>>10916522Neoteny and domesticity are highly correlated in mammals, including our partially self-domesticated species, and probably causally related for reasons that should be obvious to even casual observers of development. People who are closer to the wild type will in general look older for their age, and also be less playful and more violent, in conduct and in tone of expression and cognitive preoccupation. The artistic/empathic type, more cultivated and cultivating, is essentially more domestic, but also mingles more selectively with its kind, and keeps its distance from those who are more of the wild type. Most of the measures we take of others in social signaling pertain to how acutely, and with how much nuance, this difference is detected. At least this is how I see it, that it's not so much a matter of boundary size, but of how it modulates according to social context: Forgetting themselves, two empathic social virtuosi can easily identify one another as such, and share their typically enormous memories of others with negligible self-censorship. This is also to say that the highly empathic have highly porous boundaries with eachother, but large and exclusionary boundaries against hazardous persons, and circumstances thereof. A similar apprehensiveness, and apprehension of, the natural world usually goes with it: Disinterested curiosity is the most instant and reliable index of empathy I know of, though it does imply a larger, if more diffuse, projection of the self.
