Naturally, all of us do both observation and introspection, but it is a rare individual who does an equal amount of each. The vast majority of us spend most of our waking hours looking at, listening to, and touching objects in our immediate presence, and very little of our time introspecting, that is, making inferences, imagining, daydreaming, musing, or wondering about things not in our presence.
The point not to be missed is that we cannot do these things simultaneously. When we observe what's going on around us, we cannot at the same time observe what's going on within us. We may alternate our attention, but we cannot divide it. Some of us, from infancy on, seem to be more raptly attentive to inner promptings, others, to outer promptings. The reason for this difference in attention is not at all clear, and certainly it is a matter of conjecture. But if the reason for this preference in attention is obscure, the consequences of it are not. Those of us who attend inwardly much of the time as children strengthen that preference, our inner voice becoming louder and clearer, our inner promptings more vivid and complex. Likewise, those of us who heed the external much of the time come to see and hear objects in more detail and with greater specificity.
Because of their tenuous grasp of reality, Introspectors can appear to Observers as flighty, impractical, and unrealistic -- the dreamer or absent-minded professor who can't be bothered with the nitty-gritty of living. For their part, Observers can seem to Introspectors as unimaginative, concerned only with trivial pursuits, and exasperatingly slow to consider implications and possibilities. Both views are exaggerations. Indeed, both kinds of people are capable and even creative in their own way -- it's just that they attend to very different sides of life, with the other side getting short-changed.
The two ways are not mutually exclusive. Introspectors have no choice but to turn outward at times and concern themselves with the business of everyday living, while Observers do occasionally look inward to ponder, and dream, and make inferences. Such excursions can even be stimulating and satisfying, but neither type can be in both worlds at once, and each will usually show a strong preference for one over the other. For both types, the vitality, the immediacy, and the significance of life is found more easily in their own world, while what is central to the other's world seems relatively foreign, uninteresting, and unimportant.
I think that when i was a child I was more of an Introspector , today I think Im more of an observer.
Which are you more of??