Intuition and Mental Illness

Those thoughts that come out of nowhere - where do they come from?

Intuition, bipolar, schizophrenia. Over at BipolarConnect, Katie mentioned meeting some people, and it's "like I know everything about them," even if "I only know them for two days."

"Is this part of bipolar?" she wonders. That got me thinking.

"How intuitive are you?" I asked in a poll on Knowledge is Necessity during August 2009. There were seven possible answers - ranging from "psychic" to "sorry," and respondents were allowed to fill in as many as they liked. One hundred fifty came up with 316 answers, or two each, presumably not ones that represented polar opposites.

Nearly one in four (23%) answered that they were "borderline or full-on psychic, or at least it seems that way." In contrast, less than one in ten (13, 8%) responded with, "Sorry, I'm totally rational and logical."

Filling up the middle were various shades of intuition. I cover the psychic phenomenon in another article in this section. Let's focus on intuition ...

A Look At the Poll Results

Four in ten (42%) indicated that "my thoughts and ideas seem to come out of nowhere" while more than half (55%) reported that "I often read people and situations like a book." This represents our bipolar advantage - creativity and seemingly otherworldly mental abilities - as well as our curse - racing thoughts and distractibility.

I would have expected a similar positive response to this statement: "I can put two and two together and come up with five," but only one out of four ( 25%) said yes to this.

In retrospect, it wasn't exactly clear what I was driving at. What I was looking for was insight into how we connect the dots to arrive at conclusions. I suspect that many more of us possess the type of prescience that stuns casual observers. By the same token, we can come across as fools for giving undue weight to the first thing that happens to pop into our heads.

The most intriguing response may have been those one in five (21%) who reported that "I have heightened awareness in areas of my life that require my attention, such as my job, my hobbies, or raising kids, but rarely elsewhere." This suggests that although some of us may be born more gifted than others, we can improve with practice.

It also suggests another possibility, namely our own sanity depends on filtering out the chatter. But at the same time, we're smart enough to cultivate a heightened awareness for when we need it. The military is onto this. An article in the New York Times in 2009 describes how bomb squads in Iraq are trained to use their sixth sense to sniff out ambushes.

One third (34%) report, "I get occasional flashes of insight, but I see myself as rational and logical." If you fall into this category, along with the eight percent who see themselves as totally rational, please don't feel like you're missing out on anything. Being grounded confers enormous advantages.

What is Intuition, Anyway?

Intuition is generally described as "the ability to sense or know immediately without reasoning."

Science tends to view creativity and intuition as normal behavior writ large. Our brains, after all, are wired to function in novel situations. But then when does an advantageous state of hyper-reality cross over into into a pathological break from reality? Alas, intuition, creativity, and bipolar (and other mental ills) seem to come packaged in the same brain.

In the article on creativity in this section, I report on Nancy Andreasen's work into the brain's capacity for making novel connections. Another factor at play is the brain's ability to unconsciously filter out information, referred to as "latent inhibition."

High LI is conducive to rational thought. Low LI is associated with psychosis and schizophrenia, but more recently researchers have also been linking it to intuition and creativity. But there is a catch, namely the need for strong executive function, which relates to the brain's ability to cognitively control thoughts and behaviors and set goals. Those with schizophrenia tend to have notoriously weak executive function.

The best ally of the intuitive mind, it appears, is the rational mind

Sylvia Nasar, in her book "A Beautiful Mind," recounts a colleague asking John Nash (who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics) how he could believe that extraterrestrials were sending him messages.

"Because," Nash replied, "the ideas that I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."

Dr Nash's great creative work was done in his early-mid twenties, before his illness manifested in full. We tend to identify mental illness by severe episodes and breaks with reality. But the reality is long lead-in periods, with clear warning signs, much like an irritated throat preceding full-blown flu. Behavior becomes strange, enough so that people notice. Psychiatrists refer to these states as "prodromal." Technically, the individual doesn't warrant treatment. Otherwise, "oddball" would be a diagnosis.

Schizophrenia researchers are hard at work trying to separate out prodromal from oddball, in effect John Nash from Einstein. According to Dr Andreasen, Einstein was an eccentric with "schizotypal" (schizophrenia lite) tendencies. As she notes in a book review published in the American Journal of Psychiatry: "[He] could sometimes be socially inappropriate or insensitive, especially during his youth; he was frequently disheveled in appearance; he was dreamy and distracted."

But his son Eduard was swimming in a deeper end of the family gene pool. At age 20, while studying medicine to become a psychiatrist, Eduard was afflicted with schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life in and out of institutions.

There is a dangerous tendency to romanticize mental illness, to see florid psychosis for instance as a state of higher awareness that the ancients honored rather than medicalized. "Madness need not be all breakdown," wrote RD Laing back in the 1980s. "It may also be break-through." There is a certain truth to that, so long as we don't assume breakdown automatically equates to break-through.

Yes, higher awareness occupies the same spectrum as breaks with reality, but what we are really looking for is its polar opposite - namely, greatly enhanced brain function. Thus, one's ego is loosened to the point in which the boundary between "self" and "other" becomes barely distinguishable. But somewhere in the control room, there is an "I" that is in charge. The better we can discipline our rational mind, the wider and deeper we can experience alternative realities and use them to enrich our lives.

That gift and curse thing, again. More on that ...

First published as blogs on Knowledge is Necessity and BipolarConnect 2009, 2010, reworked into an article Jan 30, 2011

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