There is a sense of superiority gained from doing math. Not the kind that you shove in other people's face, but one that satisfies my ego. I personally got involved with math because of the large amounts of time I had to invest in it at the beggining, and as with anything you lose sleep over, it became an obsession. No longer was math a tool for my science courses, afterwards it was a contest to my ability. It has taught me to be logical and has made me very skeptical about all the sciences. Apart from the methodology of math, which is an excellent mental exercise, it is a beautiful subject. You don't find such concreteness and beauty anywhere, aside from maybe music.
It does come with a price though. I will have to second that mathemeticians live sheltered lives. Which is not neccessarily a bad thing, because everything else is trivial in comparission to a deep theory. I don't agree with how the poster said it, but math takes an insane amount of time to do and it is natural to give up a social life while studying it. In fact, I would go as far as saying it even damages your verbal reasoning because you get accustomed to a very precise language and a symbolic language that ordinary people don't use. That comes from only personal experience though, as you can see by the way I write.
In any case, I'd rather study Galois theory instead of spiking my hair and wondering if the bimbo next to me is interested in small talk.
