Wide angle and narrow angle
Jun. 15th, 2005 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinWhen I was younger I decided that my brain operated in two distinct modes, which I thought of as "wide angle" and "narrow angle" (I think the only time I ever used these terms publicly was in a poem I wrote for a school assignment in the seventh grade). I meant the terms quite literally; in wide angle I was more able to notice things going on in my peripheral vision than in narrow angle. In wide angle I'd be itching for some kind of social interaction, willing to try new things, a joker, very talkative and sometimes irritatingly pushy; in narrow angle I'd stick to routine, not talk much, and concentrate on studying or making one thing for hours on end (with little ability to control what thing it was).
What strikes me now is my unwillingness to make value judgments about one state being better than the other. I didn't think of myself as depressed or upset when in narrow angle, though people looking at me would often think I was worried or sad about something and ask me what was wrong, and doubtless some psychoanalyst might insist I was actually sad and simply didn't consciously realize it. Certainly modern American society highly prizes wide-angle behavior. I didn't think of either state as undesirable—narrow angle could be a tremendously productive state if I happened to be fixated on something useful—though I was sometimes annoyed at my inability to switch my head between the two states at will. Wide angle and narrow angle would come and go without warning. And they still do today.
They correspond pretty closely to the conventional notions of introversion and extraversion, I suppose, though those are usually spoken of as personality types rather than moods. Maybe the personality types really just indicate the length of each part of the cycle.
Anyway, I now present these terms for general use.
What strikes me now is my unwillingness to make value judgments about one state being better than the other. I didn't think of myself as depressed or upset when in narrow angle, though people looking at me would often think I was worried or sad about something and ask me what was wrong, and doubtless some psychoanalyst might insist I was actually sad and simply didn't consciously realize it. Certainly modern American society highly prizes wide-angle behavior. I didn't think of either state as undesirable—narrow angle could be a tremendously productive state if I happened to be fixated on something useful—though I was sometimes annoyed at my inability to switch my head between the two states at will. Wide angle and narrow angle would come and go without warning. And they still do today.
They correspond pretty closely to the conventional notions of introversion and extraversion, I suppose, though those are usually spoken of as personality types rather than moods. Maybe the personality types really just indicate the length of each part of the cycle.
Anyway, I now present these terms for general use.