What is the difference between introverted and extroverted person?

You may already heard a lot about this two dimensions, as the words are commonly found in popular psychology. Introvert is usually described as someone who do not involve in social interactions and them being shy, while extrovert is a social animal and always surrounded by people.

It’s important to know that we cannot predict that based only on the behaviour, as it’s more like an internal feeling and perception of the events for this person. Someone might be very talkative and likes to go to the parties and events, but on the inside he is experiencing that very intense and exhausting. As in many cases, here ''the rule of all or nothing'' does not apply. You can easly be somewhere in between, usually one side is more expressed.

Now, if we dive more deeply into it, we can see biological difference in this two dimensions.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a vital role in reward and movement regulation in the brain. It is connected to craving, motivation, and desire. Studies have found that it is also responsible for mediating our social homeostasis, meaning that when we lack social interaction we actually start to crave it. Dopamine here is released to motivate us to search for human interaction.

What is actually going on is that in introverts too much dopamine is realised in the brain and consequently they don’t need a lot of social interaction, whereas in extroverts less dopamine is realised and therefore they need to seek for more social interaction in order to lift that dopamine and consequently maintaining social homeostasis.

I recommend you to search for dr. Huberman who has amazing topics in the field of neurobiology, his podcast are really educational and I personally draw knowledge from his podcasts.

Written with the help of this two articles and dr. Huberman podcast.

Petric, D. (2019). Introvert, Extrovert and Ambivert. The Knot Theory of Mind.

Lee, C. R., Chen, A., & Tye, K. M. (2021). The neural circuitry of social homeostasis: Consequences of acute versus chronic social isolation. Cell, 184(6), 1500-1516.

Source of the picture: Wikipedia (EN) - Dopamine