds creepy, but I don't have anything better so ride or die on terminology here), but no. Like, yes, smokers talk a lot but we also are doing something else--smoking--and there's literally nothing like awkward silence in the smoking group because i'ts not awkward, we're inhaling. I guess like knitting but we're also getting high(ish)? I don't know, but I realized it while vaping with norabombay, and yes, I've known her for fifteen years, we're like long-distance fannish semi-lifemates in that way that fangirls are, she takes nothing from my social well...when I'm vaping (and like a ton less at other times, or even none, obviously, but she was the one there with me at my epiphany).

Drinking obviously is excluded form the 'social well' thing--except then here I am with two major exceptions because as it turns out I do have a social well that can empty except when one of these two conditions are met. How did i realize this? How many times I was super enjoying this group discuss yet had to flee for reasons unclear but nicotine related except I just like hung out quietly outside looking at traffic in a sort of zen-way and maybe remembering to vape every few minutes? Or talking to nora, of course. Or writing because yeah, it happens and you gotta do it?

(Yesterday, I started a course of existential despair and unrelated cramping except those are related yeah, that's called PMS, which is yet another separate wtf because two thirds of my life this has been a monthly thing and yet, I did indeed spend way too much fucking time last night feeling a sense of hopeless despair while badly playing Atmos and getting no element higher than 38.)

So does smoking/vaping either act as no-take zone of my well or do they refill it faster than it would otherwise? Or both? Like, I'm one of those introverts who doesn't fear public speaking--actually, I love it--and audience size is a plus as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I do get that's an entirely different even if related social thing but still, that's one of my speed-chargers in the social well. The only thing that keeps me from generally volunteering for ALL THE PANELS (other than say, obvious reasos) is I"m also incredibly lazy, but this makes me think future cons, to offset my well problem, i probably should volunteer to moderate at every con I go to (I did three on Saturday and that definitely did the trick on social well things).

I feel like I should survey but I'm not sure how to frame the question. I just wonder if anyone else noticed something like that?

ETA: kara_mckay has some really good observations in comments here. I'm still trying to assemble a better response than "Dude....." with pointing for I am more articulate than that and also no one can see me pointing.

Comments

[seperis]

It was weird to realize that, especially how smoking masked it so well. I mean, on one level it does make sense and may be a reason some people also knit or crochet or work on something during social time, especially if somehow the physical component helps. Maybe even people you see on their phones when in groups; it isn't "you're not important enough for my attention" (obviously, I do it too) but maybe a mental offset?

Or to put it another way; diluting it to workable levels with your brain, especially if your brain for whatever reason gets overwhelmed easily by working in an unpredictible environment. No matter how much you're enjoying it, your brain is working about ten times harder just on predictive algorithms when it comes to people than say, crocheting. And if that's literally all it's doing at that moment, yeah, it's going to burn through your well a lot faster than if you combine it with easily predictible actions; crochet pattern, knit pattern, a simple app game. Yeah that sounds counter-intuitive, like 'wait, that's twice as much work' but this isn't zero sum brain work. It's balancing brain work; amount of energy isn't the problem, it's the proportions assigned.

Moderating a panel takes a lot of work, but I feel energized after, especially large panels: why? Half of it is scripted (to me), aka the point of the panel; the only predictive work is what people will say, but only within predictable bounds, the subject, and I'm moderating because I know it so my brain isn't working as hard. Why norabombay takes no energy from me? I've known her for nearly a third of my life which means 'familiar' aka predictable (though no, she's not, she's goddamn nora the awesome of 'wait, what?').

We keep discussing/reviving/debunking multitasking within the conscious mind, but in the end, what if conscious multitasking is being able to shift one or more tasks into category: predictable and only keeping one that requires the brain to deal with the unpredictable? What if it's supposed to? The common idea is 'do the one thing' to get it right and then you feel like a failure because you can't and feel like your brain is just not up to it, but it's possible the problem is we're not giving it nearly enough; the 'more' just needs to be running in a different area? Our brains outclass the sum of every existing computer combined into one superduper computer and runs our entire body in background processes, but you're saying we can't do two things at once consciously? For fuck's sake, my metabolism alone probably needs base-52 to express concurrent functionality, but my mind runs in sequential binary? Sure, because evolution strapped a mental toaster to the most sophisticated machine every accidentally assembled in creation.

So, we could solve a lot of problems teaching everyone to knit, crochet, or play high-predictability games in conjunction with low-predictability tasks, or figure out how the brain actually wants to run instead of deciding how we think it is and back engineering the evidence. Like interesting fact: I take notes at any and all work meetings. I don't read them after; I almost can't, they look like goddamn sanskrit to most people. Less bored, but fact: I can remember two thirds of everything said, and the easiest to read parts of my notes are stuff I won't easily remember. That's not an accident, but I know I'm doing it, but it's not something I think about, any more than I think about each crochet stitch in a scarf; that's a task that experience with my memory makes very, very predictable.

...or you know, I've only had one cup of coffee, so, I am overthinking.

[niqaeli]

Have you seen that tweet that's "Sir, that's my emotional support knitting"? I mean, that's pretty much the tweet, actually but oh my god ahahaha I was like I FEEL THIS ON A SPIRITUAL LEVEL when I saw it.

One of the things about having a physical object to fiddle with is -- and this is why knitting is the only way I can cope with some things AT ALL -- it's a socially acceptable reason to avoid or break eye contact. Western culture and US culture in particular are fucked up in demanding such constant eye contact in social settings, because that shit is exhausting and wearing for a LOT of people, and it takes an even higher proportion of brain cycles to deal with for a lot of neuroatypical people (autism, ADHD, among others). But knitting? Or having a cigarette or cigar or pipe or whatever to fiddle with? Means you can take a break from it, without taking the social hit of having rudely refused to make or maintain eye contact, because there's a REASON you did. See, it's the physical object right there! That's totally the reason why! And people will, subconsciously, accept that reason.

The other thing I want to say is, okay, so last I'd heard mostly the research shows that humans are generally actually shitty at consciously focusing on two things simultaneously -- and that people who multi-task at all effectively are actually task-switching very quickly between the things that they're doing. Like, very very quickly sometimes, but that it seemed to be task-switching at speed when it comes to conscious attention. I'm fucked to go find the cites on that, because it's been awhile and who the hell knows where it is now, but honestly it doesn't matter because okay even IF we take that as granted.... the conclusions people reach FROM that, basically never bother to take into account neuroatypicalities and how managing those can mean that it really doesn't matter if we're shitty at multi-tasking because the alternative of single-tasking is, for various reasons, actually even less productive than the shitty multi-tasking. Like. The thing about ADHD people is: we ain't managing to focus constantly on ANYTHING, barring a fit of hyperfocus, so what we often have to DO is find a stable of things we can flit between to ALLOW for the constantly wandering attention. Trying to single-task means nothing actually gets done, multi-tasking gets things done more slowly than effective sequential single-tasking would, but effective single-tasking isn't on the damn table as an option.

So, like here's a WEIRD thing about me and my memory: I can't take notes and retain shit from audio input. This is the combination of my audio processing bullshit (my hearing is fine, I have trouble sometimes turning the noises people make into meaning and there's a noticeable delay, which is fun and hilarious when I've asked someone to repeat something and halfway through them repeating it my brain finishes the turnaround and lets me know what the fuck they said and I interrupt them with the answer). Anyway, so, the thing is the process of taking notes obliterates any chance of that audio getting processed from short-term memory into long-term memory. But sitting quietly doesn't help me retain shit that much, because my memory is fucking terrible (fun fact, that's an ADHD symptom, I was in a 400 level neurobio class before I ever learned that short-term memory and attention are, we think, basically the same fucking thing, and I was like, well that explains literally fucking everything about my ADHD and the fact that the severity of my memory symptoms are a major indicator of how well the medication is or isn't handling it). ANYWAY, my point is: in order to retain anything from audio input, I need to be doing something with my hands, but NOT taking notes because that engages too much of the rest of my brain that is needed for committing shit to memory. Even ADHD medication did not change this. I doodled a lot for years before I found knitting. And I knit my way through my entire undergrad degree. The only exception to this is things like ochem and math, where the notes I am taking are the process of working through a problem along with the instructor, but that's fundamentally different than taking notes from words? That's noting down the problem and working through it.

...I'm not sure if I have a point anymore, so, uh. Have a comment! :D

[cathyw]

There are some people who will insist that knitting in a social setting is incredibly rude (those people are wrong, of course) but I agree that it's a brain thing. You know how there are old DOS games that you need to run an additional program to explicitly slow down the CPU to a point where the game is playable? "knitting something simple" is where I offload the extra brain cycles that would otherwise be spent on getting distracted from the task at hand.

(had this discussion with a teacher in a class where I was knitting and he was *dumbfounded* because nobody'd ever knitted in his class before - but I was able to demonstrate that I was paying attention to and absorbing the material he was presenting. OTOH he asked me to stop because other students were using it as an excuse to play with their phones. Grr. Stupid people are why we can't have nice things.)

[niqaeli]

Yeah, there's a few, who'll be offended, but those people are honestly going to be offended at ANYTHING I do to cope with social situations so frankly I can't be fucked to care what they think. But also, as you say, they're wrong!

And OH GOD. Thankfully, none of my professors tried that on me. I had one tell me I could haven't my computer/ipad out for Anything Ever (which was... not standard at my university, we'll say) and I went to disability services to get the damned exception because my ADHD meant, no, ACTUALLY I need to be able to log shit with due dates to my calendar, YES ACTUALLY I NEED TO DO THIS IN MIDDLE OF CLASS, NO IT CANNOT WAIT.

But no one ever complained about the knitting. I did have one professor who was adorably charmed because she'd gone, ye those many years ago, to a women's college and she'd had a lot of classmates that knit through their classes and hadn't seen anyone knitting in class since, basically, so it delighted her to see. (I was... Distinctive even in large lecture classes, between The Knitting, and The Cane, and The Sitting On The Floor Because My Hip Is Fucked Up.) I had a number of other professors who were clearly somewhat baffled. But no one ever tried to tell me that I couldn't or shouldn't knit. I mean, if they had honestly, I'd've gone to disability services same as I did for the devices. But I did have a university with competent disability services that had actual clout over the teaching staff, so.

[seperis]

See, I don't get that, the 'rude' thing. And yeah, it's probably because I have ADHD so I need something to do when listening or I can't concentrate.

"knitting something simple" is where I offload the extra brain cycles that would otherwise be spent on getting distracted from the task at hand.

That is the best way I've heard it put in my life. My brain is constantly searching for stimulation, and if just sitting quietly listening could cut it, I'd be doing it. I mean, I keep captioning on constantly not only because I miss audio like a lot, but the reason I miss audio; my attention will wander, and not only does captioning let me catch up quickly, I retain anything I read the way I simply don't anything audio. Also, reading is a kind of work my brain super likes, so my attention wanders a lot less when I give it that kind of treat on screen.

I crochet sometimes, and yeah, I do it watching TV (though not often during reading unless it's something for work and not entertainment).

[aurum]

I lot of what you said sounds very familiar to me, especially the audio processing stuff! If someone starts talking to me when I'm not paying attention (or it just wandered off for a moment), I'll have no idea what they said, even though I obviously heard the sounds. Brains, man. Also:

Trying to single-task means nothing actually gets done, multi-tasking gets things done more slowly than effective sequential single-tasking would, but effective single-tasking isn't on the damn table as an option.

That's just too true.

[niqaeli]

Audio processing disorders suck. I've got great hearing! Like my range is fantastic! I'm in my 30s and I STILL HAVEN'T LOST THE RANGE THAT HEARS ELECTRONIC HUM, which honestly I'd actually be delighted to lose already. But processing human mouth noises into MEANING is a whooooole different story! There's a reason the subtitles/CC are ALWAYS on in my house, and it's mostly me.

The weird thing is, I do have a buffer? So if someone starts talking to me and I wasn't paying attention, if I tune back in before the buffer runs out, I will be able to catch up! But the process is, uh, not always smooth. >_>

[aurum]

...I didn't even connect that with my subtitles thing, but yes, definitely, subtitles always and forever. At least in English; it's less of an issue when the audio is in my first language (Polish), but I guess adding the language layer just makes my brain check out half the time.

Your buffer is super interesting! I don't think I have one, at least not enough of one to make a difference in practice, but hm. I guess I'll try to pay more attention (heh) to that.

[seperis]

This is so goddamn familiar with audio. The worst times are when I know--I mean really know--I need to focus on what they're saying to me but it just simply won't happen.

[azurelunatic]

But (also having been friends with Nora a significant fraction of my life) it's a good sort of "wait, what". It's only going to be something appallingly correct about mashing up Valdemar with popslash, or maybe whale peen. It's not going to be "I think the street Cheeto at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave has some good ideas about immigration."

[norabombay]

I would like to state for the record that I know very little about whale peen. I just.like to make a lot of jokes about whales as a metaphor for peen.

And Azz hasn't heard this one yet, but Magicians/Valdemar. Eliot gets forcibly chosen into being heir. Yes this is to make a his wife, a horse jokes.

I love you both and have a serious and thoughtful answer later, when I am not so high on southern california.

[seperis]

THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Nora's unexpected and unpredictable is entirely awesome and when Valdemar, exposes some implications I, for one, both love and sometimes lose sleep over.