Latest Poll Results - It's Official: We're Intuitive

"How intuitive are you?" I asked you in a poll I conducted during the month of August. There were seven possible answers - ranging from "psychic" to "sorry," and you were allowed to fill in as many as you like. One hundred fifty of you came up with 316 answers, or two each, presumably not ones that represented polar opposites.

The extremes provide some indication of where you stand. Nearly one in four of you (35, 23%) answered that you 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."

I highly doubt that we would find so many with psychic tendencies in the general population. I also suspect that a lot less of you would share this kind of information with your psychiatrist. We've all had experiences that we can only describe as uncanny and inexplicable. Some of us have them with greater regularity.

Moving on to straight-up intuition: Four in ten of you (64, 42%) indicated that "my thoughts and ideas seem to come out of nowhere" while more than half (83, 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 that "I can put two and two together and come up with five" to have yielded a similar result to the previous two answers, but only one out of four of you (38, 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 be those one in five of you (32, 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. Indeed, the military is onto this. A recent article in the New York Times describes how bomb squads in Iraq are trained to use their sixth sense to sniff out ambushes.

One third of you (51, 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.

So what is intuition all about? In a recent piece on BipolarConnect, I observed:

Investigations into creativity and intuition point to variations in the way the brain processes information. In either endeavor, the mind arrives at conclusions that cannot be explained as the product of rational and linear thinking.

One way of looking at it is that in the creative and/or intuitive mind, the brain may be inefficient at filtering out so-called irrelevant inputs. Strongly allied to this notion is the idea that creative/intuitive brains may be frighteningly efficient at connecting these so-called irrelevant inputs into something transcendentally relevant.

I also noted in my BipolarConnect piece that science tends to view creativity and intuition as normal behavior writ large. Our brains, after all, are wired to function in novel situations. But there also seems to be a fine line where states of hyper-reality cross over into breaks from reality. This may account for why intuition, creativity, and bipolar (and other mental ills) seem to come packaged in the same brain.

Finally, I cautioned that the left brain is there for a reason. Our intuition may offer an enormous advantage, but only our ability to think rationally gives direction and purpose to this mysterious gift.

Further reading:

From Knowledge Is Necessity

The Mystery of Creativity

Madness and Creativity - What's the Connection?

Trick Question: Vincent Van Gogh

From BipolarConnect

Intuition, the Paranomal, and Bipolar - Any Connection?

Intuition and Bipolar - Is There a Connection?

Question of the Week - Uncanny Moments

From mcmanweb:

Madly Creative

Latest Poll Results - It's Official: We're Miserable

What a lousy week. In July, I asked you how your “last seven days" went. Out of 127 responses, only four of you (3%) replied, “couldn’t have gone better.”

By contrast, seven times as many of you (28, 22%) told me your week “totally sucked.”

Okay, let’s check out the adjoining categories. One in five of you (23, 18%) said the last seven days went “pretty well.” Add that to the three percent of you who had a great week, and - guess what? - it still rounds off to a pathetic one in five who could look back on a positive week.

Contrast that to four times as many of you - nearly half - who had a negative week. We arrive at this by adding the “totally sucked” group to the one in four (31, 24%) who reported the week “posed a serious challenge.”

Filling in the middle, one in three of you (41, 32%) reported that the last seven days “had its ups and downs.”

How would I have answered this poll? At the beginning of July, I came back from a road trip with a moderate depression and what I thought was a bad leg cramp. Put me in the “posed quite a challenge” week.

Then the leg cramp intensified into excruciating pain that kept me flat on my back for eight days looking up at the ceiling fan. Sciata. Life “totally sucked.”

Could I squeeze a good week out of my entire month? No. “Serious challenge" was the best I could do.

Granted, July was an anomaly for me. I like to think in any given month, I can cobble together at least two weeks that “went pretty well.” As for “couldn’t have gone better,” you gotta be kidding. Never in my entire life, not for a seven-day stretch, anyway.

I have bipolar. You’d think I could count on at least one reliable hypomania to rocket me through a week I would never forget. But in case you haven’t noticed, hypomania isn’t all its cracked up to be. Mine come preloaded with high anxiety and road rage. So - whenever I hear some stupid doctor saying we go off our meds because we’re addicted to our manias, well, never mind.

Obviously, our population has extreme difficulties with the concept of happy. Meanwhile, we have miserable nailed. I suspect the general population is similarly - though not as excessively - predisposed.

Maybe we’re simply not meant to be happy, and the sooner we acknowledge this the happier we’ll be. Maybe our perception of happiness is totally wrong, and we become miserable chasing after the wrong things. Maybe life is all about successfully negotiating its special challenges, instead. Maybe the best we can hope for is quiet acceptance.

Who knows? What this admittedly unscientific poll clearly tells us is that an overwhelming majority of us are having considerable difficulties negotiating this rather ubiquitous presence called life. Obviously, we need to do a better job.